Mastering Maintenance and Embracing Community in The Sunshine State

Embark on a journey into the heart of homestead upkeep with Mike Roth and the ever-knowledgeable Peter Bernard as we uncover the secrets to keeping cool during The Villages' blistering heat waves. From tackling the myth of garage door insulation, where we swap tales of Styrofoam boards versus the sleek aluminum foil-like bubble wrap, to examining the art of keeping those hurricane bars firmly in place, we've got your garage woes covered. But it doesn't stop there; we also spill the beans on why tinting your garage windows could be your new best friend in our fight against Florida's fiery temperament.

As we grease the wheels of conversation, literally, with my trusty lithium white grease, we share maintenance must-dos that will ensure your garage door's longevity and save you from future headaches. We've all heard the horror stories – like my neighbor's spring tension fiasco – so heed our advice and leave some tasks to the professionals. Meanwhile, don't miss out on our water heater wisdom, where the anode rod becomes the hero of the hour and a vinegar trick could save you from the cold shower blues. We're all about those simple, yet effective, home hacks that keep the good times rolling.

Finally, we're cutting through the sensationalist noise to bring you the genuine pulse of life in The Villages. Forget the overblown media portrayals; Peter and I share heart-warming anecdotes about our community's electric car buzz and the sheer joy of navigating our Tesla-tinted world. Whether you're a gearhead or a green thumb, our episode is a testament to the dynamic, tech-savvy, and oh-so-lively spirit of The Villages, where every day is an opportunity to learn, laugh, and live to the fullest. Join us, and be part of the conversation that goes beyond home maintenance, touching the essence of our vibrant local life.

Transcript

Emily: 0:11

Welcome to the Open Forum in The Villages, Florida podcast. In this show we talk to leaders in the community, leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the Villages to give perspectives of what is happening here in The Villages, Florida. We are a listener-supported podcast.

Mike Roth: 0:28

How can you support our podcast? This is Mike Roth and listeners, I'm thrilled to share with you this podcast, which is my passion project for you. This podcast brings me joy, brings you knowledge, inspiration and a lot of things that people need to know about the villages and the people that are living here and what's actually going on. Creating this podcast is a labor of love, even though it demands more time than I can easily spare. But hey, time isn't something we can buy back right Now. Here's where you come in, the unsung heroes and heroines. You can help us keep the podcast alive and thriving. How? By becoming a supporter. There are two simple ways that you can support us. The first is a small monthly donation. Visit our podcast website:, open forum in the villages, florida. com, and click on the black supporter box. Even a small three to ten dollar a month donation makes a difference. And guess what? You can cancel anytime, no strings attached. The second way that you can contribute to the podcast is by making a purchase of an Amazon product at Amazon standard prices, and we are paid a small commission on each purchase as an Amazon affiliate. That way, there's no extra money out of your pocket, but you are supporting the podcast Check every week because we're going to be adding new Amazon products that you can buy and support the podcast with. Thank you, and your support means the world to us. Stay curious, stay inspired and keep those headphones on.

Mike Roth: 2:04

This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in The Villages, Florida. I'm welcoming back Peter Bernard. Thanks for being with us, peter. Good to be here again. Good In today's show, peter. I think we're going to talk about some common maintenance issues that people have here in the Villages. The first thing we were talking about before we started this episode was garage door insulation. Everybody's got metal garage doors here and it transmits that heat like you can't believe. It's 100% transmission and it's going into a garage which is uninsulated in most cases, and if you have a window to the outside, it's a small window and you can't circulate a lot of air. No, the other solution people have used is they open up their attic access and send the hot air up into the attic Works a little bit, a little bit. Now I think we both have insulated our garage doors, and why don't you tell our listeners what you did for insulation?

Peter Bernard: 3:06

Well, the first thing I did when I moved here because I noticed it was so hot out there, I paid a couple of dudes to come out and do it because I didn't think I was going to be able to. And they did the easy route where they had this stuff that's foldable, bendable, and they stuck it in. It took them about seven minutes to do my entire garage for $200.

Peter Bernard: 3:22

And I thought hmm, I think maybe I can do better. I left that stuff in and I went out and got the styrofoam boards. Many of the garages here in the villages have a hurricane bar that goes across. It's an extra truss. That's code. That's code. But getting that thing off, there are a lot of little screws.

Mike Roth: 3:41

A lot of bolts.

Peter Bernard: 3:45

If you don't get it lined up, just right, putting back on now you're in a heap of trouble. So I decided to go the cheap route and I didn't take it off and I was cutting the styrofoam to put in there ended up cutting my hand at one point. I got a little bit of blood on the styrofoam. We did it and it was a pain and I'd never do it again, not without taking out those, those special trusses. So the next thing I did is is I went to Home Depot and I bought the stuff that looks like aluminum foil. It's like a bubble wrap stuff, two-sided foil on both sides, and it was easy to install. I put that in and I used some of that tape that looks like aluminum to help it stay in place. So now I've got some foam, I've got that stuff that they put in and I've got this aluminum stuff. But here's the deal After all that labor, I have yet to see if it's going to reduce the temperature in my garage, because I haven't had a new summer.

