Toronto library union decries city's 'hard line' in talks as deadline looms

Contract negotiations continue but union says management's been told to extract concessions.

Kawasaki 17 HP

A buddy brought me a EX Mark ZT with the Kawi 17 hp twin. I haven't dwelled on it all that much since we have been under the gun with all this bad weather down here in Louisiana.



He started it and went to give the gas to mow. No response at all from the cable.



I looked at it and the panel seems to works fine. I took the panel off and can get the engine too rev up by moving the gov rod by hand. Gov spring is hooked to the panel.



Any thoughts on this issue my friends ??

Interview in the middle of calls

I got a second interview next week. :D Unfortunately, it's right in the middle of two calls I have scheduled, so the free time I have is slim (this will be on a break, not on the clock!) I've only ever worked for the company I'm currently with and never scouted for another job - I'm wondering, do recruiters/managers mind if you show up in your company uniform to conduct an interview or should I pack an outfit and change in my truck?

Carrier A-series RTU question

Have 2 A-series VAV RTUs that share common duct, both run a same time, no isolation dampers. Trying to find a way to write the speed from one to the other so they track together. Found a writable but it only works when unit in test mode. Anyone come across this problem? Anyone come up with solution? Thinking of adding dampers and running lead/lag but that is not spec.

Low pressure at kitchen sink

Been having a problem with the water pressure being very low at our kitchen sink. The sprayer seemed good, so we figured the faucet was to blame. Since we've been wanting a new one anyhow, we purchased one to replace the one faucet.



Installed the new faucet, and the pressure is still very low. I've checked, and there aren't any pipes leaking. It's both hot and cold that are a problem, and every other faucet in the house has good pressure. Where should I start looking for the problem?

Wentinghouse?bryant Breaker compatibility?

I have an Eaton sub BR1624L125

I know of some new Westinghouse Bryant Breakers that listed as BD1520

I would like to know if they can be used in my panel in the slotted buss?

If so are they good breakers or crap?

What should I look for in the listing on them?

Thanks

T.

How to Get Your Ideas to Spread with Influencer Marketing

When 50 fashion influencers on Instagram posted a picture of themselves in the same Lord & Taylor dress, it sent out signals that this dress was a must have fashion piece. The following weekend the dress was completely sold out.

This Lord & Taylor campaign is a perfect example of the power of influencer marketing.

65% of brands now run influencer campaigns and according to an infographic by The Shelf, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people-even if they don't know them personally-over promotional content that comes directly from brands.

We're more likely to buy a product if it's recommended by a friend than pushed at us by an advert and an eMarketer study found that advertisers who implemented an influencer marketing campaign earned $6.85 in media value on average for every $1 they spent on paid media for influencer programs.

Influencer marketing opens up endless opportunities for brands to amplify their content, connect with consumers and build relationships more organically, and more directly.

But how do you get started with influencer marketing? What makes an influencer? And how can you build relationships with influencers?

In this post, I'd love to give you the lowdown on influencer marketing and some actionable tips to help you find the best influencers for your business.

Let's dig in.

How to get ideas to spread

Success in marketing often comes down to one simple concept: getting your ideas to spread.

Traditionally, mass-media adverting is the go-to way to spread ideas. Here's how it works (in theory): you buy some ads, put those ads in front of your audience, and that's how your idea spreads. In turn, these ads drive sales and then you can buy some more ads, to reach some more people. And so on…

The problem with this approach is that we live in a time where choice is abundant and time is sparse.

Consumers are spoiled for choice when it comes to what to spend their money on and have too little time to consume content and engage with adverts. What this means is that most advertising is just ignored.

As technology advances, traditional marketing techniques have become less and less effective. This is where influencer marketing can help.

What is influencer marketing?

Consumers have always looked to fellow consumers to inform their purchasing decisions, and with the rise of social media, it's becoming easier for brands to discover and partner with influencers to get people talking about their company and products.

To help us give you the best tips and advice on influencer marketing we spoke with social media agency, SocialChain:

“Influencer marketing is a marketing style that focuses on using influential people to share a brand's message with their chosen audience,” explained SocialChain's Anna-Marie Odubote.

“Influencer marketing is beneficial to businesses because it arguably creates more meaningful engagement than traditional advertising.”

“Influencers have very trusted voices. They are real people that appear to be unbiased; a traditional advert or a post directly from a brand will often be ignored. But an endorsement from an influencer is like your friend, brother, sister or parent 'having your back' and telling you about something you need to check out. And regular social media ads are a little bit like strangers shouting random things at you – after a while you just tune them out.”

Primarily, influencers act as a mutual friend connecting your brand with your target consumers. An endorsement from an influencer has the power to drive traffic to your site, amplify your message across social media platforms, and even directly sell your product through their recommendation.

Marketing and The Diffusion of Innovation

The Diffusion of Innovation is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures.

What the Diffusion of Innovation shows is that adoption of new technologies doesn't happen simultaneously for everyone. Facebook, for example, was first adopted by college students and only now has it started to be used by the late majority and mass market.

The Diffusion of Innovation is broken down into five adopter categories:

• Innovators: These are people who want to be the first to try the innovation. These people are very interested in new ideas, very willing to take risks, and are often the first to develop new products and technologies.


• Early Adopters: These are people like to adopt new ideas and enjoy being amongst some of the first people to try new technologies and spread the word about them. Often these people are leaders and share their experiences with the people around them.


• Early Majority: These people are rarely leaders, but they do adopt new ideas before the average person. Typically they like to see that an innovation will work before they're willing to use it.


• Late Majority: These people are skeptical of change, and will only adopt an innovation after it has been tried by the majority.


• Laggards: These people are bound by tradition and very conservative. They are very skeptical of change and are the hardest group to bring on board.

Editor's note: for more on the Diffusion of Innovation and marketing, check out this great talk by Simon Sinek. 

Most marketing is traditionally aimed at the mass market (Early Majority and Late Majority in the above graphic). The problem with this approach is that it's much harder to get these people to care about your product.

Innovators and early adopters, however, care deeply about new products and technologies. For example, a tech product reviewer on YouTube will be extremely interested in using the latest smartphone technology, whereas someone in the early majority will likely only care when their old phone is outdated.

If you'd like to get your ideas to spread, reaching the innovators and early adopters within your niche can be a great way to go. This is something Apple has mastered over the years…

Influencer marketing on the grandest stage

When Apple have new products to launch, the first people they talk to are those who want to listen. The people who actively opt-in to hear Apple's message.

When Tim Cook gets up on stage at the WWDC conference, he's not talking to the mass market; he's talking to innovators and early adopters in the hope that what he says will inspire them enough to pass the information on to their audience.

