The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

  • Water Heater Drain & Flush

    Flushing with Y hose connector
    Flushing with Y hose connector

    For reasons that aren’t germane here, I’m responsible for two water heaters. Having just replaced one of them, I figured I should do a preemptive drain-and-flush on the other and check its anode rod.

    In principle, you just hitch a garden hose to the drain valve, turn it on, and flush the sediment right out of the bottom. In practice, it doesn’t work that smoothly, as the valve has a teeny little opening that instantly clogs with grit.

    The first step is to shut off the water, open the drain valve, and disconnect both flexible couplings at the top of the heater. You will move the heater a little bit during this operation and that will cause the flexy connectors to leak, maybe just a little bit, but enough to cause Bad Things to occur.

    In the past I’ve used a Y hose connector with a homebrew double-female adapter to blow water into the bottom of the heater; the hose runs to a nearby sink with a male hose thread on the cold-water faucet. The two teardrop-shaped black handles on the Y adapter are ball valve handles (crappy valves, but good enough).

    It goes like this:

    • Close the Y hose valve
    • Turn on the water at the sink
    • Open the water heater drain valve
    • Open the Y drain valve
    • Watch a brief piddle of water hit the bucket
    • Close the Y drain valve
    • Open the Y hose valve to blast water into the tank
    • Close it again
    • Open the drain
    • Repeat as needed

    With any luck, you won’t have that much sediment and the drainage will clear after only a few iterations. That didn’t happen here…

    Water heater drain valve parts
    Water heater drain valve parts

    The next step is to apply a strap wrench to the drain valve, remove the cover and core, and see if the larger opening will produce more flow.

    Note that the drain valve, at least on this Whirlpool heater, is basically a coarse-thread plug that depends on a rubber disk to seal against the valve body. I’d really rather have a full-flow ball valve down there instead of this piddly little thing.

    it is possible to replace the drain valve entirely, but the last time around I applied far more force than I thought prudent to the plastic valve body and got exactly bupkis in the way of rotation. Not wanting to break the damn thing off, I gave up.

    Valve cleanout with copper wire
    Valve cleanout with copper wire

    Anyhow, with the guts of the valve out of the way, the flow was still fairly weak. I rammed a copper wire up its snout and dislodged a truly disheartening amount of crud. The opening kept jamming shut, which meant there was a great pile of sediment atop the opening, so I spent quite  while wiggling the wire to keep the water flowing and the grit emerging. The pic at at the bottom shows some of the pile; there’s a heaping double handful of sediment on that shovel.

    The bottom of the tank is flat, with the valve pretty much flush with the bottom. That means you’ll leave a huge pile of sediment inside unless you swish some water around. That, of course, will clog the valve. Repeat until tired.

    When you go to put the valve back together, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t seal. Tighten the cap, put a hose plug on the outlet, and move on.

    You can tell by the color of the water that Something Is Not Right inside the tank… more on that tomorrow.

    Some of the water heater sediment
    Some of the water heater sediment

  • Forgotten Alkaline D-cell: Corrosion!

    Alkaline D-cell corrosion
    Alkaline D-cell corrosion

    Found this toxic spill while I was looking for a gadget on another shelf: it seems I left an alkaline D cell standing on my electronics parts & tools carousel for much too long.

    Amazingly, although the cell’s leakage blistered the paint pretty badly, it didn’t affect the steel carousel!

    I wiped most of the crud and dead paint off, then applied white vinegar (which is essentially dilute acetic acid) to neutralize the cell’s potassium hydroxide. The grabber tool sticking  out from between the boxes had a pretty good dose of corrosion up the side, but soaking it in vinegar (wow, the bubbles!) removed that and a shot of penetrating oil expelled the rinse water.

    It’s definitely not Duracell’s fault: the cell had a best-used-by date in 1997.

    Memo to Self: throw ’em out!

  • Audio Headset Hanger

    Headsets Off the Desk
    Headsets Off the Desk

    For obscure reasons, I have a pair of headsets attached to the PC: one USB that’s used for phone calls and one plugged into a sound card for everything else.