Peter Bernard: 4:31

This will be my second summer here. Okay, so do you have a recording thermometer in your garage? I do not. I used to. My wife thinks I broke it because of the heat in the garage. I don't think that was the reason, but no, but it's a simple deal. I'll go check it.

Mike Roth: 4:46

Some people want to know the before and after. We have a Wi-Fi garage thermos thermometer which measures temperature and humidity and it's recorded in Home Assistant so that I can take a look at the graph to see how well it does. It hasn't done very well. I have the single layer of flexible that I put in where it's aluminized on the side that faces the metal and it's a white plastic on the inside. The failure was. One of the failures is that it doesn't cover the overlap between the doors where the doors bend. Okay, did you cover that?

Peter Bernard: 5:23

No, and I have done some tests with my hand and I can feel it coming in the heat. The radiant heat is coming through. Those are little radiators. The edges Exactly, and I have windows in my garage. So I took a couple hours one day and I put tinting up there to keep the sun's rays from coming through. Now that's going to provide a minimal amount of protection, but I can tell, by putting my hand up there too, that it's helping a little.

Mike Roth: 5:48

Yeah, I was over at Matt Mormon's place, the Obsessed Garage and he has the flexible foam insulation over the metal between the doors where the doors fold so that he has almost 100% seal on the garage door for the heat barrier. And it was the inside of his warehouse with the doors is cool and I touched the interior where he had the fold and it was in the 70s when it was in the 90s outside.

Peter Bernard: 6:20

Mike, I looked into and I had a guy give me a quote on I was going to have some solar-powered attic fans put in and I also inquired about having a fan put in my garage.

Peter Bernard: 6:31

You can have a thermostatically controlled fan that will kick on at a certain temperature. Now what it does is it takes the hot air from your garage and vents it to your attic, and then hopefully your soffits are going to vent that and all that kind of stuff, and they will. It will, but I don't know if there's a return on investment there, because now I have to pay electric bills to run that fan and of course the solar is going to hopefully vent that out. If you did both of them, I think you might get a benefit?

Mike Roth: 6:57

I haven't figured that it's a benefit, because if you're venting the air out of the garage, there's got to be new air that's coming in.

Peter Bernard: 7:06

And it's hot.

Mike Roth: 7:10

It's 95 degrees outside, you get 95 degrees air in and you're pushing 95 degree or 100 degree air out the top. It's not much of an efficiency thing. Now, if you have an air-conditioned garage, you've turned your garage into a woodworking shop or a place where you work on your cars. A mini split, yeah, a mini split. Then the air-conditioned garage door would make a lot of sense. Okay, and double insulating it would be a perfect solution, because then you're dealing with colder air.

Peter Bernard: 7:44

Right, and this is going to affect people in the villages that have west or east-facing garages. For the morning it's going to be the east-facing garage, in the afternoon it's going to be the west-facing garages, and in mine I have a west exposure in the afternoon and it just heats up like no one's business. And I have two Teslas parked in there and I had a thermal indicator last year. My little red T on my charger starts going off and that means that it's overheating and that means no more charging is happening. No, that means you have to air condition your garage. Yeah, there's a point of no return.

Peter Bernard: 8:16

I looked at the whole putting in the solar powered vents up there and I asked the guy at the company. I said is there going to be a savings on my utility bill after I did this? And he hemmed and hawed a bit and he goes not really. And I said then what's my return on investment? Why would I do it? And he goes you got to get that heat out. And then the humidity, which is probably true. It's probably better for the roof not to have 140 degrees or higher in your attic. If you have good insulation above your head, hopefully that won't radiate down. But I didn't get the return on investment. It at least didn't work out on paper.

Mike Roth: 8:47

And the roofs in this area of the village as I'm not sure about the new areas, maybe you can tell me have the radiant barrier, which is a piece of aluminum foil. The heat that comes down hits the aluminum. It's supposed to be going back out through the asbestos tiles.

Peter Bernard: 9:04

Yeah, it's not standard equipment. I know some people that have done that, and whether or not it's working for them I don't know.

Mike Roth: 9:09

It was standard equipment in this part of the village. It makes sense. I think it makes perfect sense. Didn't make any difference in the heat. No, okay, in fact, what it does is it stops cellular signals I know. So then you have to get a booster of some kind. If you look on the desk there, that little box with the blue light, that's the booster. It's connected to a wire that goes outside, so we have GPS signal on cell phones inside there.

Mike Roth: 9:33

It took a while for us to figure that out why the cell phones work when we stepped out the front door or the back door.

Peter Bernard: 9:38

But not in the house. You solve one problem and then it makes a problem elsewhere.

Mike Roth: 9:43

I'm not sure that the radiant barrier solved the problem, but it sounds good, I'm glad I didn't do it.

