There really is a Youtube video for almost everything...

Shawn

Shawn

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Shawn
Heater went out yesterday in the house. Booooo...and chances of getting a service call over the weekend are slim...and now that I dropped a few pounds I am always freakin cold!

I am pretty dang handy but never once oped a furnace...pull cover off...blank stare...hmm, what can I smack with a hammer?

Uhhh, there has to be a troubleshooting video out there...three different videos later diagnosing the fault codes, how to decipher them, and about an hour bouncing back and forth between the computer and furnace figuring out how to locate and clean a stuck open sensor...boom...heat again!...and no parts left over!

I love Youtube, best part is I didn't singe a single eyebrow.

Freaking service guy probably would have charged me parts too!
 
Yup, Recently replaced my aging A/C unit with one I purchased online. Saw how to install it on you tube. Saved about $5000 over hiring someone. Used the money saved towards the purchase of an Avidyne IFD440. I am going to install that myself also, after reviewing the you tube instructional video.
 
Had the repair guy out twice to fix mine , did a bunch of work that wasn’t needed but still would not work all the time. Ended up googling the issue and within 15 min had it fixed
 
Morgan3820 said:
Yup, Recently replaced my aging A/C unit with one I purchased online. Saw how to install it on you tube. Saved about $5000 over hiring someone. Used the money saved towards the purchase of an Avidyne IFD440. I am going to install that myself also, after reviewing the you tube instructional video.
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I was considering installing a mini-split AC unit but have been hesitant because of the refrigerant regs - isn’t a license of some sort required to obtain same?
 
My fix it with youtube favorite was a flat screen TV that stopped turning on. Googled the symptoms and found out about a bad batch of capacitors in a lot of Samsung TV's. Opened it up and found two capacitors with black goo coming out the top. Quick trip to Fry's and ~$10 later new caps soldered in. TV has worked perfectly since.

As I was typing remembered fun fix #2. Wife's 10 year old mac wouldn't boot. Spent a couple hours at the Apple store to determine the graphics card was shot. New graphics card was around $300, not worth it for 10 years old. Fix on this one was bake the card in the oven for 10 minutes at 400F. Booted right up.
 
wrbix said:
I was considering installing a mini-split AC unit but have been hesitant because of the refrigerant regs - isn’t a license of some sort required to obtain same?
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The new units come precharged.
 
I was tempted to replace the capacitor on my AC unit a couple years ago, but got some sense and called my AC guy. ;)

Glad you were successful!
 
The capacitor replacement on the A/C is pretty straightforward. You can usually get the replacement at Grainger.com
 
Fixed our Yamaha Clavinova digital piano after searching YouTube. I used to fix a lot of electronic stuff when I was young but it was all analog. Digital stuff is a different animal for me.
 
Wow..!!!

You really can learn anything by watching it on You tube..!!!!!

 
I googled the capacitor replacement for my AC condenser unit and it worked TWICE over a period of 18 years. When the system started continuously tripping the big outside breaker, it was time to call the pro's. I got an awesome deal from a local HVAC guy and only spent about $7,400.00 for a completely new system. I knew from all the previous research that paying more than that was a ripoff...
 
wrbix said:
I was considering installing a mini-split AC unit but have been hesitant because of the refrigerant regs - isn’t a license of some sort required to obtain same?
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Don't know about the license, but you do need to be able to braze the copper tubes, leak check and evacuate the air from the lines. Also good to be able to test the refrigerant levels to be sure system is properly charged. Most DIY sellers recommend you find a local contractor to connect the line set, evacuate the lines, and check the charge. That said, I've seen some of these trained techs in action and was not impressed. A good one is worth his weight in gold.
 
and yet girls still flash their rear ends for money in that site. IOW it's just like the 90s, but without land lines...:rolleyes::cool::D
 
I love YouTube for home repairs - And I usually watch several videos, because usually you can figure out which ones are giving you all the right techniques and which ones are kind of half-assing it. Mix the best of the best, and go from there... Which sometimes means buying supplies and doing it myself, and sometimes means throwing in the towel and calling a pro because I know that it will test the limits of my skill (occasionally) and my patience (frequently).
 