    They’ve been cluttering up the corner of the desk for far too long, so I bent up a rack from a surplus coat hanger. Nothing critical, as long as it’s tall enough to hold the mics off the desk and wide enough they don’t clunk together.

    The trick is to just drill a hole in the top of the desk and poke the end of the rod into it. That works because my desk has a notch along the edge just exactly the right width to hide the hole!

    Hanger Mounted Under Desk
    Hanger Mounted Under Desk

    Maybe you don’t want to do this to the top of your desk, in which case maybe you can bend the hanger around the edge and put a screw in the bottom or the desktop. If you don’t look under there very often, the spiders will take over; this one is from the basement desk that I haven’t used for far too long.

    Details of the hanger, not that you can’t figure it out on your own:

    Headset Hanger
    Headset Hanger

    I suppose you could actually buy these things…

  • Credit Card Privacy Choices

    Just got a new credit card, which arrived with the usual “Privacy Policy” flyer describing how they’ll keep our sensitive bits safe & secure. Except, of course, that by default they’ll share those bits with nearly any organization that asks, if there’s even the least bit of money to be made in the process.

    The flyer explains how we can tell them of our privacy choices. Oddly, in this Internet Age, none of the banks have figured out how to put our privacy policy choices on their websites. Maybe that would be entirely too efficient.

    Anyhow, we’re supposed to either:

    • Pick up the phone to deal with their customer service apparat or
    • Pick up a pen, fill out a form, cut it out, and mail it to them

    For our joint accounts, if I forget to say “And this also applies to my wife”, well, then they’re free to share her sensitive bits.

    I’m sure they know that when they make “choosing” difficult enough, nobody will bother.

    Ya think?

    For the record:

    • Chase: press 0 to short-circuit the account info blather and get to a rep
    • Citi: press 6 for that purpose. Why not 0? Huh…

    The Chase folks tell me this may require up to 90 days to take effect. Wow, do they fill out forms and hand-carry the paperwork to Galactic HQ for further transcription?

    Memo to Self: Remember to tell the nice voice…

    • This applies to both account holders
    • Turn off all information sharing options
    • Turn off “convenience checks” (is anybody stupid enough to use those things?)
    • Turn off automatic credit line increases

    This takes about four minutes for each account on a Sunday morning.

  • NiMH Cells: Finding the Weak Link

    I recently bought two dozen Tenergy Ready-to-Use NiMH cells, rated at 2.3 Ah, with the intent of making up three 8-cell packs (identified as A, B, and C, for lack of anything smarter) for the amateur radio HTs we use on our bikes. However, one of the packs measured a consistently short runtime and I suspected one weak cell.

    So I ran pairs of cells from the weak pack and found these results:

    DSC-H5 Battery - Tenergy RTU NiMH AA Cells
    DSC-H5 Battery – Tenergy RTU NiMH AA Cells

    Observations…

    These are all measured just after charging, so they’re all the best you can expect from the cells. I haven’t done any self-discharge tests yet.

    The overall capacity at 1 A load is roughly 65% of the 2.3 Ah rating.

    The red trace falls far short of the others, so that’s the pair with the weak cell. I charged & tested those two cells individually, which are the lower two traces: cell A4 has 58% of nominal capacity. Admittedly, that’s 90% of the capacity of the rest, but, still …

    I’ll use the other three pairs of cells through the Sony DSC-H5 camera, for reasons described there. Cell A4 is destined for the shelf…

    Now, the question becomes: who should I buy the next batch of cells from?

  • Verizon FiOS: Wheeling and Dealing

    So Verizon seem determined to spend as much money as it takes to bury us in FiOS Triple Play mailings. For the last few months, we’ve been getting at least one mailing a week with exactly the same offer. Perhaps they think we’ll eventually get fed up and buy the damned thing, although rumor has it that the offers keep coming even after you do that.