Peter Bernard: 9:48

I had a guy offer to do my house for $3,000. My wife and I talked about it and we didn't do it, so maybe it's better. You saw a phone signal in the house good, my cell phone signal is great Outside, but I look outside. I know there's a T-M. Made the right decision? I think so. I think so.

Mike Roth: 10:03

Since we were talking about garage doors, let's talk a little bit about the garage door maintenance. Many people have the chain drive garage doors here in the villages which are standard. What kind of annual maintenance should someone do or have done to their garage doors?

Peter Bernard: 10:17

I'm a nut about this kind of stuff, as you probably have guessed. I buy the stuff I believe it's lithium white grease it comes in an aerosol can and I go to every single place where there's movement. And that means the rollers, it means the hinges, it means the chain, the motor drive, and I just give it a. You don't have to overdo it, just a little like, not even that long, just enough. And you have to make sure that you aim it right, because it's messy and smelly and don't do it when your car's in the garage.

Peter Bernard: 10:45

You don't want that on your paint. I did it once and I spent hours getting it off. So put the cars out in the driveway and then all the way around and then run it a couple of times up and down and up and down to get it all the way around. I think it's a great maintenance. I think't know $8 to $12. It's nothing.

Mike Roth: 11:04

They're available at the local auto parts stores, there you go, and Lowe's and Home Depot. That's one way to do it. I use the lithium grease in a tube, okay, and I remove the old grease, slather that new stuff on and for a while it really quiets the garage door down. You wear a glove? Yes, I wear a glove and I use paper towels to remove the old. Perfect. I have my wife stand there with a trash can and collect the greasy paper towels.

Peter Bernard: 11:31

It reminds me on my bicycles I use a lubrication on the chain and I try to get it all off because it's black from riding, and then put the new stuff on and then use the paper towel to get it moved all around and on the gears on the back too yeah, I can't speak for bicycles anymore On the garage door, it tends to work real well.

Mike Roth: 11:48

The other thing that I do is I tighten every bolt okay, every bolt on the door, and I find that at least 10% of the bolts are stripped out. Stripped out, yes.

Mike Roth: 12:01

When you turn them, there's no tension on it anymore because they're self-tapping bolts, and so I've looked forever for a new, larger self-tapping bolt that can go into the same hole. Couldn't find one at Lowe's or Home Depot, or even checked Spar, and then I decided what I'm going to do is put a screw and bolt in okay, and put a nut behind there it's not hard to do and tighten it down. That seemed to stop a lot of the squeaking.

Peter Bernard: 12:28

Wow, that sounds like a great tip. I know from going up the vibration of the thing. Just going up and down and up and down has to loosen that stuff. It's putting fatigue on that metal. So tightening them up I think it's a great idea. I think.

Mike Roth: 12:39

something else most people don't bother to tighten is the actual mounting bolts that hold the motor up to the ceiling. Oh, I didn't think of that, Okay. And then there are about four or five mounting bolts that hold the tracks to the doorframe. All of that was loose. Oh my goodness. You know easily a little bit, a quarter turn more on 12 bolts. I can do that.

Peter Bernard: 13:03

I'm learning something here. I want to throw out something too. If you look at your chain and there's an excessive amount of sagging, it's an easy procedure just to loosen that bolt a little bit, tighten, tighten and then tighten it back up again. I'm not a garage door expert, but I know that it should not be sagging a lot.

Mike Roth: 13:18

If the garage door chain touches the track Then it's sagging. It's sagging, yeah. Okay, it can sag a little bit. Okay, you don't want it over tight. And the other thing that I recently solved was when I opened the garage door chain with tension very tight and all of a sudden the garage door would pop up, and that was because the garage door was sticking. So at first I went after the rubber seal at the bottom of the garage door. That wasn't sticky and I researched it on the internet and some guy said it's where your garage door touches the insulation at the front. And so I touched the backside of the vinyl insulation with my fingers and, my God, that stuff was sticky. Do you clean it? I cleaned it with an acetone solution that work. It worked All right, and then six weeks later it was sticky again. And the second solution was, after you clean it, lubricate the vinyl channel with Vaseline. And since I've done that, both doors don't stick.

Peter Bernard: 14:21

I'll give you one more tip for the listeners. Today you do have that black seal on the bottom of your garage. What I'll do is open my garage to about eye level because I don't want to have to be reaching over my head, and I take a rubber protectant that I use on my car, saturate a paper towel or a rag and go along that just over and over again. It's rubber, it's going to deteriorate. Part of it is in the sun in the afternoon and I think I'm going to get more life out of that the garage door or the golf car as well.

Mike Roth: 14:52

Yeah, it gets crushed down. The thing that I don't think people should do is adjust the spring tension.

Peter Bernard: 14:58

No, not yourself. No, I heard a story recently. My neighbor said he tried to adjust the spring and he's lucky that he's still with us, because his screwdriver came popping out and right by his head. It would have killed him. That is dangerous work. I leave that to the professionals.