These innovators and early adopters care deeply enough about Apple to give up their time and watch a whole keynote presentation purely focused on Apple products. For Apple, it makes much more sense to talk directly to influencers who care, rather than push a message out to the mass market directly.

After the WWDC conference has finished, Apple knows their message and news about their new products will reach the masses through content produced by journalists and social influencers.

When you think about marketing your business, try to think about the innovators and early adopters within your target audience: Who sincerely cares about the problem your product or services solves? Who can you speak to that will really listen?

What makes an influencer?

SocialChain describes an influencer as, “an individual that has a significant audience, who listens and makes decisions based on his/her opinions.” And influencers come in various shapes and sizes:

• Journalists


• Industry experts


• Celebrities


• Academics

Editors of highly read blogs can be influencers as can highly viewed YouTuber's like MKBHD, and influence isn't just based on follower counts and audience size.

A celebrity may have a large following purely because they're famous, or someone may have acquired hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter because they're great a curating content. But a large following doesn't necessarily dictate influence.

Measuring influence

SocialChain has developed a simple method for measuring influence across the main platforms; T-Score (Twitter) F-Score (Facebook) Y-Score (Youtube) I-Score (Instagram).

The scoring system is aimed to decipher exactly how much of the meaningful engagement you're actually paying for and how cost-effective an influencer is, as Steve Bartlett, SocialChain's founder explains on his blog.

Here's an example of the T-Score in action:

– Tom is a real YouTube influencer who we've worked with [SocialChain] on a number of influencer marketing campaigns 

– Influencer Tom's last 50 tweets have 17,600 engagements combined (replies, likes, retweets). 

– He has 210,409 followers on Twitter

– He charges £100 per tweet

17,600 (combined engagements from last 50 tweets) / 50 = 352 (Average engagement per tweet)

352 (Average engagements per tweet) / £100 (total following) = 3.52

Tom's T-score = 3.52 and you're effectively paying £1 per 3.52 engagements that Tom is generating for himself.

(This doesn't mean you'll get 3.52 engagements per £1 on your sponsored content, but it gives you a good idea of how much engagement you will hope to see per £1 spent.)

How to find influencers

The type of influencer you're looking for will depend on the goals of your campaign.

“To find influencers that fit your business, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your own brand and how you want to be perceived,” Anna-Marie Odubote explained.

“There are many influencer discovery tools online that you can use to search for influencers in certain categories and countries. If you want to find more bespoke influencers, the best way would be to manually search social media.”

Here are a couple of tools to help you discover influencers in your niche:

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a brilliant tool from Moz. It allows you to search for keywords in Twitter user bios to find those with the most authority and largest reach.

Klear

Klear allows you to search for keywords and discover relevant influencers on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also filter users by skills and location as well as add all your selected influencers to a list.

Content + Distribution: The perfect mix

When you're looking for an influencer to partner with, the ideal influencer tends to have two key abilities:

1. The ability to create content


2. The ability to distribute content

Content

Great content is the heart and soul of any influencer marketing campaign.

Most influencers have managed to build their audience through creating their own, unique brand of content, and if you're simply asking them to share a piece of content you've created, it can feel a little inauthentic and stand out as an advert or sponsored posts.

Ideally, you're looking to partner with influencers who can create content alongside your business. Rather than only sharing content, you've already created.

Distribution

I like to look at distribution as a combination or reach (audience size) and engagement. Sometimes it can be easy to feel that someone with say 100,000 followers on Twitter or 10,000 subscribers on their email list is an influencer. But really, it doesn't matter how many people follow someone. What's important is how many people engagement with them. And how many people click the links they share.

The SocialChain scoring system mentioned above can be a great way to measure engagement various influencers receive on their content.

How to build relationships with influencers

Once you've identified your influencers, the next step is to start building relationships with them.

“If an influencer manages themselves and all of their enquires, you always need to be personable and make the influencer feel valued and unique. Although influencers are their own business, the majority aren't businesspeople. Too much corporate talk can scare them away, and it's best to arrange a face to face meeting/ Skype call as soon as you can,” said Odubote.

“Depending on the influencer's reach, [some larger influencers have management teams] you'll often speak to their management (the influencer will see the initial enquiry and forward it to their management if it's something they're interested in).”

Over to you

Thanks for reading! I'd love to continue the conversation about influencer marketing in the comments below. Have you tried any influencer marketing campaigns? Any tips on building relationships with influencers?

The post How to Get Your Ideas to Spread with Influencer Marketing appeared first on Social.

Jobs in PA?

So I'm moving back home to the Johnstown PA area from Hampton roads and have been doing residential/commercial install for about a year. Anyone know of any jobs?





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Blackboard behind brick

Ok, Our house flooded about 6 weeks ago. We have torn all the sheet rock & insulation out. Yesterday, an inspector from the insurance company came by & noticed the blackboard behind the brick is rotten from the water coming in from between the brick & slab.

For clarification, there's brick outside, then the black board, then maybe 8 or 10 inches (wide/tall) of tar paper (black felt paper) looking stuff, then the studs, then sheet rock.



The inspector is putting it in his report that it needs to be replaced but, he is recommending it be replaced from inside & not removing the brick. He cautioned me that most contractors that he has experienced, do not want to replace this from the inside, because of some kinda problems I didn't quite understand, but I think he was trying to say that contractors don't agree that its proper to do it that way. So, it will be between me & my insurance company to work this out with a contractor.

I called the guy who came out initially & wrote up the estimate & he said that it can be replaced from the inside & that's the way they recommend doing the job & as a passed contractor, he has done it.

He says the way it should be done is remove the damaged black board, cut the new black board into fourteen & one half inch (14 1/2") pieces & put them between the studs & tack a "sweep?" to the stud to hold the black board against the brick.



This doesn't sound right to me.



So, what is the deal?

On Branding: How a Digital Agency Goes Start-to-Finish with a Social Media Branding Strategy

Imagine having a way to control how you're presented online, a way to identify yourself or your company and differentiate yourself from others.

Sounds a bit like social media, right? Sounds a bit like branding.

The two go hand-in-hand. Branding happens on social media, and social media is an outlet for the voice of your brand. Many people have found success with personal branding and company positioning online, and agencies have come along to help people with both.

One of these agencies, Januel + Johnson, was kind enough to let us peek inside the way they run social media for their digital agency and how an emphasis on branding extends to the very root of all the content, scheduling, and engagement they provide with Buffer. Get the specifics on how J + J find success for their clients with a 360-degree brand strategy, with social media and Buffer at the heart.