Hang 4 said:
My fix it with youtube favorite was a flat screen TV that stopped turning on. Googled the symptoms and found out about a bad batch of capacitors in a lot of Samsung TV's. Opened it up and found two capacitors with black goo coming out the top. Quick trip to Fry's and ~$10 later new caps soldered in. TV has worked perfectly since.

As I was typing remembered fun fix #2. Wife's 10 year old mac wouldn't boot. Spent a couple hours at the Apple store to determine the graphics card was shot. New graphics card was around $300, not worth it for 10 years old. Fix on this one was bake the card in the oven for 10 minutes at 400F. Booted right up.
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My favorite somewhat-recent fix didn't even involve Google or YouTube. It was an LED bulb that quit working, and I decided to see if I could do anything with it, or if nothing else learn about it.

I pried the round "bulb" cover off, and a loose wire was staring me right in the face. A couple of minutes and about a penny's worth of solder later, and it was working again. :)
 
texasag93 said:
Where do you buy them?
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I purchased mine from www.acdirect.com.
They were ok to deal with. There are a few others that have similar offerings. Contractors will badmouth Goodman as they dont like that they will sell direct. If you don’t want to do the install, you can get a pro to install and still save.
 
Once upon a time, I had a monetized YouTube account to which I posted videos that were mainly narrated screen recordings of various computer-related tasks such as installing various operating systems, configuring networks, and solving various problems. I had a capture device between the computer and the monitor so I could even record things like BIOS configuration. I made a few bucks in ad revenue.

I probably could have made quite a bit more had I recorded a lot of the more general-interest DIY stuff I've done over the years. My recent DIY backup generator installation was an example. I've had several electricians tell me I did a better job than some professionals do. And judging by the quality of some of the electrical work I've seen around here, they're right. My county doesn't require electricians to be licensed -- and it shows in some of the wiring I've encountered. :eek2:

I've also amazed friends with easy, straightforward ways to do other things that sound difficult if one hasn't actually done them such as other electrical wiring tasks (adding outlets and so forth); changing motor mounts on car engines using nothing but a floor jack, jack stands, a piece of 2x4, and hand tools; cleaning or changing burners on furnaces; and felling trees that are entangled with other trees by making them spin as they fall (it's all in the geometry of the cuts).

The thing that stops me is the fear of liability. Anyone can sue anyone for anything in the United States. Some of the jobs I've done myself could be fatal if done improperly: and I've learned that assuming that people enough have common sense not to do things like working on a breaker panel without shutting off the main power is a dangerous assumption nowadays.

On the rare occasions when I do post accounts of my DIY jobs nowadays, they're full of warnings that the posts are just accounts of how I spent a day of my life doing something, not instructions for how others should do that same something; and that others really should hire licensed professionals to do those same somethings because, well, they're not as smart as I am. My lawyer still gets nervous.

I've gotten a lot of help and a lot of ideas from YouTube videos. But I also think that people who post videos of jobs that can be dangerous are taking huge chances. I hope they're well-insured. I am, and I still won't post some things.

Rich
 
I fixed my mom's washing machine from YouTube videos. Hubby learned how to rekey the cylinders for our house locks. I'm predicting YouTube is going be responsible for a whole lot of lost small business revenue.
 
I passed the CPA exam thanks to YouTube. Just kidding. It wasn’t really around back then.

I did learn how to tile a floor though.
 
Drywall, Texture, Tile, Test for blown head gasket (it was :( ), rewire a 65 mustang, Replace front suspension, lose belly fat using this one weird old tip, crown molding, pool equip. repair, gall bladder removal, and the list goes on.

There is probably a video for anything you would want to learn how to do.
 