Mike Roth: 15:12

Yeah, you got to have the special tools and the locking pins.

Peter Bernard: 15:15

I'm afraid of my garage door spring. I know the times in my life when it's gone out it sounds like a gunshot in the garage it does gunshot in the garage.

Mike Roth: 15:26

It does, it really does. They're under a lot of tension, but when I lube the garage door I spray silicone spray into the spring. That's good To remove any tension Right.

Peter Bernard: 15:32

And we all have these cables too, and I lubricate the spool.

Mike Roth: 15:34

The rollers, the spool, yeah. At the top, yeah, any place there's a ball bearing. That's it, the weather is tough on it. That's it.

Peter Bernard: 15:41

I think the listeners of the Mike Ross Show are going to be out there tomorrow doing all this stuff.

Mike Roth: 15:45

Good, let's take a short break and listen to Dr Craig Curtis. Give us an Alzheimer's tip. This is Mike Roth and Dr Craig Curtis. We're talking about Alzheimer's disease. Let's talk about omega-3 and omega-6. How should people get that from their diet?

Dr. Craig Curtis: 16:01

Well, primarily you should get that through beans and nuts and legumes and fish. You can take a supplement of omega-3, omega-6s. However, don't overdo the supplementation of omega-3. Specifically, there was a large study published by the American College of Cardiology a few years back that seemed to show that people that took too much omega-3 might have an increased risk of a heart arrhythmia. So my recommendation is if you buy omega-3 supplements, take it as written.

Warren: 16:35

With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, dr Curtis's goal is to educate the village's community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, craigcurtismd. com, or call 352-500-5252 to attend a free seminar. I'm back with Peter Bernard Peter.

Mike Roth: 16:53

Let's talk about water heaters. I'm back with Peter Bernard Peter. Let's talk about water heaters. In half of the villages we have the old-fashioned water heater. In many cases electric could be gas. Those have two different maintenance issues that homeowners should address. Okay, at least once every five years change the anode rod. Yeah, is that something a homeowner can do? I'm not real familiar.

Peter Bernard: 17:12

I've done it myself. It' anode rod. Yeah, is that something a homeowner can do? I'm not real familiar. I've done it myself. It's very easy.

Mike Roth: 17:17

Yeah, okay, even if you have a very tight low ceiling, okay, you use a I think it was a 27 millimeter wrench with a six foot handle and you just give it a little, turn off all the water pressure, okay, and the power, and turn off the water going into the water heater.

Mike Roth: 17:37

That's smart, Yep. And then you want to put a hose on the drain and drain a few gallons out into the street. Okay, you want to lower the water level. After you've lowered the water level, then you take the wrench and hold the tank with one hand so it doesn't move Slowly. Undo the screw, which is the anode rod. The anode rod that I took out was supposedly solid aluminum. After five years it was solid wire.

Peter Bernard: 18:01

There was no aluminum left on it. Was there any calcium carbonate on it? Oh, lots of it, lots of it.

Mike Roth: 18:06

So what I bought from Amazon, I have it on my supporter site. If you go to the support button there are products from Amazon that I recommend button there are products from Amazon that I recommend, and this one was a steel cable with aluminum and cadmium on it, but in 12-inch sections so you could put it into your tank. Okay, and it was longer than the rod that I took out, so all I did is cut the wires on the last section, so it became at the same length. Oh, okay.

Mike Roth: 18:37

Slip it in one section at a time, tighten it back up, turn on the water again and away you go.

Peter Bernard: 18:43

Do you know this for a fact? I used to have that kind of a water heater and I used to hear a crackling and a popping when it was running on the electric version. And somebody told me once and I don't know if this is true that's a sign that calcium carbonate has built up on that anode and maybe it needs to be changed out.

Mike Roth: 19:00

Yeah, definitely. I would say that an anode rod rarely lasts more than three years, Especially if you have hard water. If you have hard water, I would do it every year. We have a water softener in here which also went out. Yeah, oh God.

Peter Bernard: 19:15

All right, so let's jump to the tankless.

Mike Roth: 19:18

One more thing on the hot water heaters. Above the hot water heater there's usually an expansion tank. Okay, if the expansion tank fails, it will cause your hot water heater to fail, yikes. So it's got a bladder in there rubber bladder about midway through, and half of it's supposed to be filled with air and half of it's supposed to be filled with water. So if you tap over the long screwdriver, you'll hear a different sound from the bottom to the top and you'll know what the water level is inside your tank. If it's the same sound from bottom to top, it's time to change that expansion tank, which isn't hard to do. Okay, you can get them on Amazon, you can get them at.

Peter Bernard: 19:57

Lowe's. You don't have to do any. You don't have to sweat the pipe on.

Mike Roth: 20:00

No, it's a screw-in thread. You use your Teflon tape and away you go. There you go. Save the tank by putting in a $30 expansion tank. Good tip. Good tip Much better than spending $1,000 to have a plummet change out your hot water heater For sure Too early Now tell us a little bit about the hot water heaters in the new section.