None of our content looks scheduled. Yet with Buffer, it all is. That's one of the biggest things that people say all the time. In fact, I get so much high engagement that people always think that I'm online, but I'm not, which is awesome.

– C.J. Johnson, Januel + Johnson

Growing a following on the strength of branding

Many agencies begin as an extension of one's expertise: web design, SEO, advertising.

For C.J. Johnson and Ambar Januel, their unique advantage is with branding.

Branding has been a huge asset for them both at the personal level. C.J., an actor and director who lives in Los Angeles at the heart of the entertainment industry, found Buffer early on and has grown his following to 57,000 on Twitter. This follower growth brought attention and led to opportunities to share what he had learned about social media marketing and personal branding with others.

My following kept growing because I was using Buffer to schedule posts. My content is all about images. Photos. Videos. Because I'm the person that's behind the camera, I know it'll be high-quality and customized.

I saw that type of content was really kicking up some serious action and engagement. What ended up happening was people started asking me, “Hey, how are you able to get all these followers? How are you able to do this systematically?”

Everybody I talked to, I would say, “I use Buffer.” I would give them tips. I eventually was able to turn that into what I have now, which is Januel and Johnson, J + J, a premium branding agency. We specialize in branding period. That's from the creative aspect of it, the social media, the publicity, everything.

“None of our content looks scheduled”

Branding is the most significant selling point for Januel + Johnson, and a huge part of this branding effort is the social media presence. C.J. and his team want their clients to have great success on social. For Januel + Johnson, this all starts with the content.

Their emphasis is on visual content. They prioritize custom images for their clients, and they have the in-house production team to pull off some beautiful shots (C.J. leads a majority of the photoshoots for the team).

Their visual strategy includes a few go-to elements:

• Custom images


• Emoji


• Gifs

This is the formula that worked for C.J. as he grew his following, and it's been working for clients, too.

The overall effect of this specialized, visual content is that it's impossible to tell what's been scheduled and what hasn't.

The secret, of course, is that a majority of it is scheduled, within the Buffer dashboard. Januel + Johnson ensure that every social media update is unique and special, be it with a custom image, an emoji, or a GIF. And the result is a Twitter feed that looks completely in-the-moment.

One of our strongest assets is that we provide clients with the information to figure out how to schedule posts efficiently and how to get the best results. One of our biggest tips is to customize the content to fit whatever that particular client is into and what networks they're on. And Buffer is a key part of it. I believe I manage 32 accounts in Buffer - at one point it was 50. I've used Buffer in every sort of way you can think of.

Before I started my own agency, I was working for a digital arts company, and I was managing 100 accounts there. We'd do two to three posts per day, per account, per channel. It was LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+. Not only did those accounts see growth, but they always had consistent engagement. I think that that had a lot to do with the fact that I used two rules when it comes to content:

Be informative, be entertaining.

In any situation, there's always a call to action. Even if it isn't a specific, “Hey, have you checked this out?” or “Hey, visit us here,” I always have a link at the end of the post. That helps a lot. And I don't do link shortening. I leave the link as-is. That's just for branding purposes.

From the beginning we would do a mix of photos, emoji, and GIFs. We would have customized videos, customized photos, including a call to action link, including the emojis and including the GIFs. We'd shake it up. Nothing looks ordinary. None of our content looks scheduled. It all is. That's one of the biggest things that people say all the time. In fact, I get so much high engagement that people always think that I'm online, but I'm not, which is awesome.

When it comes to social media content, the more unique you are with posts and the more consistent you are, the better results you get.

Looking for big results? Give it three months

Social media, with its real-time nature, tends to lend itself to an expectation of quick results.

Of course, this can't always be the case (and rarely is), which is why a long-term social media strategy and a consistent brand on social are so key.

Januel + Johnson have found that three months tends to be the sweet spot for a strategy to take hold and for results to start coming in. They believe these first 90 days to be so key that they make this period a requirement for any new clients that they take on.

Our goal is to empower people in general. Entrepreneurs and creatives. That's our number one goal.

Typically what we do is we have a three-month period. I like to call it a trial period even though it never is officially a trial. It's basically a three-month minimum to work with us. Typically within those three months I see gangbuster results.

I think maybe it's because the first month is that trial transitional phase.

The second month you're building the system.

The third month you're seeing out-of-control engagement.

I can tell you this, when the content is really, really good and it's scheduled out to perfection, and everybody is doing the role of what they need to do to succeed, obviously, the results are awesome. Typically, when they're not consistent about posting, or the content is not very good - looks like spam, looks redundant - then it's just a mixed bag of results.

Week-in-the-life: A social media scheduling workflow

An emphasis on quality content raises a key question: How much time does it take to make and schedule all these awesome tweets and posts?

The content that Januel + Johnson creates includes:

• Custom photos


• Videos


• Emoji


• GIFs


• Evergreen content


• Events

Plus a good mix of scheduled updates …

J+J founders @AmbarJanuel & @cjjohnsonjr on the opening night of @artistdecoded #art gallery. #LA #adventureswithjj pic.twitter.com/5WkvVUTrQQ

- J+J (@JanuelJohnson) April 4, 2016

… and real-time engagement.

#Villanova!!! WOW.
Hardball tactics employed by former TPA president worked 20 years ago but likely wouldn't play well in 2016, observers say.

Mysterious wet spots on my ceiling!!! HELP!!!

To start, I just bought my first ever home and have no clue about anything. My town home was built in 2007, i bought it in July 2015. first time I noticed wet spots in my baby's room on the second floor around January( I almost never went into the room before my son was born). Anyhow I thought it was a roof leak. called 3 different guys they all checked it and said it wasn't. Went on the roof and attic. Called Ac guy to check condensation. he said everything works fine. Called home inspector, he went on the attic and said that he had never seen anything like this. So this is some kind of mystery. The spots usually appear when its raining but it had not been raining for 2 weeks the spots dried out completely and with no rain, appeared yesterday again. Now they also appeared in my bedroom(2nd floor) and bathroom. It getting more and more. Please help me because I don't even know who to call anymore

Attached Images

  

h10 pm calibration

hey guys,



my h10pm is 5 years old... i do use it weekly and have had to calibrate it (as per the manual) a couple of times.

my question is this, ive noticed that the calibration adjustment is almost at the end of its range. im assuming when i reach the end of the adjustment i will need to buy a new sensor? by googling it looks like the sensor is about $100...

would i be better off to send the whole detector in to bacharach for a tune up? it looked like that was about $200... just wondering what you have had good luck with.



thanks in advance for the response



fred

Subfloor over differently sized joists

I'm looking to finish my attic in the near future and there's one big question that I need to figure out in order to proceed. The joists are the proper sizes for a 40psf live load but depending on the span some areas used 2x8s and other areas used 2x10s. What is the cheapest way to make this so I can install 3/4" subflooring over the top so that it can be one continuous flat subfloor. In other words, how can I bring up the 2x8 areas 2 inches so that they match the height of the 2x10s? I know I could sister all of the 2x8s to new 2x10s but I'm figuring that isn't the most economical solution as 60% of the area I'd like to finish used 2x8s.

