Forums: Residential Solar Power

Saturday morning a live WWII era hand grenade was found amid piles of debris in the backyard of a central Austin, Texas residence. Area neighbors found the grenade while removing the remnants of a collapsed garage as part of a community outreach/ assistance program for elderly property owners. Local authorities were notified, the area blocked off by police, some nearby residents evacuated and the Austin Police Department bomb squad brought in to identify, contain and dispose of the munition. The grenade was safely detonated by the APD bomb squad in a nearby empty lot at 50th Street and Harmon Avenue...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Sales of new homes dropped 8.3% in August to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 795,000, the slowest sales pace since June 2000, the Commerce Department estimated Thursday. Sales are now down 21.2% in the past year, with no sign of a bottom in the crippled housing market. Read the full government report. "This is just hideous," wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics. "This is more evidence that it's going to be a long and -- for a lot of people -- a painful process," said Mike Schenk, economist for the Credit Union...

Last year was a record for the nation's home building industry . The Commerce Department reported Thursday that construction of single-family homes and apartments totaled 2.065 million units last year. The increase of 5.6 percent over 2004 pushed overall residential construction to the second highest level on record, exceeded only by 2.357 million units built in 1972. Meanwhile, single-family home construction hit an all-time high for the third straight year, rising to 1.714 million units, up 6.4 percent from the previous record of 1.611 million homes built in 2004. The record-setting performance came despite the fact that housing activity dropped...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

New houses are being built with more lighter materials these days. However, some fear this is putting firefighters at risk. At issue are lightweight wooden trusses that support the roof. They're engineered to make housing more affordable, but many firefighters have a saying -- "Don't trust a truss." It's a firefighters worst nightmare. Falling through the roof of a blazing building. For Rob Penny, he remembers clearly when it happened to him nine years ago in a Montgomery home. "I had no idea how far I was falling, but I knew it was going to hurt when I landed," said...