Peter Bernard: 20:23

In the new section and they're doing it everywhere Dabney, citrus Grove and I'm sure down in Middleton and all Eastport they have tankless gas, hot water or water heater. I hate to say hot water heater. If it was hot already you wouldn't want to heat it, but anyway, there's a heat exchanger in there and it has a tendency to build up calcium carbonate and other kinds of minerals on there. The fix is easy. They have special bypass valves on these things and you can you turn off the thing first inside. You go in their garage, just hit it and it'll. The display goes out. Now you know you're not providing any power to it. No need to turn off the gas, it's not going to do anything. So once that's done, turn off the valve for the cold coming in, turn off the valve for the hot going back into your house and then you open the valves for the two bypasses and I hook up a submersible pump and I have a bucket filled with two gallons of vinegar and I just let that run for about 45 minutes. I've done probably 15 or 14.

Peter Bernard: 21:18

I donated some of that labor for our AED program in Citrus Grove, and then there's some neighbors that heard I was doing it. I ended up having to put the kibosh on the whole thing because it was getting to be ridiculous. Hey, would you do mine? You did my neighbor, would you? Look, I love my neighbors but I'm not in the water heater decalcification business. So I stopped. I said look, go find someone else Local handyman, you can do that.

Peter Bernard: 21:42

So it's something I think you should do every year. If you have hard water coming in. I have a soft water machine, like you do, so I think I can extend that period out, but you just let it run for 45 minutes. Another tip, though I did the whole vinegar routine. It's white vinegar. Let it run, blah, blah, blah.

Peter Bernard: 21:58

I went online and I found that there's this stuff that they make for coffee makers and it's a chemical decalcification product. It comes in a little packet about five inches by five inches, and I made a little slurry of that stuff and put it in my bucket and I ran it after I did the vinegar thing. I got a lot more out, so I think I'm going to stick with that in the future. What's it called? You got me. If you go online and say coffee maker cleaner, and it comes in a little white packet, it looks very industrial. So it's not something that I think they intended for water heaters, but it sure does the job. That's a good thing to know. Yeah, it was brown. After I had done the vinegar. I used that and the water came out brown Still with the recirculating pump and the whole shebang.

Mike Roth: 22:42

I'm glad I did it, and in your home you still have the water softener. Oh, yes, okay, and you've tested the effectiveness of the water softener.

Peter Bernard: 22:50

Yeah, I have a dip. The test strips have a dip. The dips, the strips, Right Interesting. I had this system when I was in Pinellas County. I moved up here last May. It's a very expensive system. It's made by Connecticut. There's no electricity to it. Blah, blah, blah. It uses a cog that measures how many gallons you use and just does a regen. I love it. So at my house now it comes through the Nova system You've seen those blue things that people have the filters right Now. That's not a softener. That's not a softener. And so it takes out some of the particulate and things like that. Then I have it going through a dechlorinator, so it takes out, I'd say, 90% of the chlorine Activated charcoal. Yes, it's what it is, which has to be refurbished every now and then. And then it goes through two baths of beads and those beads are charged so that they attract the calcium off of it in other minerals.

Mike Roth: 23:35

The resin beads.

Peter Bernard: 23:35

Right, but as with all softeners, it has to be clean. What happens is there's a salt mixture brine that goes through and that takes the calcium that's collected on the beads out and flushes it out. I love the system. It's doing a great job.

Mike Roth: 23:51

Now are you providing the salt water brine tank.

Peter Bernard: 23:55

Yes, there's a tank that has the salt and I have to replenish that every now and then. Yeah, but I'd say I'm very cognizant of the fact that we live in a humid environment here, so if I have too much of it in there, it'll start making what's called a bridge. You don't want a salt bridge. So I put about a foot and a half of salt and I check it about every week, and then it does the job.

Mike Roth: 24:14

Yeah, I was talking to a plumber and he said that's the number one problem with water softeners.

Peter Bernard: 24:18

Salt ridges and it's like it's not even there anymore. You're not doing the job, that's right.

Mike Roth: 24:24

The test strips will tell you whether or not your water softener is turning out soft water.

Peter Bernard: 24:33

My test strips have a little color code that you look on to see how soft it is. And when I dip it and do the 30 second wait, it doesn't even change color at all, which means I got the nice soft water. But the benefits of soft water I think some people say, oh, I'm fine, the way it is the benefits of soft water is when you wash your hair, you're going to get better suds. When you wash your dishes, you're going to use less detergent. When you do laundry, you use less detergent. I think, just all in all, it's a benefit. Yes, they're expensive. There's companies here in town Nova does it, pegasus does it. There's a Connecticut. It's called E-Water. There's a whole bunch of K-Water. There's a whole bunch of companies that do this.

Mike Roth: 25:06

But I think it's worth the investment, especially if you're going to be in your house for a while we did it, when we moved in and we spent about two grand, we used soft water and we put reverse osmosis underneath the kitchen sink. Nice For the kitchen sink For drinking water and cooking Drinking water and the refrigerator. Ah or ice, yeah, and that's worked out very well.