Raccoon-resistant green bins arrive next week

Scarborough the first area to get new containers with critter-thwarting latch.

Phillips/slotted screwdriver

Has anyone tried the combination Phillips/slotted screwdrivers.









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Solving the 10 Most Common Social Media Marketing Challenges

Today, there are 2.307 billion active social media users around the world. That's nearly one-third of our planet's total population of 7.125 billion!

As social media marketing professionals, we're lucky to reach even .000001% of that population with any one of our posts. This can feel a bit underwhelming for businesses and marketers looking to demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media.

Everywhere we look it appears that brands and companies have it all figured out on social media. With each new post to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter comes thousands of likes, comments, and shares.

Even Grumpy Cat has earned more than $100 million dollars since 2012!

This leaves the rest of us wondering, “What are we not doing right on social media?”

We've experimented, made mistakes, and even learned a little bit in the process. From that, we've put together a playbook on solving the 10 most common social media marketing challenges.

Let's jump in!

1. Authentic connection with the audience

We've been seeing a massive shift in what it means to be effective on social media over the last few years. One challenge that marketers are facing in this new era of social media marketing is connecting with audiences on an individual and personal level.

Connecting with your audience helps to humanize your brand and build real, authentic relationships.

Solving this challenge: 

Connect with your audience by utilizing free or low-cost brand monitoring tools such as Respond, Mention, or TweetDeck and respond to every single comment on Twitter.

Monitor all additional social media channels and respond to each comment in an authentic way. You can do this by asking questions, linking to other blog posts, providing insights, or offering help with a problem.

You may also consider creating and growing a niche forum or group on Facebook or LinkedIn, or even creating your own dedicated community site similar to inbound.org or GrowthHackers – this gives you the opportunity to engage with users as well as let them indulge their passions and connect with like-minded people.

2. Creating a social media marketing strategy

You may know what you want to accomplish and why, but without a social media marketing strategy, you won't have a specific plan on how to get there.

Think of your social media plan as a roadmap to your goals – Sure, you can stop off and check out landmarks along the way (experimentation), but you'll want to return to the road that gets you to your destination in the shortest time and distance (goals).

Solving this challenge: 

Creating a solid social media marketing strategy doesn't have to take weeks to put together. For me, it helps to have 3 key things written down on paper:

• Why we're on social: Simply being active of social media channels for the sake of being there is one of the quickest ways to burn valuable time and resources. First, answer the question of 'why'  your business is on social and what you would like to accomplish.


• How we're going to succeed: Next is to ask the question of how. This can be specific social channels, paid advertising budget, video or image creation, partnering with influencers.


• How we'll measure success: Key Metrics, Goals or OKRs that you would like to accomplish broken down into days, weeks, months, and the year. Breaking it down like this will allow you to focus on day-to-day activities while also keeping the big picture in mind.

3. A dramatic drop in organic reach

What worked in 2012 when organic reach on social was booming vs. what's working now with the decline of organic reach has many social media managers scrambling to find tactics that work, including myself.

If growing your organic reach doesn't seem to be working, there may be another solution.Solving this challenge: 

Marketers can overcome this obstacle by looking at the decline of organic reach as an opportunity in disguise. That opportunity is paid social media advertising.

Even if you only have $5 to spend on boosting a Facebook post or promoting a Tweet, putting a few dollars behind the content you've worked hard to create will effectively get that content in front of hundreds potential customers. Look for posts with high engagement but low reach as a good barometer for potential success.

Use a combination of Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Audience Insights to learn about your audience and create personas. Once you have an idea of who they are, use those insights to create highly-targeted ads that will resonate with users.

4. Coming up with consistently good content

We completely understand. Managing social media is extremely time-consuming, and can become a full-time job. Which is why staying creative and original is one of the toughest social media marketing challenges to overcome.

The social media manager checklist seems to go on forever: curate, create, schedule, monitor, respond, update, and reuse content across several different social profiles.

That's why it's important for social media marketers to find little hacks to optimize their time.

Solving this challenge: 

Besides basic content curation and idea generation tactics like monitoring Facebook pages or scouring Buzzsumo and Quora for content, there are other less time-consuming tactics you can experiment with today.

Openness & Transparency: Some of our most popular content and social media posts are ones that feature an inside look into Buffer's culture.

People love knowing that there is a “real person” behind the social media profile and by giving them a look into your company or brand you will evoke real human interaction.

Original graphics: We've also generated some excellent buzz by creating original graphics in Pablo or Canva and posting them to our social channels. This image, for example, received more than 100 retweets on our Twitter account in less than an hour.

To create it, we pulled stats from around the web and put them into a simple graphic, which only took about 30 minutes to create.

5. Content quantity over quality

For some brands, the way to cut through all of the noise on social media is to simply post more. While this tactic may work for some, for many it has the tendency to irritate followers.

The Next Web posts 30-40 times per day on Facebook due to the high amount of new content they're putting out online. But many businesses who are creating less content may struggle to show value from more frequent posting.

Solving this challenge: 

An excellent way to think about the quantity vs. quality is to treat every piece of content-every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email-with the utmost care, as Leo explains in our Buffer marketing manifesto.

People will naturally follow your brand over time from posting great content, not posting more content.

Marketers can benefit from embracing the “everything matters” mentality when generating content for their blog, graphics for social media, and forums for connecting.

6. Getting content to a large social audience

Now that you have all of this great content for your blog and social media channels, people will surely follow, right?

As marketers know, this isn't always the case. Promoting content, partnering with brands and influencers, and capturing audiences' attention is a whole new social media challenge in itself.

The encouraging news is that if your content is enjoyed by a few people on your blog, then the chances are that people on social media will enjoy it as well. The challenge is getting it to those people.

Solving this challenge:

Just like in investing, the “Compound Effect” is a powerful idea that works with social media promotion as well.

Let's say every one person on Twitter has 100 friends that follow them, and those 100 friends have 100 friends that follow them. Even if only 5% of the total friends share your content, that's still a massive amount of shares and impressions.