Hank S said:
I've never figured out how some people do that . . .
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It used to be pretty easy: Open a YouTube account, open an Adsense account under the same Google account, link the two, and decide which videos to monetize.

Nowadays it's basically the same process except that the YouTube account has to be "verified" first, and your videos have to achieve a certain number of hours of viewing. The specific number of hours has changed a few times. YouTube also has been known to approve accounts that are rapidly accumulating the view time even if they haven't yet gotten there. They basically want popular accounts.

YouTube's "Verification" process usually means letting them send you a text message. It's just a way for Google to get your cell phone number, as far as I can tell.

If the Google account has already been verified by some other means, however (such as by postcard for a Google My Business account or if you already have an Adwords, Adsense, or Google Search Console / Webmaster Tools account), they'll sometimes offer the option of verifying over a landline with a recorded voice call -- provided it hasn't been used to verify too many other Google accounts.

One way or the other, the objective of verification seems to be for Google to get another piece of information about you.

Once the YouTube account is "verified," the viewing hours start adding up. When they get to a certain point, Google will either invite you to monetize it, in which case approval is basically automatic; or you can apply yourself to monetize it, in which case they'll check to make sure your videos have the requisite number of view hours and that they don't offend whatever sensibilities Google happens to be observing that particular day.

If all your videos are about things like flying, car repairs, home improvement, or other "safe" topics, your approval should be quick as long as you have the requisite hours. If they're about hunting, guns, religion, or politics, then not so much. They don't want controversial videos monetized.

Once you're approved for monetization, you open an Adsense account if you don't already have one. They'll need the standard tax information that any 1099 payer needs. Approval will be automatic if they've already approved your YouTube channel for monetization, but it may still take a few days.

Once the videos are monetized, money is earned when people click the ads. They may also have pay-for-performance ads now, which would require that viewers do more than click, but would generate more money. If you're hugely popular, they may also have pay-for-impression ads available. They pay based on the number of times an ad appears, regardless of whether people click it. I really don't know what's available now other than pay-per-click, which were the most common ads that Google offered to Adsense publishers the last time I checked. I haven't set anyone up with monetized YouTube for a while, however, so things may have changed.

There are better ways to monetize videos without Google and YouTube, but they're a lot more work and require that you have your own hosting, some basic competency in HTML5 and JavaScript, decent editing software, and scads of storage and bandwidth or a business account with Vimeo or some other video hosting platform that allows embedding. They also require that your site achieve some popularity of its own. YouTube's biggest advantage is its popularity and ubiquity. That's where most people go for HOWTO videos. But if you've established enough of a name for yourself that people will specifically seek out your advice, building your own site and monetizing it with a commission-based platform like Amazon Associates will probably make more money for you than Google's PPC model.

In a nutshell, Google is fast and easy if your videos are popular and utterly inoffensive. It also will generate passive income for you. But there are more lucrative ways to go about it -- especially if your videos are about merchandise that you can hawk -- once you've established a name for yourself as a go-to source for information about your particular area of expertise.

Rich
 
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RJM62 said:
It used to be pretty easy: Open a YouTube account, open an Adsense account under the same Google account, link the two, and decide which videos to monetize.
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I think the comment was more along the lines of I always wonder how some people make actual meaningful income from doing it rather than how they setup the account. At 1/10 of a penny per clicked ad or whatever piddly amount they pay, seems you won't make more than occasional beer money unless you somehow become a youtube rock star.
 
My truck has a passlock security system that I've taken to the GM dealership several times. $2,000 later it still intermittently kept the truck from starting, but there's no rhyme nor reason to when that would happen. Found a youtube video showing me exactly which wire to cut and I couldn't be more grateful.