Peter Bernard: 25:25

Yeah, I think buying bottled water in the store is archaic, especially like the big five-gallon jugs that people haul around.

Mike Roth: 25:33

I can't imagine doing that, just as a hurricane source of water drinking water we keep 10 or 12 bottles or more in our hurricane closet.

Peter Bernard: 25:44

I'm a meteorologist so I'll tell you that, as far as hurricanes goes, obviously we're not going to have the flooding that we've seen along the coast. We're far enough away from that. The big threat here is wind and knocking over power lines and causing the power to go out, maybe taking off a few shingles. I think generally speaking now I'll be proved wrong this hurricane season. Generally speaking, we're fairly safe from the effects of hurricane.

Mike Roth: 26:06

So we're talking about weather. Are you still following the weather forecast for this year?

Peter Bernard: 26:10

I have a little bit. Some of the prognosticators are saying we're going to have a very active season. I tend to look at that with a jaundiced eye because they say that every year. Yeah, I think that keeps them employed.

Mike Roth: 26:22

You're right Bad forecast.

Peter Bernard: 26:23

But they look at the wind currents, the gyras out in the sea La Nina and El Nino and I think this year they say we're not going to have the steering currents that would normally take those storms away from Florida. At least that's what they're saying now.

Mike Roth: 26:36

I hope they're wrong. I hope we don't get any storms here in Florida, I hope they're wrong too.

Peter Bernard: 26:39

There's some people who look at sea surface temperatures, and even the sand coming off the Sahara Desert affects what happens here.

Mike Roth: 26:47

It seems like when there's a lot of sand in the air from the Sahara Desert that's good.

Peter Bernard: 26:51

We get a much softer easier that's exactly true, because it doesn't heat up the surface of the seas as much and tends to make it so that we don't get the real strong storms. That's all good. Yeah, I like it. It's a fascinating thing. There's people from the University of Colorado that do a lot of this, believe it or not, Colorado talking about hurricanes. They'd never seen one themselves, but they do a lot of this research. There's some I can't think of their names offhand, but there's some scientists out there that's pretty much their full-time job is to figure out what's going to happen.

Mike Roth: 27:21

It's amazing. What do you think about the tornado season this year? Is it going to happen?

Peter Bernard: 27:25

Tornadoes happen in. Every state gets tornadoes. There is an area of the United States in the center, that we refer to as Tornado Alley, and it's Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri and Iowa, and it's only because of the I call it the Clash of the Titans. Cold air comes in from the north, warm air from the south, which is very humid, and when they get together it forces an upward travel of that air and then a tornado actually occurs, first of all in a horizontal fashion, and then it tends to bend and then you see it Now, if a tornado doesn't hit the ground, it's not a tornado, and if it's over water, it's a water spout. Water spout, yeah, but those water spouts can get pretty feisty. I've seen them come ashore and rip up awnings and things yeah.

Mike Roth: 28:08

Here in the southern areas of the villages, where you don't have a lot of big trees, it's not going to be as much of a problem as up in the.

Peter Bernard: 28:15

Marion.

Mike Roth: 28:15

County area where they have a lot of big trees.

Peter Bernard: 28:17

True, yeah, the mature plants up there, the mature trees, yeah, they'll tend to take it more pluses and minuses. I love those mature trees. You drive around places and the orange blossom grows. It's just gorgeous up there and you go down to where I live and they're twigs. Yeah, but they also don't clog your gutter. Yeah, they will. That's a whole other story. There's this place out there called Leaf Filter that promised that if you put those on your gutters it's going to help you. My personal opinion it's bunk.

Mike Roth: 28:44

I had them on my gutters in Cincinnati.

Peter Bernard: 28:46

Did it work for you.

Mike Roth: 28:48

That's a partial yes. Okay, it's got a filter on the top that's supported by a plastic frame underneath the filter that's mounted on top of the gutter. Yes, and it sounds real good.

Peter Bernard: 28:59

It filters all of the large particles, but not pine needles and not the big stuff, the big stuff just tends to lay down on top of it, the whole promise of this thing is you don't have to clean your gutters anymore.

Mike Roth: 29:11

You don't have to clean your gutters, you have to clean what's on top of the gutters and you don't have to clean your gutters, you have to clean what's on top of the gutters. And in Cincinnati we hope for a big windstorm to blow all those leaves off of the gutters Real quick digressing.

Peter Bernard: 29:25

I had leaf filter come out to my house and they offered to do my until this is down in Pinellas County, offered to do my whole house for 6,000. I balked it came down to 4,000. I balked it came down to $3,500. I bought. Then when they left, they called me back and they said if we just give it to you at cost, would you do it? So don't take their first offer. If you are intent to get this stuff, which I don't think you should, don't take the first offer, especially down here in the villages.