The key is not to sit back and hope that people share your content, but to actively seek out people that you know will benefit from it. A few ideas to get you started:

• Email your friends, family, and coworkers


• Direct message influencers–in a genuine way–on social media


• Join LinkedIn groups or online forums in your niche market


• Syndicate your content (A complete guide from Neil Patel)


• Republish content to Medium


• Ask questions and respond to comments on Quora

7. Finding ways to encourage sharing on social

One thing that is particularly challenging on social media is finding ways to avoid what I like to call a “creative rut.” A creative rut is when social media managers find a tactic that works a few times and then continually go back to them over and over, even though the results may be even or declining.

Only posting blog links on Facebook, quotes on Instagram, or links to your own articles on Twitter are examples of content that is good, but could maybe use a creative boost.

Solving this challenge: 

Think “share first” by getting inside the mind of your audience. Before posting ask, “Is this something that I would like, comment on, read, or share on social media?” If the answer is “no” that may be a sign to look for other types of content.

The New York Times once published an excellent study on the psychology of sharing. It boiled down to the fact that sharing on social media is all about relationships. The study indicated that 49% of respondents said they share to bring valuable and entertaining content to others.

Jeff Bullas shared an excellent list of 10 ways to create contagious content with some fun ideas including:

• Telling Great Stories


• Making Your Audience Look Smart & Classy


• Using Emotional Appeal

8. Using data to back intuition

How many of us wing it when tracking data in order to guide our social media strategy? I know I've been guilty of this a few times!

Previously, social media data was hard to access, difficult to understand, and seemingly useless. But these days, there are so many amazing tools out there that accessing data is a must-do for marketers looking to take their social to the next level.

Solving this challenge: 

Start by creating a simple Excel spreadsheet with each of the social media channels that you're managing on the left and the most important stats you would like to track across the top.

Here's a quick snapshot of the sheet I use: (Download the full Social Media Metrics Dashboard):

Tracking metrics week-to-week and month-to-month helps me to visualize if my intuition is working. That way I can quickly implement experiments, track the data, and pivot to another tactic if things aren't on the rise.

Check out the entire Buffer Social Media Strategy to see how we pulled the data from each network so that you can start tracking your own.

9. Creating quality visuals and graphics

Visuals and graphics are the second most important factor for success on social media right behind the quality content. But creating quality visuals and graphics are another challenge on their own, regarding skill level and time it takes to create them.

Seeing as how visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content, there's never been a better time to invest in visuals of your own.

Solving this challenge:

Two of our favorite go-to sources of great visuals are high-quality stock photos and original images created by our team.

For high-quality stock photos, we've put together a massive list of 53+ free image sources. For original images, we suggest either Pablo or Canva. Each is fun, easy to use, and allow marketers to customize each image size based on the targeted social media channel.

A few design rules of thumb:

• Avoid overused stock photos


• Ensure each image is properly sized for specific networks


• Use best-practices with text overlay


• Design with consistent brand colors, palettes, and logos

*Infographic created by Ethos3 

10. Focusing on the things that matter most

A common thought in the social media sphere is that there's a silver bullet of growth and engagement. The truth is that it takes a lot of work to create a community of engaged followers and brand advocates.

Growth and engagement are a result of a variety of factors, but figuring out which activities to focus on is an important challenge in social media marketing.

Solving this challenge:

When putting first things first, it's helpful for me to refer to Brian Balfour's Growth Machine. Brian points out that a lot of marketers focus on tactics first, rather than creating a growth process.

Tactics first is putting the cart before the horse.  You need a process that will help you build a scalable, predictable, and repeatable growth machine.

– Brian Balfour

The most important part is having one growth process and sticking to it no matter what.

Know your channels, your audience, and your market inside and out and make strategic experiment decisions based on those learnings. Doing so will help to focus on the things that matter most.

Over to you!

Thanks for reading! What challenges do you often face when it comes to social media? We'd love to hear from you below!

The post Solving the 10 Most Common Social Media Marketing Challenges appeared first on Social.

Ted Kennedy's Immigration Legacy

Ted Kennedy's Immigration Legacy -- and why did he do it?

Just as a reminder, let's make a short list of the immigration policies that Kennedy and his extremely talented staff put into effect:

• The 1965 revamp of the entire immigration system. It ended 40 years of low immigration, got rid of solid numerical caps and opened up chain migration into every overpopulated country in the world, exploding annual immigration numbers.
  
  .
• Massive expansion of the refugee programs in the late 1970s, opening up massive loopholes and encouraging a domestic resettlement industry that became a major lobby for more and more overall immigration.
  
  .
• The 1986 blanket amnesty. Kennedy's skills may have been best seen here where he got legislators on our side to agree to the amnesty in exchange for enforcement rules that he made sure were written in a way that would not work. Within a decade, he would be using the inability to enforce the 1986 rules as an excuse for why we needed more green cards and more amnesties. An example of Kennedy's great skill was that he persuaded Ronald Reagan to enthusiastically support this bill.
  
  .
• The 1990 immigration act, which increased overall immigration by another 35%. The first Pres. Bush was Kennedy's co-partner, just as the second Pres. Bush was Kennedy's eager co-partner in trying to force through another blanket amnesty 2001-2008.
  
  .
• The 1990 act also established the lottery whereby we randomly give away 50,000 green cards a year to people in countries picked because they have the least ties and cultural association with the United States, and which disproportionately are terrorist-sponsoring countries. This was something of a compromise for Kennedy who was able to ensure that during the first few years, much of the lottery winners would be illegal aliens from Ireland -- his own ethnic group.
  
  .
• The H-1B visas which have enabled corporations to keep hundreds of thousands of American kids from getting a foothold in the high tech industry.
  
  .
• The total defeat of liberal civil rights champion Barbara Jordan's blue-ribbon commission recommendations to reduce overall immigration and eliminate chain migration and the lottery in 1996.
  
  .
• Six mini-amnesties that passed in the 1990s, primarily aimed at specific nationalities.

Read the rest:

https://www.numbersusa.com/content/n...-he-do-it.html

New streetcars delayed by Bombardier again

TTC CEO Andy Byford said expected delivery now a mystery with no new schedule in place

Pella leaky window?

I am in the process of looking at a foreclosure that is about 12-13 years old and had Pella windows installed. I have read about some of the problems of the older windows and concerned about that. I walked through the house and all the windows that are movable had the pain peeled away where the upper and lower window meet (so along where the latch is). It is across the entire strip and has some black spots.



I took my keys and pushed on it a little and didn't notice any rot. Some of the windows were not latched so I am wondering if this is from someone leaving the windows unlatched and just some moisture from the winter etc or a bigger problem. I will try to get some pictures tomorrow.



