When was the last time you went to the store and picked up a bucket of lube? Be honest. Well I bought mine a couple months ago and the lube is super handy! I use it for wire pulling of course. Sometimes, actually all the time, pulling wire is not as easy as one might hope at the outset of a project. I have found myself in a couple situations where I was running wire in conduit, or in some cases out of conduit, with minimal clearance. Adding some lube to the Romex has made wire pulls possible that I do not think would have worked without it. When in doubt, use lots of lube! I use Ideal’s Clear Glide which I picked up at my local Home Depot. Details can be found at Ideal.

If you are like me and have way too many power tools, then you probably also have way too few electrical outlets around the work-bench too. The Benchmate is a handy device for adding some easily accessible electricity. It adds four outlets and is rated for 15 amps. Best of all, it is flexible from temperatures from -45 to 221 degrees Fahrenheit. That is good news since our garage is approaching the upper range of that right now. Available for about $15.00 from Rockler.

If I had only known about this when I was wiring my phone system! It is a pricey toy, but well worth it if you are going to be fishing wires and doing electrical work, especially in an old home. It comes in varying lengths, but the ProVision100 has a flexible 18 inch fiber optic arm. It features a 40 degree wide field of view, up close focusing, and a 2.5 volt lamp to shed light on the situation. In my case it probably would have saved about 20 holes I cut into our walls in bad places.
Made by Provision, and available for about $250 at Amazon.com and other tool dealers.

Our house is so old-school, that rather than having a vent fan in each bathroom, we actually have electrical heaters. Sadly they look and sound just like a normal vent fan, so our guests often just run the heater thinking they are vacuuming the “stinkies” outside. In reality, they are just heating things up. Nice!!! If we actually had vent fans, this product from EFI might really grab my attention.

The clever folks over at EFI have developed a sneaky solution to moist and/or smelly bathrooms. It’s a light switch that when turned on turns on the fan and the light. When the switch is flipped off, the light turns off and the fan runs for a pre-set adjustable time. Of course, if your guests don’t know how this subtle device works, they might spend hours in your bathroom trying to turn off the fan. This minor drawback aside, this sounds like a great way to eliminate fans left on indefinitely, or ones that are turned off too soon.
Available from EFI’s Website, for about $40.