The only thing I'm not a fan of is when the videos are edited so heavily that some very important details are left out, and when the camera isn't positioned where it should be when something important is going on. Ex. One of the videos on cutting the passlock wire showed the guy on his back under the dash while he's describing the blue/white wire he's cutting. Do you know how many blue/white wires there are in the various wiring harnesses? The video I actually used showed the wire that was being cut from the correct harness. A video of a guy on his back looking under his dash isn't of any use to me.
 
Juliet Hotel said:
I think the comment was more along the lines of I always wonder how some people make actual meaningful income from doing it rather than how they setup the account. At 1/10 of a penny per clicked ad or whatever piddly amount they pay, seems you won't make more than occasional beer money unless you somehow become a youtube rock star.
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Google paid two-thirds of revenue received from each click to the publisher last time I checked. It could be different now. How much that is per-click is based on how much the top advertiser bid for the placement. It's been a long time, but I think my average revenue-per-click was a bit less than a dollar. I wouldn't swear to it, though.

The way the formula worked was that advertisers bid for their ads to be placed on sites (and videos) with content that was relevant to whatever they were trying to sell. Because my videos were rather specialized (to put it mildly), I tended to attract high-bidding advertisers. Smart Adwords bidders defined very specific parameters for where they wanted their ads to appear. The fewer sites or videos that matched those highly-specialized bids, the higher the bids would be.

Ever since Google started factoring user history into ad selection, overall ad relevancy has gone down the tubes. Instead of Google limiting ads to those that were highly relevant to the content, they started showing ads that matched the viewer's historical interests. This didn't work out too well, in my experience. I suspect that part of the reason was that many users shared computers, so the ads would be relevant to another user's interests rather than their own. Maybe the fact that family members are more likely to use their own devices now has ameliorated that a bit.

Supposedly publishers can disable user history as an ad-selection factor for their sites, but I never got it to work. I'm also not sure that option was ever available for videos. It's been a while.

I think the biggest harm that came from using user history was to niche sites, where content-relevancy was everything. General-interest sites like news sites and the like, on the other hand, quite possibly were helped by the change.

At my earnings peak, I was making ~ $700.00 / month from Adsense. That's not a whole lot of money, but it was money for doing nothing other than allowing Google to put ads on stuff I'd already built. Some money for nothing is better than no money for nothing.

When they started factoring user history into ad selection, my revenue went down dramatically. But because I always considered it surprise walking-around money anyway, it wasn't a big deal for me. People who depended on it to put food on the table, on the other hand, were devastated.

My position on it now is that if someone has popular videos that they put up for fun, and they don't hate Google so much that they want no part of them (which seems unlikely if they use YouTube as their platform), then they might as well monetize their videos. It's not hard to do, and it's basically free money if they're making the videos anyway. Google's going to track their viewers anyway, so they may as well get a piece of the action.

Rich
 
is there a youtube video that shows how to learn things by watching youtube videos?
 
RJM62 said:
Google's going to track their viewers anyway, so they may as well get a piece of the action.
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A microscopic piece of the action but agreed, might as well do it if you're making the content anyway.
 
I had a Google and YouTube moment myself back in 2015. 2 days before my dad and I were going to pull my travel trailer down to the Outer Banks for 5 days of surf fishing, my Suburban started acting up. Door chime sounding with the doors closed, and the doors started locking and unlocking over and over while driving down the road. Two repair shops, one being a Chevy dealer, thought it was the door switch. The repair bill was going to be over $500 for each shop, and they couldn't guarantee it would fix the problem. But the part would not come in until Monday at either shop, and I planned on being on the beach fishing on Monday. My Dad's Tacoma cannot tow my trailer, so we started looking at taking his pop-up camper, which is nowhere near as comfortable.

I refused the repair at both shops, and brought the 'Burb home the day before we were leaving. I jumped on the internet and started googling my problem. I read that some people had problems with the body control module (BCM), and that you could reset it and that would sometimes solve the problem. I reset mine, and 3 years later, the problem has never reoccurred. Our trip was salvaged and we got to take my nicer trailer.

Glad your result was good, and free.
 
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