Anything else I shoud look for on the windows when I go back?





Thank you

Millenial Marketing Superstar Everette Taylor's Top Snapchat Tips

This interview is an excerpt from our Complete Guide to Snapchat, originally published on February 23, 2016. 

Snapchat is one of the fastest growing and most exciting social networks for marketers at the moment and the app now boasts over 100 million daily active users and 7 billion video views, daily!

But with any growing social media platform, it can be a little hard to figure out where to get started. In order to deliver the best, most actionable Snapchat tips, we teamed up with Everette Taylor, who gave us the lowdown on how to use Snapchat to deliver value for your business.

When it comes to marketing and building communities, it's safe to say Taylor knows a thing or two. He's the founder and CEO of MilliSense and formerly served as Chief Marketing Officer for Sticker Mule where revenue increased by over 40% during his tenure and website traffic more than doubled.

Here are Taylor's top 5 Snapchat tips for brands, businesses, and marketers. Let's dive in!

Everette Taylor's Top Snapchat Tips

1. Bring value through variety of content

With Snapchat, you have to bring value with every piece of content you share, Taylor explains:

Take a minute and think about most of the Snapchat stories you see and how similar the content is. The fact is, for most – originality on Snapchat is lacking. That's the case for many social media platforms but can be the most apparent on Snapchat due to the nature of the app. That's the cue to step your game up.

The best way to bring value to users on Snapchat is by providing a variety of content that your users will either find entertaining or helpful information. Don't be afraid to think outside of the box and take risks. Monotony = loss of interest.

It's also important to keep Snapchat's user base in mind when it comes to content creation – 45% of Snapchat users are under 25.

The point is to be fun, creative and experiment. Remember the audience on Snapchat tends to skew to be a lot younger. If users know what to expect from you, they will be a lot less likely to click on your stories which means less impressions for you or your brand. Take to time to strategize a marketing strategy for your Snapchat like you would any other channel or funnel.

In the early days of TV and Radio, if you missed a show, it wasn't on again. There were no DVRs or on-demand services. Snapchat is much the same, once your story has been live for 24 hours, it's gone forever.

To keep your content interesting and engaging, you could create a schedule to give your audience an expectation of what's coming up:

Create custom content, for example having “Motivation Mondays” where you offer inspirational quotes or highlight inspirational stories/people or “Tasty Tuesdays” where you cook a new recipe or review a new restaurant. Whatever you do, just have fun!

2. Create your own Snapchat KPIs

Measuring your performance on social media can be a tough task at times, especially on some of the newer platforms.  And currently, there aren't any public ways to get analytics or data around your Snapchat account.

So when it comes to measurement on Snapchat, Taylor advises that “a little ingenuity is needed.” 

First thing you want to figure out is VPS, Views Per Snap. In my opinion, this is the “one metric that matters” when it comes to Snapchat. The best way to do this is to calculate the average views for your Snapchat videos each day and record that number in a spreadsheet. You can then start to track the progress of your views daily and begin to set goals.

Alongside Views Per Snap, Taylor also recommends tracking followers and screenshots:

If you have the time and the patience to manually count, you can calculate new follower metrics and figure out your follow rate – daily, weekly, monthly and even annually. This allows you to set acquisition goals as well.

One of the most useful KPIs I've come up with screenshots. This shows that people found whatever you posted highly entertaining or valuable.

This leads nicely to the next tip…

3. Make Sure Users Anticipate Important Messages

One of the biggest barriers to entry for brands on Snapchat is figuring out how Snapchat can directly have value for their brand. One of the best ways is to give important messages and announcements on your Snapchat.

If you're delivering an important message on Snapchat, for example, sharing a URL you'd like your followers to visit, asking them to screenshot it can be an excellent way to drive action.

When it comes to screenshots, Taylor advises giving your followers some warning of what's coming up:

You have to be smart about how you go about this. You have to make users anticipate something is coming before it comes. Let users know that you're about to announce something important before you do so or prompt them by saying “screenshot the next snap.” Yep, it's that simple and can be highly effective.

4. Use Other Social Media to Promote Snapchat

Snapchat doesn't have a public friends feed or a mechanic that will show people that their friends are viewing and engaging with your content. As such, a great way to build your audience is through your pre-existing followers on other networks, Taylor explained:

One thing I admire about Vine & YouTube influencers is the way they are able to shift their audience to other social media platforms. It's an impactful tactic if done well. It requires you to be using other social media platforms to promote your Snapchat.

One of the most effective ways to do this is by scheduling posts on Buffer to promote your Snapchat throughout the week. Some platform-specific tips include: making your profile picture of Facebook and Twitter your Snapchat QR code, setting up a pinned tweet on Twitter and pinned post on Facebook promoting your Snapchat, and setting up automated direct messages on Twitter along with a value proposition for people to follow you on Snapchat, etc.

Taylor also recommends taking screenshots from your Snapchat pictures and videos and sharing these on other social networks:

Taking your interesting Snapchat pictures/videos and posting them on other social media platforms with your Snapchat handle is super effective. I've found this the most effective on Twitter and Instagram. Also if you're doing something fun or exciting, you can tell people to follow you to see more. For example, “I'm at *insert event* – follow my Snapchat to check out my adventures.”

Here's another example of Pepsi promoting their Snapchat lens on facebook:

Get a mind blowing taste of #PepsiMaxCherry with our Snapchat lens for today only! Send us your snaps to PepsiMaxUK to feature on our story!

Light Socket Outlet Adapter

I have a question regarding those light socket adapter that allow you to screw into a light socket and added an inline switched outlet in the process.







What are some of the things to watch out for when using an outlet like this? Is there some sort of wattage restriction on what you can plug into it? I am thinking you can't plug in anything "heavy duty" to it because it is going through the lighting fixture's wiring and components.



Can you put this on an exterior wall sconce and hook up say a string of Christmas lights?



Also it does not have ground.

Air Conditioner Donated To The Lanark County Food Bank

Our team getting ready to install the YORK central air conditioner that we have donated to the Lanark County Food Bank.

Karin (Manager of the Lanark County Food Bank) contacted us the first of April inquiring about obtaining air conditioning for the building they recently moved into. There were some existing window air conditioners, however they are either not working or in rough shape.

We met with Karen and determined that a central air conditioner would work in  this application, and would therefore replace the window units. As a result we have donated a YORK air conditioner complete with installation labour and materials. This is being installed today.

