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

Tide HE Laundry Detergent: Shrinkflation

The most recent Tide HE Laundry Detergent bottles seemed smaller than the one we were about to empty and, indeed, they were:

Tide HE shrinkflation – bottle labels

Call it 9% smaller, based on the volume in liters. I suspect the price was also 9% higher, but that would require more digging in the file cabinet than seems justified.

Note that both bottles claim “64 loads”, each with an asterisk (well, a lozenge ◊ symbol) explained on the label:

Tide HE shrinkflation – new load bars

That’s the new chart. The old chart was more explanatory:

Tide HE shrinkflation – old load bars

Note the “just below Bar 1 on cap” weasel wording. The term “meniscus” enters the chat, although laundry detergent doesn’t have much in the way of surface tension.

One might reasonably assume the bars on the new cap have gotten shorter, so that the volume of detergent used for each load would be smaller.

One would be wrong:

Tide HE shrinkflation – cap capacity marks

The blue cap on the right is one we’ve been using for the last few years, because I put black tape at the level of the first bar to match our “Medium” loads. I cannot imagine how much dirt would require filling the cap to Bar 5.

The clear cap on the left is the new cap. I filled the blue tap to the top of Bar 5 with water and poured it into the clear cap, where it comes about 3/4 of the way to the top of the new Bar 5. Evidently, the amount of detergent required to get grubby clothes clean has increased by 33%.

The old cap holds just shy of 4 fluid ounces to the top of Bar 5:

Tide HE shrinkflation – old cap bar 5 capacity

The new cap holds 5.5 fluid ounces to the top of its Bar 5:

Tide HE shrinkflation – new cap bar 5 capacity

If you have really crusty clothing, you’re now using 36% more detergent per load.

The obvious arithmetic shows the old bottle holds 23 “Bar 5” loads and the new bottle holds 15.

To the limit of my measuring ability, both caps hold 1.3 fluid ounces to the top their respective Bar 1 levels. I cannot vouch for the “just below” level, but I suspect more accurate measurements would show the new caps have slightly lower volume at that level, juuust enough to make the “64 loads” weasel wording come out right.

As with all too many such claims, they lie.

2024-07-16
House Finch Nesting Attempts
Earlier this year, a pair of House Finches chose the a pine cone wreath hanging outside our front door for their nest.

One day a Starling attacked:
Starling Attack – IM_00052
Starling Attack – IM_00053
Starling Attack – IM_00054
There’s a Youtube video of the action following those pictures:

Ms. Finch suffered a peck to the head raising a few feathers into a small topknot, but seemed otherwise undamaged. The eggs survived unscathed and a month later they fledged a quartet of new finches:

House Finch chicks – pre-fledging – 2024-05-18

Yes, they’re surrounded by a ring of bird crap: finch chicks can aim and fire overboard, but they don’t have much range.

The same finch pair abandoned their second nest after a Brown-headed Cowbird added an egg and punctured both Finch eggs:

House Finch nest – Cowbird egg vs punctures

Their third attempt failed after four eggs when a Cowbird added a fifth:

House Finch nest – Cowbird egg with 4 finch eggs

A few days after that picture, something tore that nest apart and destroyed all the eggs:

House Finch nest – destruction with feathers

The scattered feathers suggest a major battle with severe injuries.

Three nesting attempts produced only four fledglings: a bad year for those two finches.
2024-07-15
Door Knob Lock Orientation

For the usual historic reasons, the exterior doors on our house all have different knobs with different lock orientations (and keys), so it’s difficult (for me, anyway) to verify they’re locked with just a glance. The correct solution of replacing all the knobs seems like a great deal of effort & expense for very little benefit.

This is easier, albeit considerably less stylish:

Doorknob 1

When the twisty thing aligns with the label, it’s locked:

Doorknob 3

No matter what orientation it has:

Doorknob 2

The scars in the paint show some of those doors have sported many knobs over the last half century or so.

You’d think such a thing could be standardized, but nope.

If we lived in a fancier house, I probably couldn’t get away with it.

2024-07-11
Clothes Washer Hose Bumpers

For obvious reasons, the water hoses tend to thump against the wall and the sheet-metal back of the clothes washer, so I added foam disks to mute the noise:

Clothes washer hose bumpers

They’re closed-cell polyethylene foam, laser-cut from a sheet about 15 mm thick. The cut is a yawning 2 mm wide near the top, but it pretty much doesn’t matter in this application.

The black line in the split is a snippet of the usual outdoor-rated foam tape, which probably won’t stick well to PE foam. If these fall apart, a cable tie around their waist should suffice.

