Alkahest

I picked up a new kitchen faucet at Lowe’s today.  As usual with this sort of thing, removing the old faucet was the worst part.  The nuts holding the old faucet on to the sink were standard plastic nuts - attached to badly rusted screws.  After 30 minutes of trying: first by hand, then with […]

It’s been 7 months since we’ve done plumbing renovations, so we’re apparently due.  This time I have to replace the kitchen faucet.  It’s started leaking badly.  “But wait,” you say, “a leaking faucet doesn’t require replacement, you can just replace the gaskets.”  Unfortunately no.
I’ve mentioned before that our water is acidic with a pH of […]

(odd: i thought i had submitted this last night.  i guess i just saved it in draft)
It’s been raining today which is good. The forecasters are predicting rain tomorrow and Friday which is even better. However, I’m still worried. It’s been over a month since the last real rain and close to […]

Not a whole lot going on this weekend. A little shopping, a little work around the house, etc. Saturday, Bryn’s husband, Adam, came by and took a look at some trees that were worrying me. Having a master arborist tell you that, while they are dying, they won’t come down immediately […]

It felt like I was griping a lot about plumbing here, so I thought I would make it a new category and go back and classify old posts as “plumbing” if they were water related. So far, I’ve found 14 posts on plumbing problems - more than I’ve written about photography :-(.  That’s depressing.

Yep, it has been a few months since we’ve had major water issues, so we were due. We had water before dinner, but when I went to rinse the dishes, we had no water. It seemed like the pump wasn’t working. I checked the breaker box, the breaker was fine. I […]

Finished up a lot of little things this weekend. Nothing too terribly exciting:

Planted some herbs and covered them with hardware cloth to keep the squirrels out. Basil (lots of basil), thyme and rosemary. I was looking for sage, but couldn’t find any.
Fixed the water softener - the backwash drain hose was so […]

The acid neutralizer has been in place for over a week - no problems yet. That said, I did manage to break a holding clip on my water softener while trying to figure out why there was extra water in it. Not a big deal, new clips are on order and the broken […]

So, I’m going to tempt fate here and follow up on a post I made a few weeks ago. Last week, I received the replacement tank for my acid neutralizer. It didn’t look quite like the same tank I had, so I emailed the company. Turns out they had upgraded the tank […]

so Saturday night around 11:30pm, the acid neutralizer I just installed, exploded. Okay, it didn’t really explode, but the top popped off again. Spoke to the customer support, looked around a bit more and it seems that the threads on the tank were stripped. I’ll call tomorrow and see about getting a […]