During the meeting with Karin she mentioned that she frequently has requirements for a van or truck to pick up from grocery stores when she makes large volume purchases and/or receives donations, or schools that have conducted collections in support of the food bank. In the past it has been difficult for her to collect these items because she would have to find a suitable vehicle to borrow. Moving forward we will be doing these pick ups for her with our fleet of vans and trucks.

Another example of how our team continues to give back to the communities that we serve, and the residents that support us.

We wish to remind everyone that the Food Bank is in need of donations to fill their shelves.

Social Media From Your Couch, and Other Tips For Managing 100+ Social Profiles

Some people go to great lengths to find the best ways to share to social media.

Social media management tools definitely help, and so too do the workflows and tactics that social media marketers discover to save time each and every day.

This is especially true for busy marketing agencies who run social media marketing in addition to a host of other duties. The folks at iM Image Marketing, a digital agency from Youngstown, Ohio, most definitely fit this description, juggling social media management on top of web design, branding, and so much more.

Their team manages more than 100 social profiles! And they do so with some really smart workflows that help them save time and gain great results for their clients. The iM team was kind enough to sit down with us and share some of these secrets. Here's a bit more about how this fast-moving agency gets work done.

If I don't have a whole lot of time, I can still, very quickly, schedule a week's worth of posts for somebody. When you're managing as many accounts as we are that's incredibly valuable.

– Sam Morris, iM Image Marketing

The agency journey: From web design to social media

Like many other marketing agencies, iM Image Marketing began as something else entirely: purely graphic design.

Then they added web design.

Then digital marketing, SEO, social media, and most anything else the client might need.

This seems to be the path that many agencies take, embracing this 360-degree service to help clients succeed in whatever way they can. Social media has become a significant focus for the iM Image Marketing team and their clients. Project Manager Sam Morris, who leads up iM's social efforts, believes it's all due to the time it takes to do social media right.

Many business owners are strapped for time and need help delivering a consistent presence on social media.

We're a marketing agency nowadays and we kind of started out just graphic design and we added websites. As people wanted more stuff we did more stuff.

We deal with a lot of smaller businesses. We do have some that are multi-million dollar companies, and we have a lot of them that are two to five people or it's their home business.

We find that most business owners don't have time to do a lot of their own marketing.

They don't have time to do their social media, they don't have time to write blogs, they don't have time to do all that stuff.  We do as much as we can for these clients: maintaining their website, keeping their social media profiles updated. If they have an event coming up, we help them get the event organized and promoted, do the design for their flyers and print material.  We roll everything all into one package. We become their marketing department. Social media is one of those things that they don't seem to have time to deal with.

Honestly, there're a hundred or so accounts we manage in Buffer, and that number grows consistently over time as we sign more clients. We've got a pile of new websites to build, and that'll be more accounts getting added in to Buffer as we get those websites completed, too. It becomes a full-time job just doing the social media stuff.

Workflows: How to manage 100+ social accounts

Social media has become a full-time job for Sam at iM Image Marketing. Thing is, there are several other jobs still to do!

How do you maximize the time spent on social, while still saving away enough hours to get work done elsewhere?

Sam and the team use Buffer for their social media management, and within the app, they've found some useful workflows for working smart and saving time. Here are three workflows that stand out as time-saving ways to share quickly, share smartly, and keep track of over 100 social profiles.

-

1. Using groups of profiles to share to multiple places at once

Often, Sam will find that the same content will work great for a client on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

Instead of creating the same update, one-at-a-time, for each of these networks, Sam shares all at once. Each client has its own group within Buffer so that Sam and his team can share quickly to all connected social profiles for the client.

When you open the Buffer compose window from either the app or the extension, you can click on the “+Group” button above the list of profiles.

Then name the Group, add as many profiles as you'd like, save, and close. Now this group will appear in the composer each time you go to share a new update.

To take things one step further, Sam then shuffles the content for each of the profiles so that these similar posts aren't all being shared at the exact same time. All profiles will have their own unique order of content, while still sharing the same content. (Plus, Sam saves a ton of time placing it all in the queue.)

When I'm scheduling stuff for a company, because I'm posting to more than one account, I'm always using those groups.

A lot of times we'll have three people's LinkedIn plus their Facebook and their Twitter and Google Plus - I'm posting to several accounts at a time. I post all the same stuff, but I'll go and shuffle it. That way, you've got all the same stuff posting, but it's not posting the same link to three people's LinkedIn accounts the same day. It does it at random, which I think is a really cool thing because if I'm on, say, LinkedIn and I see that three people from the same company shared the same link at the same time, I can tell that it's automated. That shuffle option is really nice because it mixes them up so that we're not posting the same stuff all the time.

-

2. Sharing on the go (or on the couch) with mobile apps and tools

Another way to save a few minutes on social media marketing is to do your sharing and scheduling whenever you have a free moment.

Sometimes, those moments come on the couch.

I have two small children, and when I'm waiting for them to go to sleep at night is when I use Buffer on my phone. I'm sitting on the couch and my phone is in my hand, so it's handy to be able to get work done. I've done a lot of buffering through the app, just sitting on the couch waiting for my kids to fall asleep.

It's amazing how much work I can actually do from my cell phone nowadays. It's very nice to have that ability to schedule things from the phone by hand when I'm on the couch or out and about.

With social monitoring, too, I'm constantly - this is a lot of times another one of those things I do while I'm waiting on my kids to go to sleep - going in and monitoring the comments and likes in the native Facebook and Twitter app. You get a feel for what type of posts are working and what's not just from being in the accounts and looking at them.

-

3. Tracking progress client-by-client with a Trello board

Managing a full slate of social accounts - 100 profiles for dozens of clients - can likely get a bit hairy.

There are some really wonderful tools to help with the management: Buffer for scheduling, Google docs for organizing, Dropbox and Paper for team collaboration and sharing.

Sam adds another layer onto these cool tools: Trello, for tracking the due dates and queue status of each client.

I've got a Trello column with all of our current clients. Each card has a different company name, and then I put a due date on them with how far ahead I've got them scheduled.

When we switched over to Buffer, I used this board to track everything. When I set up that company's accounts in Buffer, I just changed the color of the label on the card to yellow so that I knew it was in Buffer. I was able to move them over a little bit at a time. It wasn't really hard to do.

-

The biggest difference-makers for a busy social media team

With the amazing workflows that Sam has come up with he's able to save many hours a week with social media management.

In addition, there are particular parts of the tools he uses that come in handy for working smarter, not harder.

These are a couple of his favorites.

1. Smart social media scheduling

One of our aims at Buffer is to build a smart and powerful way to share to social media, and it's awesome to hear that this focus has been helping Sam and his team. In particular, there are three parts of the Buffer scheduling that have really stood out:

1. Optimal timing


2. Multiple schedules


3. Rebuffer from archives

With optimal timing, you can analyze your past updates to see suggestions for possible best times to post, based on the engagement of your past updates.

