Air sealing is your fastest savings. You might consider hiring some one to blower door test your house and make recomendations about where & how to seal the leakage. Some companies will also test the ductwork. fix the house leakage, repair the duct leakage and see if utility cost does not go down. You could prolly find a lot of the leakage sites yourself if you know what to look for. (wish I knew how to put pics in my reply!) Spiders build webs were air moves. Look in cabinets by plumbing penetrations, inside closets, ceiling moldings, light fixtures. Most areas inside your house are best sealed with caulk which will expand and contract with the house. Open your return air..do you see exposed 2xs'? If you have a heating system closet look around the door frame..dust? can you shine a flashlight and see the return air plenum? do you see dirty insulation in the r/a? Is the platform sealed to the walls & to the door when it closes? If you really want to do some homework..go in your attic. Look for spiderwebs and dirty insulation. where there is a gap or a hole or even an open plumbing wall the insulation will be dirty around the opening. This is where the house sucks dirty insulated laded air into your house. Are the supply and return plenums well sealed to the heating system? Duct tapes fail, foil tapes don't adhere well..these are areas to be mastic sealed. take a look at the ductwork..again..dirty insulation? move the insulation back at the duct to duct collar connection at the supply plenum. Is it mastic sealed? are there areas of the living space open to the attic? over shower units, around chimney? you should have a good air barrier first, then a good insulation barrier. btw, where are you located? best of luck.

I wanted to let you know what I have found with my upstairs front loader over the past several years. I had major issues with vibration too from my 3 year old Kenmore front loader (dishes would fall off my shelves on the first floor). It died 3 weeks out of the extended warranty (isn't that always the case?). I had my husband bring my older model Kenmore front loader from our rental property. It was an older model one and it was really heavy (I would guess 400 pounds). The repairman told me the older ones actually had a rim of cement in them for added weight to dampen the vibrations. Ironically, the old heavy machine doesn't vibrate at all. The extra weight more than dampens the spin cycle vibrations and we don't have any more issues. I would choose the heaviest one I can find next time I buy one. Maybe you can trying weighting it down with a few hundred pounds to see if it improves??? My washer just sits on hardwood. I only do laundry when I am home so I don't worry about a leak. Maybe the key to fixing your machines may be to add weight to it.

Until you go in to apply for the position, they tell you the pay is commission based. So if you're not also a 'silver tongued' salesman, your pay is likely at best 30K a year or less and at risk of being let go. These kinds of ads are nothing new Mike. I've seen them for 20 years. They talk a good game... but it's just a game like everything else. You're a home owner Mike. How could you know? Why is a position like this commission based? because techs lie, ride the clock... meanwhile the company goes broke, due to non-productivity --- or giving services away. (Some companies will employ these measures to get their foot in your door. You know we won't charge you for advice sort of thing... but their advice is heavily stacked in their favor. It has to be... they are paying 100's of thousands of dollars to make high cost TV ads, not to mention other forms of ads.) The position is a good secure position that isn't going away... but if you think it's easy as just 'showing up' to make $75-100K a year... you're beyond clueless. There are more techs that try this field and quit, than there are techs that succeed and become anything remotely what I wake up to every morning. Why do you think there are so many ads looking for people. Hint *high turn over, churn mill*. Remember I've been doing this for 26 years... 13 of those years I worked for other companies. This isn't meant to discourage a younger generation from doing this... but there is no such thing as an 'easy profession' to make a livable wage. This job is hard, hard, hard. People will call you rip off artist, lying cheating con man, tell you the company you work for cheated them when the system fails. You will work in the weather... hot, cold, mild, windy, rainy, thunderstorms. You will craw under homes in rat infested dumps, climb thru attics maybe if you're fortunate you won't plummet to serious injury up to and including death by being impaled by something. You will sit in a truck for many hours. Get used to it because you will more or less live in that truck. You will work from sun-up to sun down and sometimes beyond that. Some days you'll will be busy, making good money. When the calls come at a trickle you'll still be sitting in that truck... the pay won't be as good then. It's a seasonal business any way you slice it. There will be the calls you spend hours on, but because you're running a 'free estimate bid' you won't make nothing on those that you don't sell. Do too many of those and the company will cut you loose. Why would this company put you in a truck and keep you there if you don't perform like they think you should? There will be those employees who wanting to get a leg up, go and snitch on you. There will be favorites.. those who get to go home early while you continue to work. You're nearly to your front door... then another call comes in. You're on call... forget your plans. On that call you find out that another clueless idiot that snitched on you had been out on this call earlier didn't perform the repair right and the condensate pan is over flowing dripping into yet another pan from another unit that is also backing up flooding the home. What's all this you ask: It's what the ad doesn't say. If they told you all that... there would be far less people who stick their neck out. Remember, I've lived it... 26 years is a LONG TIME. I don't run a 'churn mill' -- if that's what you want, good luck. The Ray Austin way is only achieved by using Ray Austin. The few, the happy, the service when you need it. (I can't service everyone, nor do I try.) I service the Katy, Texas area

This is an addition to a house. We have no reason to think that the style of the addition is consistent with the original home. We do have good reason to suspect that the style is inconsistent with the rest of the house given that the owner dislikes the ceiling & paneling in the addition and doesn't mention the rest of the building. These sort of finishes were generally the fastest, easiest & least expensive choices to finish a new addition. And DIY friendly. And chosen for those reasons alone.