    Anyhow, I called the number (877-896-3354 this week) to ask:

    • How about selling us FiOS 15/5 Internet and Freedom Essentials (unlimited US residential VOIP) for $60/month for two years with no installation fee?
    • Failing that, put us on the Do Not Solicit list to shut off the junk mail

    Come to find out that:

    • Nope, the nice voice can’t dicker on the monthly price, but…
    • They’re willing to waive the installation fee ($50) without blinking
    • The fact that we don’t have a TV and aren’t interested in the Triple Play is a dealbreaker for them
    • The DNS list is just a checkbox on their display of my account: done!

    At this point we’re spending $50 for Optimum Online cable 13/2 (more or less) internet and nigh onto $30 for a Verizon landline phone without “long distance” calling (which we do by VOIP these days). They can do a bundle for something like $80/month with a brief teaser discount, but no better than that. So we’d wind up paying more for basically the same thing.

    After a pleasant conversation he asked if I would recommend Verizon to my friends & relations. I said “Absolutely not” and he asked if I wanted to talk to a Quality Assurance representative. Figuring it’d be good for a laugh, I said yes… and then went directly to the usual interminable wait-on-hold.

    The QA guy asked why I wouldn’t recommend Verizon, so I gave him a few reasons:

    • Their phone menu system is impenetrable
    • I often get mysteriously disconnected during intra-Verizon handoffs, particularly if I’m asking difficult questions
    • Nobody in their “customer support” phone tree can explain how much the “Other charges, taxes & terms” might add up to on a bundle deal: they can’t tell me what their service will cost!
    • Nobody at Verizon can explain the random charges / credits / debits / adjustments on my buddy Aitch’s wireless + Triple Play bill. He’s a smart guy; if he can’t figure it out, I certainly can’t.
    • Their pricing is not competitive; it’s more than we’re paying now for basically the same thing. Why switch?

    He actually tried to claim that I can’t get FiOS speeds from cable. I pointed out that the difference between 15/5 and 13/2 isn’t “This is FiOS. This is BIG!”, it’s just barely discernible and not guaranteed anyway. Oddly, in the last few months, Verizon has quietly bumped the base FiOS speed from 12/2 to 15/5, which I infer means they found that trying to sell a slower speed to cable customers wasn’t working out that well.

    I also infer this whole FiOS thing still isn’t going as well as they’d like. If it was, the incessant offers would stop.

    The QA guy said he’d call me back if they could do anything about the price; there’s evidently a New & Better Deal coming out in a few weeks. Of course, since we’re on the DNS list, we’ll never know…

    I told him here’s what it would take to get me to switch: paying less than $80/month for internet + phone. I figure $60 (plus the mystery charges) would save me maybe $10/month. I’ll geek for that if they don’t screw me over for installation and suchlike.

    Failing that, we may just shoot the landline in the head and go with the cheap prepaid cellphone deal. Google Voice seems to be a reasonable solution; I got a local number that’s very close to our current landline, so maybe it’s time to print up a stack o’ cards and send out some notices.

  • Water Heater: Flexible Tube Heat Trap

    Flexible tube heat trap loop
    Flexible tube heat trap loop

    The insulation on water heaters is pretty good these days: the exterior shell stays within a few degrees of ambient temperature. However, hot water rises, which shouldn’t come as any surprise, and convection currents can drain a surprising amount of heat out of both the hot & cold water lines on the top of the heater.

    So I added heat trap loops to the inlet & outlet plumbing using flexible tubing. These are 18″ long and I might replace them with 24″ lines to reduce the angle at the water heater. Surprisingly, there’s not much strain in the tubing: it’s happy with that bend.

    The guidelines say you need a foot or so of vertical loop, but even this piddly loop keeps the upper fitting at ambient temperature after a night without drawing any hot water.

    In theory, you can screw heat-trap nipples into the water heater, but this heater came with something that looks like heat traps and heat most certainly still traveled up the cold water pipe. I think that had something to do with conduction from the tank to the metallic shell of the nipples.

    I’ll add all the usual insulation when I’m sure everything is tight.

    As always:

    • This may or may not satisfy your local plumbing code
    • If it leaks, it’s not my problem
    • If it breaks, you get to keep all the pieces
    • Etc, etc, etc.