The nice clip in the foreground is one of two intended to corral the drain hose. It’d be nice if LG included a few clips for the water hoses, but no matter where they were, the hoses would want to go elsewhere.

2024-07-10
Acrylic Grid Bathtub Soap Tray

Although the house has a shower stall, I want to fix the cracks in its floor before we use it, so we’ve been taking showers in one of the bathtubs. As is always the case, the soap tray / grab handle is positioned for someone reclining in the tub, making it both too low and too awkward for either of us.

Normally, I’d just stick a soap tray on the wall and be done with it, but the tub wall is covered with small tiles that defeat sticky cups; more permanent adhesives are not under discussion.

So I dropped a TrayInsert grid into a NotesHolder box, stuck them to the existing fixture with snippets of (regrettably black) outdoor-rated foam tape, and there it is:

Acrylic grid bathtub soap tray

You’ll surely not have 3.2 mm acrylic for the grid and 2.5 mm acrylic for the box, but those two linkies have the jawbreaker URLs required to regenerate exactly what I built using the incomparable boxes.py site and you can tweak them as needed.

The general concept had it stick out a bit from the fixture handle to let soap gunk drip into the tub, not down the wall, and to have an easily removable grid for cleaning. I doodled all manner of clever hooks to engage the ceramic handle before coming to my senses; this is a prototype, it may not solve the problem very well at all, so let’s find out if it works before making it better.

The WordPress AI urges me to remind you of the safety issues surrounding DIY projects. IMO, should you need such reminders, they won’t do you any good and you must immediately stop reading this blog.

Fair enough?

2024-07-09
Samsung Microwave Light Improvements

After replacing the gas / humidity sensor in the Samsung microwave, replacing the pair of 40 W (!) halogen bulbs with G8 LED bulbs didn’t pose much of a challenge:

Samsung microwave light – LED-ified reflectorized

Those are not the best bulbs for the application, as they’re allegedly equivalent to 20-25 W halogens, but I had some on hand from a previous relamping project and they seemed promising.

G8 halogens have a flattened section just above the pins that these G8 LED bulbs lack:

G8 halogen vs LED bulb – front view

It’s more obvious from the side:

G8 halogen vs LED bulb – side view

The curvature of the soft silicone LED body magnifies the components to look like they fill all the available space, but a little deft X-acto knife work flensed the body down to fit the microwave’s ceramic socket without exposing any of the electrical innards.

Because the LEDs dissipate only 3 W and barely get warm, I replaced the original translucent glass diffuser panels with (yes, laser-cut) clear 3 mm acrylic, then tucked a strip of aluminized mylar above the bulb to bounce some of the light from the upper chips down where it would do more good. I think it’s possible to melt the acrylic with a stovetop mishap, but we don’t make those kinds of recipes.

They’re not daylight shining on the stove, but they’re much brighter than the halogens at maybe 10% of the power.

2024-07-08
Samsung Dishwasher: Upper Sprayer Disassembly

The Samsung dishwasher has an upper rack with a rotating sprayer that was thoroughly clogged with debris from its damaged screen filter:

Samsung dishwasher top nozzle – assembled

The whole assembly is readily available, although it seems any discrete part of the dishwasher costs about fifty bucks and this one wasn’t exactly broken.

It comes apart by rotating the lock ring (the one with right-angle ears sticking out on either side) 1/8 turn in the other direction from whichever way you think it should rotate. Hold the spray bar, shove the ears, and the spray arm will drop off:

Samsung dishwasher top nozzle – unlocked

The inside of the spray bar shows the locking details:

Samsung dishwasher top nozzle – sprayer

Now, here’s the tricky part.

The small ring under the locking ring, the one with two square nubbins pointing downward, snaps onto the pipe carrying the water. There’s a shallow notch around the pipe, the inside of the ring has a shallow lip, and the ring holds the whole affair onto the pipe.

Contrary to what I thought, the two nubbins do not latch onto anything. Apparently, they hold the ring in the proper position relative to the arm’s interior and that’s it.

The only way to reassemble the arm is to snap the small ring into place, with the lock ring above it, then install the arm and turn the lock ring 1/8 turn the other way. You (well, I) cannot snap the assembled arm into place, because the nubbins don’t provide enough oomph to seat the small ring on the pipe.

Unless I write that down, I will never remember it …

Protip: Needle nose tweezers are invaluable for picking crud out of the nozzles. Iterate on picking and flushing with water until nothing more comes out, then expect to repeat the process several times as more crud emerges from the depths of the plumbing.

Although it is apparently possible to disassemble the spray arm by unlatching all the snaps along the edge, I’d reserve that for a moment when lives depended on unclogging the nozzles.

2024-06-27