Mike Roth: 29:45

Unless you have trees directly over your gutters, it's not going to be a problem, and in Cincinnati we had 100-year-old oak trees and pine trees maple trees over the gutters, over the house. It was beautifully shady, okay, and shade is an important thing.

Peter Bernard: 30:03

Yeah, I just don't want to see folks in their elderly years getting up on ladders and cleaning gutters. I think it's an unsafe practice.

Mike Roth: 30:11

Peter, thanks for coming on and talking about those things. Sure thing.

Peter Bernard: 30:14

Yeah, can I make a pitch real quick? Sure, I do a segment. If you've ever heard of the newcomers Jerry and Linda, they are popular on YouTube. I do every other week segment for them called Bubble Wrap, and some of the topics that we've covered here today have been subjects of my bubble wrap. Now, I am no expert on this stuff. I just learn, like when I used to have a gas car and things would go wrong with it. I learned how to fix those things by necessity because I was poor and I needed to do it myself. Now these bubble wrap things are things. I'm in a fairly new house in the villages and I'm needing to learn how to get things done there. So when I learn something, I pass on that knowledge to other folks through the bubble wrap, and it's been very popular.

Mike Roth: 31:02

Jerry and Linda had our improv group on and if you find that episode you'll find where we talked about the old George Collins skit, the Seven Things you Can't Say on TV.

Peter Bernard: 31:07

Love it, love it.

Mike Roth: 31:08

Yeah, it started out as they saw one of our improv shows. Our next improv show is November 19th of this year. Of course we wrote, and in that show we talked about the seven things you can't say about the Villages TV, and it was very funny. So Jerry comes backstage after the show and says could you do that on my video? Podcast and I said sure he comes to a meeting and we expanded it to 25 things that you can't say.

Peter Bernard: 31:38

You and I know that there's lots of stuff that people outside the bubble talk about that we know is untrue. The whole loofah sponge fiasco, craziness, the whole sexually transmitted disease baloney. The first thing people tell me or ask me when I tell them I live in the villages is that kind of stuff I'm so sick of defending it is. I just give them one of these and put my hand on my head. I said, really, we're going to get into that again.

Mike Roth: 32:01

Yeah it almost seems like the bad publicity more popular than the truth. The two or three films that were done about the villages only one of them is fairly representative and I would call a fair fiction of life in the village?

Peter Bernard: 32:17

Is that the one called A Little Piece of?

Mike Roth: 32:19

Heaven or something like that. No, no, some kind of heaven. Okay, unfortunately I was in that film. You were. Yes, if you watch the whole thing, you'll find four seconds where I'm in it. He came in and we recorded about 50 minutes in my living room with the lights and the camera guys and the sound guys and he cut that all out because I told a good story. You didn't want to hear that, huh yeah.

Peter Bernard: 32:39

I used to be in the news business and people criticize us for all kinds of things and the fact of the matter is that good news doesn't sell. When we did a newscast, we led with what we thought people would stick around for, because the name of the game is eyeballs and the name of the game is selling advertising. I am not embarrassed to tell you that when I would write my stories I called it a puff, giving it a little puff of air. If my story was boring, I wouldn't lie, but I would take what I thought was the juiciest part and put it way up front. I would have the anchors say something that would just get your attention. So you had to listen to it. Yeah, and you need to grab them. I used to say, grab them by the juggler, don't let go.

Mike Roth: 33:19

And I was successful if I held your attention for a minute and 20, which is what I got from my stories and I knew two of the three people that they featured in Some Kind of Heaven and I'd say that the gigolo was just that. And one of the other ladies was very sad. Her husband died after she got here and the third story about the drug-addicted husband.

Peter Bernard: 33:47

While that may have been true, it's a very small percentage of the people here in the villages Like me selling advertising on the newscast. They need to have stuff that people are going to watch, especially if they don't live in the villages. I watched it before I moved up here, my wife and I. We looked at each other and we went really and then I thought wait a minute, this is just like a little mini newscast. Here. They're taking the little chunks of negativity and putting it. I don't say anything bad about them for doing it. They're selling donuts. Well, lance.

Mike Roth: 34:10

Oppenheim, the guy who that was his MBA or PhD thesis at the Harvard School of Film, I believe, and he had to have something that was spicy. Yes, he does have some other true life pieces in the villages. He's got 30 seconds with the Elaine Club or the swim team, but three stories he chose to highlight were terribly uncomplimentary, Of course, the guy that's living out of his van I think that was in that one too. That's the gigolo.

Peter Bernard: 34:40

Yeah, as I say, they're filmmakers. If they did a story about how wonderful it is living here and I do think it's wonderful living here then they wouldn't sell people wouldn't go to the theater, but if you go out to YouTube.

Mike Roth: 34:51

There are a couple of 45-minute films on YouTube about life in the villages that are pretty good Absolutely, and Linton and Jerry do a pretty good job of showing the positive side they do, and they always disclaim on their podcast or your YouTube channel.

Peter Bernard: 35:06

Look, they're not experts, they're just a couple of schmoes that moved here a few years ago and they're talking about their life here.

