My 6 rain barrels are FULL to the brim, since I haven't had to water since last time it rained. Right now what has me fuming are ruddy squirrels. They've killed almost everything I had sitting in pots (grown from seed) from the last two years. I've saved water all summer to get those plants thru the danged drought, and the squirrels are demolishing everything. Lets hope we get enough rain to go under some of the tree canopy! Not so hard it will knock stressed trees over, but just enough so the ground gets a good soaking. Even better if the groundwater has a bit of a chance to catch up! girlgroupgirl

Thought I might put one in a tenant's apartment but in looking around the internet Im not finding one model where the ratings are any good at all. Some have serious leaking issues. I cannot even risk this in my apartment let alone a tenant's (who may or may not tell me about it if it's a problem.) How does this happen? Can a plumber directly connect it to water lines/drains so there's no connections that come loose? What kind of exhaust is necessary - spoze it would have to go outside or could it exhaust into a bathroom fan vent. THANKS! Sounds like it may be more of PITA than it's worth but thought I should check it out.

SxS fridges are the least energy efficient, least space efficient, and most trouble-prone type of fridge. So, in that sense, I suppose you could say that they all "suck." Still, some people find that the SxS layout works best for them. The most likely trouble-spot for SxS fridges will be through-the-door ice and water dispensers. Those are troublesome on all fridges. Take that factor out of the equation, SxS units still tend to be a bit more trublesome than conventional and FD models. Consumer Reports does annual membership surveys on appliance reliability. With something like 80,000 responses, the surveys over the last several years report that pretty every brand of SxS fridge has a 15% failure rate within the the first five years of ownership. Roughly one in seven. (15% is a rough average, as some run 14% and some 17%. CR's site says variations within 4 percentage points or less are not statistically significant.) The exception has been LG which has run a 22% defect rate (roughly one in four). So, other than avoiding LG, I do not see that any brand of SxS is significantly more reliable than others. Layout and features seem to be a better basis for choosing. GE was outsourcing some of its fridge manufacturing and components and has a technology cross-licensing and sourcing deal with LG. For several years, GE and LG had equally abysmal reliability ratings -- 25% defects according to the CR site. GE recently brought some production back to the US (I think some GE SxS fridges are assembled now in Bloomington, Ind. and some (maybe all) of the Monogram SxS fridges are assembled in Tennessee.) The company has now got is defect rate in line with the industry average. Samsung makes pretty good fridges now but had some serious product defects a few years back, and its warranty service (oursourced) has not been great. My recollection from some recent postings here (or maybe Chowhound) is that GE' outsourcing deal with Samsung was only for the counter-depth SxS Profile and Cafe fridges. I recall numbers of discussions of this subject over the last year. If you have not already done so, try searching the older threads which may have more detailed info than I can give you. Because the in-house search engine here at GW does not always work well, I sometimes have better luck going out to google/bing/etc. and including "gardenweb" in the search string. This post was edited by JWVideo on Mon, Nov 11, 13 at 15:24

DSL over a copper phone line is distance dependent. Distance isn't a factor for cable internet or fiber (whether from the phone company or the cable company). rita, your bandwidth is very limited. If a Windows update was in progress, there was no added capacity in the connection to do a speed test, it was all being used by the update and that probably explains what you saw. Capacity (sometimes called speed, wrongly) is expressed in Megabits per second (megs, or Mb/sec). File sizes are expressed in bytes, There are 8 bits to the byte. A Windows update can be 200-300 megaBYTES, so 1600-2400 megaBITS. Average it to 2000,. At a connection capacity of 2 megs (Mbit/sec) that would take, say, 1000 seconds. 15+ minutes. At 1 Mb, 30+ minutes. With no ability to do anything else at the same time, because trying to share an already burdened connection will cause all uses to choke. I think that's what happened with your update. If you want or need to do a Windows update, take the laptops to a public place (like a library) that may have a faster connection than you have at home. Edited to correct math