Remodeling, the Dummies Version

Suspended Ceiling

While eHow and HubPages have been responsible for enormous portions of the online dumbassery we find, there certainly have been other outlets for greedy freelancers to ply their trade without pesky fact-checking. A small but not insignificant site is Vancouver, BC-based InfoBarrel.com. We spent an evening not long ago wandering though the site's archives and came up with some winners for our readers. InfoBarrel week's first dumbass is 44tracyann44, who treated readers to some monumental stupidity in "Suspended Ceiling Reducing Heating and Cooling Costs."¹ 

We're not sure what psychedelic substance Tracy Ann had been taking when she told her readers, 

"As years go by, 'cathedral' ceilings were in vogue because they made a room look bigger, and the soaring beams created a spacious outdoor feeling.

The energy crunch has made it clear that rooms with these ceilings really are almost as difficult to heat and cool as the great outdoors. The cost of heating and cooling such a volume of space has become so prohibitive that homeowners are looking for some practical way of reducing the cost anyway possible in these tough economic times. 

'Dropping' the ceiling is the quickest, easiest and least expensive way to reducing the volume or a room. And it's a do-it-yourself job all the way."

Never mind the grammatical mistakes and typos, she said WHAT?!?!? This moron is suggesting that you put in a drop ceiling – acoustic tiles on a suspended metal  grid like you see in offices and institutions — below a vaulted ceiling to save money on heating and cooling? Never mind that this dumbass suggestion would reduce the resale value of a home by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars...

Tracy Ann goes on to give rudimentary instructions on how to install a drop ceiling, which she clearly cribbed from a DIY site about basement remodels:

"Lengths of wire now are nailed to the ceiling joists and suspended to support the main runners..."

...though she never mentions how to find the joists, which are hidden by drywall or plaster. What a dumbass. 

Finally, Tracy Ann says nothing about how to address any existing lighting and or fans in the room, nor what to do about any HVAC vents. She also never bothers to mention details like insulation or how putting in a porous ceiling reduces volume under HVAC (if you insist on doing this, you need to drywall the new ceiling and insulate the dead space as if it were an attic). On the other hand, she does tell us "The tiles readily lift out when, and if, it is necessary to get to the area above the ceiling..." ...though not why it would ever be necessary to do so. Nope, here's someone who came up with a dumbass idea and wanted some money for it. Heck, she might have published it simply because it's so downright stupid she hoped it would go viral. What a dumbass!

¹ InfoBarrel has deleted all user-generated content and become a "green" website, but this post can still be reead by using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   infobarrel.com/Suspended_Ceiling_Reducing_Heating_and_Cooling_Costs

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