With multiple schedules, you can adjust the frequency and timing as often as you'd like, and all the existing content that you've scheduled reorganizes itself automatically to match your new times.

And with rebuffering from archives, you can quickly add back in the top-performing tweets and updates that you've sent before.

I really like with Buffer how I have the ability to put all these posts in there easily, then Buffer picks the best time and it reschedules everything.

We actually had somebody tell me the other day that they had noticed that the stuff that we post gets more reach than the stuff that they post. It's the same content: pictures of work that they've done. I said, “Yeah, a lot of it is because the program we use has an algorithm that picks the best time.”

I really like that - and the fact that you can reschedule stuff all at once. If I decided I'm going to post twice a day instead of once a day, it can happen automatically.

Plus, I really like that it saves those posts for future use so that even on my phone I can quickly re-buffer things and add them to the queue to keep it filled up.

2. The importance of consistency

A great benefit to the ease of scheduling is the ease of consistency. When you're able to quickly and fully fill a schedule for the coming week, it makes a huge difference for the profiles of clients.

Sam and the iM team get a little bit of extra help here, too, by inviting the clients to participate in the scheduling and creating of content for their profiles. With Buffer's team member settings, Sam can invite the client to contribute to their own social profiles (without accessing any profiles that belong to others).

This helps with sharing content and visuals that the agency might not have access to, being off-site.

And overall, it lends itself well to maintaining a consistent presence on social media, where many consumers will turn to assess and inquire about brands.

We encourage our clients to post content to their accounts. Some of them do more than others. For instance, we have a running specialty store that we work with. Every once in awhile they'll have last year's models and they put them all on a table at 40 percent off. I'm not there in the store to know that. They take a picture and post it on their social media.

With most of the ones that do post on their own, they're very sporadic on when they do so. They might post two things today, and then they don't post anything else for two weeks. Having us schedule content in Buffer, we can make sure something is posting every day whether they're thinking about it or not.

That helps when consumers are out there doing research. I'm finding people are searching for services in two places, one's Google and one's Facebook. Sometimes people look for stuff on Facebook before they check Google. When that happens, it helps those companies to have a Page that's always being updated when people come across it. If someone gets there and there hasn't been an update in a couple weeks, it reflects poorly to that potential customer.

Want the smoothest social media experience for your team and clients?

iM Image Marketing and hundreds of other agencies use Buffer to manage social media profiles, content, analysis, and more for each and every client. With Buffer, you'll get straightforward pricing that scales along with your business, 24/7 customer support, and an agency-first approach to the features that matter to you.

Join iM Image Marketing and 5,000+ other brands and business with a free 30-day trial of Buffer's most powerful social media features!

Image sources: Pablo, Unsplash

The post Social Media From Your Couch, and Other Tips For Managing 100+ Social Profiles appeared first on Social.

RTAA service bulletin

Hey Guys, I was hoping someone had a copy of the slide valve service bulletin for the RTAA. (RTAA-SVB09C-EN). Thanks.

Bike lanes on Bloor get boost from councillors, businesses

Pilot project for five kilometres of new bike lanes on Bloor St. goes to first vote next week.

Cabinet hindge screws popped out

I have a lower cabinet in the kitchen the hinge came off the side of the cabinet.



The two holes look fine, the plastic "sleeves" look fine. What is the best way to secure the hinges?







Apply some contact cement or 2 part epoxy into the hole and push them back in and let it set? Or change to bigger screws?

Toronto councillors vow to end police paid-duty requirements

Many say a system requiring hiring of high-priced off-duty police to direct traffic and the like needs to end.

Light fixture with one wire? Help!!

So I've wired a decent amount of switches and fixtures but I'm no expert...so I'm replacing a fixture in a house built in 1987. It has two switches, one being a dimmer, and the fixture. When I took it down it has a group of white wires capped, two whites with a black capped, and both the neutral and hot from the old fixture were tied to the black (hot) from the box. Does this make sense? Do I wire the replacement fixture the same way??? So only one black wire was tied to the fixture Thanks...

Strange heating piping.

I have this job, the heating water is piped from another building and loops through this building. A separate pump pulls the water off this loop and sends it through the building. Return comes back to the loop. Only thing is the Supply and Return take off are only six inches from each other. Upstairs supply pipe splits, and goes to the rear VAV and front VAV. Return only comes from front of building. I looked at the first VAV, supply comes off the front supply pipe. The return goes to a separate return that follows the supply and return going across the ceiling space. In other words there are three pipes??? Ever seen anything like this? BTW they want me to right up a control sequence, including replacing three way valves with two way, with new Frequency drive pumps.

York Residential AC Sizing (Based on SEER Ratings)

Hello,



Is anyone proficient with sizing york residential equipment? They seem to size their evaporator coils to condensing units based on the desired SEER rating/efficiency... For instance, I needed a 2 ton LX condensing unit (14 SEER) but wanted to up it to a 16 SEER rating and was given a 3.5 ton (43k BTU) cased coil. That seemed a bit oversized to me but I was assured by the supplier so I installed it anyways. Now it appears that the system runs very infrequently because it is cooling down the house so fast and I'm concerned that it is not pulling enough humidity out of the air with such a short run time. I also couldnt get my subcool up past 3F, continuing to do so only started to decrease my superheat 8F. I was wondering if the oversized coil had something to do with this? It was a mild day, ambient was only about 65-68F.



So I would also like to ask: Does the system achieve the higher SEER because it runs less? Because I was under the impression that a system achieves greater efficiency if it runs longer, with fewer stops and starts?



Any input would be much appreciated, thx

Need some help to re-enter programming mode for vista-20p

I have vista-20p and 6162rt installed at home without any subscription



Recently I need re-program some sensor, but can't enter program mode any more. I think I have the modified installer code in hand, but when I reboot the panel (unplug the battery and transformer then re-plug the transformer), I pressed * and # and the same time within 50s (panel is in basement, need 10s to come back to main floor). The keypad was light on with a long beep when power is reconnected. When I pressed * and #, there is also a long beep. But the keypad keep showing "Busy - Standby, v10.23 D1". I tried * and # several times within 50s, every time I could get a long beep. After about 1 min, the keypad went back to Ready to arm on screen. I don't if this means the panel was locked by accident to downloader only



Any idea? Thank you

Toronto's unflappable public health boss Dr. David McKeown is retiring

McKeown will leave his job as Toronto's medical officer of health this summer after 12 years.