How things work in your home (and what to do when they don't)

***COURTESY OF TWOBEARS BOOKS*** The modern American home is a humming and clanking complex of hydraulic, electrical and mechanical systems. It needs a lot of care to keep it running smoothly-and to keep the costs of running it from going out of sight. The purpose of this book is to help you achieve more comfort and convenience, at less cost, by taking over household maintenance and repair jobs that anyone can do safely and efficiently. An understanding of how things work is fundamental to being able to fix them. Every article in this book begins with words and pictures that describe, with the aid of specially commissioned drawings, how the machines around you do their jobs: how air or liquid or electricity flows, how pipes or wires or gears fit together, how one part of a machine causes another part to move. Other illustrations and text explain how to disassemble things, replace parts and make adjustments. And troubleshooting charts provide a concise review of likely problems by listing sympthoms, causes and solutions. There are, of course, limits to the average homeowner's capacity for coping with the increasingly complicated devices he surrounds himself with. Radio and television repairs, for example, are not included in this book because they require expensive instruments and an intimate knowledge of electronic circuitry. But you will find that you can do certain essential, money-saving jobs even on some complex mechanisms, for even the most intricate contain relatively simple components. While only a qualified serviceman should work on the furnace, the detailed description of how the burner works will help you make adjustments in other parts of the heating system. In every case, this book will tell you what you can do - and, equally important, it will also tell you what you should not do.