Mike Roth: 35:11

Yeah, and that's a wonderful life. One of the things that moved me to move here was the number of clubs. Yeah, every place we looked the retirement communities they had. Oh, we had 50 clubs or 100 clubs or 150 clubs.

Peter Bernard: 35:22

Try 3,500.

Mike Roth: 35:23

Yeah, At the time for us it was 2,200.

Warren: 35:25

We said 22,.

Mike Roth: 35:26

That's great. If I don't play any golf, then I have 2,195 clubs to choose from.

Peter Bernard: 35:32

I tell people all the time if you can't find something here in the villages to keep you interested, then you don't have a heartbeat, because there's really something for everyone. If you want to play bridge, if you want to play canasta, if you want to play pickleball, we have 153 pickleball courts. I think it is maybe more than that. Oh, it's probably over 200. Yeah, I think it is. So you can do anything in your heart's desire.

Peter Bernard: 35:55

I'm a member of the Villages Tesla Club. I'm active in that. We go out and we talk to people at the squares about the cars. We go out and have lunches together and lately I've been going around to people's houses that have new cars, new Teslas, and I grant you, it's a complicated thing. There's a learning curve there, and I help them get over that. I had a lady last week I'll tell you, mike. She said will you come to my house? I really like my Tesla, but I can't really rave about it because I don't know how to use it. So I sat in her garage for an hour and a half going over every little thing that she could do.

Mike Roth: 36:24

Yeah, yeah, we have the same kind of problem with the newest Mercedes. And there's a lady who's in our improv club who says Mike, I don't want the AM radio or the FM radio to come on every time I start the car. I want to drive in silence. And so she said. I asked the sales guy how do I make it be a silent? And he said you can't turn off the radio.

Peter Bernard: 36:49

We have the same situation with Tesla. The fix is turning the volume all the way down and then it will come on when you get in the car.

Mike Roth: 36:55

Yeah, that's one fix. The other fix is to have nothing plugged into your USB media port and set your media center to start on the USB port. There you go, and if you want FM, then you have to change it to FM.

Peter Bernard: 37:09

The truth of the matter is, with Teslas and I'm not a Mercedes guy, but these are computers that happen to be cars Tesla is essentially a computer company because all the back end of how the car works is all done in-house, even the stereo system. So I think a good Tesla owner does a little bit of research before they pull it into their garage, so that you're not just completely dumbfounded.

Mike Roth: 37:34

And if Tesla is defined as a computer on wheels, I would say the Mercedes is designed the other way it's a car that has computers.

Peter Bernard: 37:44

I think that's right, because Mercedes has a long history. I'm going to as here to guess probably 120 years of history. They were famous for making safe cars First cars, yes, yeah, and so Tesla's only. They started mass producing a car in 2012, with the Roadster very limited, and then the Model S was their first, and their deal was we're going to have a very expensive car which it was that will help us design and manufacture the least less expensive cars. So then they came out with the 3 and the Y, and there we are.

Mike Roth: 38:15

Yeah, and Mercedes is bringing out newer cars, newer electrics in less expensive versions, which is, I think, a very healthy thing to do?

Peter Bernard: 38:24

I think so too. That's Tesla's plan too. For many years Elon Musk used to say we're going to have a sub $25,000 electric car. It's been in the works for a long time. The problem has been in the past that building the battery is really expensive the lithium ion battery. But they're now doing lithium phosphate and so that's going to help bring down that cost. And the next I just read this yesterday the next Tesla model is not going to be built on an assembly line as we know today. It's going to be built in separate parts of the main plant. So they'll do the body, yada, yada, yada and then, when it's all ready to go, they'll just meld it all together and out the door it goes. Fascinating Swedish system. I don't know.

Mike Roth: 39:05

Is that what they do in Volvo? With Volvo, I think, they build in modules and there's a team that builds the module. Yeah, and then someplace along the modules are right the other thing tesla does.

Peter Bernard: 39:14

They're doing a thing called giga casting. So they have a press that's huge. It's, you know, like a three-story building and they can build an entire segment of the car with casting. They have uh molds and then they can pour the liquid in and it does a whole back end all at once. So there's less welds, less people that have to sit and put together and assemble all these things.

Mike Roth: 39:36

Yeah, I hope it works because there are places where you have to assemble the parts and I've watched the machines that Mercedes uses to put in the assembled dashboard control panels and it's a really wild machine. It goes right inside the car. A really wild machine. It goes right inside the car, puts it into place and screws it down.

Peter Bernard: 40:01

Yeah, it's amazing. I've been to the Tesla factory out in Fremont and I was like a kid in a candy store At one part of the tour. We were delayed. We were riding on a little electric train electric obviously and we got delayed. He says we have to wait for them to move some boxes and I said to my passengers next to me I said we can sit here all day. They were building a Model X right in front of us and there's these guys that are on these seats that are about four inches off the ground getting underneath and doing the wiring, harnesses and stuff. I love that stuff.

Emily: 40:25

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