Tag: Repairs

So the oven made a weird whooshing noise every now & again, but nothing we could pin down or duplicate to debug. Then it sort of stopped heating, even though the ignitor was glowing, and the kitchen smelled of unburned propane and hot plastic.

Emergency stop, shut off the gas valve, finish the chili and cornbread in the ‘waver and toaster oven, let ‘er cool down, dig out the repair parts manual from the file cabinet.

Dismantled the oven and found a weird encrustation on the burner tube. I wasn’t sure if the tube was supposed to have a dingus that meters the ignition gas at some known rate, but scratching at the lump made it look as though the tube simply burned through and corroded. The size of that hole would certainly make the gas whoosh a bit.

Note the soot lines. The heat shield over the tube had a soot smudge, too, which I think caused the “plastic” smell.

The replacement part from Sears is $80. It’s $50 from RepairClinic.com and they throw in the ignitor module that’s $70 from Sears. Judging from their picture the burner tube has three little holes that blow gas over the ignitor, no metal dingus. You can see the holes in the second picture.

So a new burner tube (and ignitor, which I’ll zip-tie to the back of the oven) is on order.

Update: of course the new ignitor doesn’t fit on the old tube, nor does the old ignitor fit on the new tube. And the connectors are completely different. Had to dig some ceramic wire nuts out of the parts stash; I knew I’d been saving them for some good reason.

Grrrr & similar remarks…

Subtitle: ya gotta have stuff!

Our refrigerator went dim; poking around inside revealed one of the two bulbs was dead.

It was obviously a replacement: both are 40-W flame-shaped bulbs that I bought for the chandelier that might still hang in 89 Burbank Road. I intended to leave them for the new owners, but they got swept up in the moving frenzy.

Being the sort of bear I am, I had written the replacement date on the bulb’s base: May 01. So that fancy bulb survived only six years!

Nothing lasts!

I picked the next-to-last flame-shaped bulb from the “Decorative Bulbs” box in the basement storage room, wrote the date on it (with a notation that the last one lasted 6 years), and screwed it in. Problem solved!

Being the sort of bear I am, I can do all that with a completely straight face…

A while ago the shower drain in our black bathroom stopped draining. I’d noticed that the adjacent (and upstream) toilet was sometimes flushing strangely, although we attributed this to our darling daughter’s habit of occasionally emitting an incredible pot-clogging ceramic turd. Perhaps she inherited that ability from me?

So I was prepared for the worst: an accumulation of, um, stuff, at the right-angle bend just downstream of the shower. My IR thermometer showed the heat from the shower water dropped off right around the bend, suggesting that the flow wasn’t so great. Tapping the cast-iron pipe wasn’t conclusive as it all pretty much sounds like it’s solid anyway… built to last a thousand years, as the saying goes, with hammered-lead joints.

The other bathroom had no problems and the pipes down there (some newer PVC from the tub & sink) were not full of drain water. So the stoppage was between the shower and those inlets.

The line has a convenient 3″ brass (!) cleanout plug upstream of the section in question, so if I got the plug out I could see the kitchen & black bathroom inlets, as well as the offending turn. Of course, the plug was firmly stuck and didn’t yield to main force (me hanging on the end of the mighty 3/4″ socket wrench handle), the application of penetrating sprays, or a brutal hammer-and-chisel assault.

So I biked off to Lowe’s for a pair (there’s a second cleanout plug far downstream and you just never know) of 3″ PVC plugs.

Returned home, deployed the 3″ hole saw, and drilled a neat hole in the middle of the brass plug. This being plumbing, a 3″ plug is actually 3-1/2″ OD and the saw left a 1/4″ ring with the threads. Another application of the chisel folded the ring in on itself and some wiggling pulled it free.

We’d used no upstream water so I didn’t expect much in the pipe but nothing came out to greet the saw. In fact, the pipe was clean & clear all the way around the bend, with only a nasty, slimy hairball hanging from the shower/sink drain inlet.

So it was just a glob in the shower drain, not the main line, after all. Sometimes I’m really glad to be proved wrong! Why the IR showed heat stopping at the bend I do not know, but it goes to show you never can tell.

Screwed a PVC plug in place, ran some water into the shower, deployed a Plumber’s Friend with a vigorous up-and-down motion, and after a few strangled hoosha-woogas the drain went BLORT and all the water exited as usual. I’m afraid to find out if the entire hairball is hanging in the main line, but I suppose I should take a peek.

Now, if I’d tried that before examining the inside of the big pipe, the first hoosha-wooga would have affixed a ceramic turd on the ceiling.

Depend on it!