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quote:I realized today that when I said "raised bed", the septic engineer was thinking of the kind that are a bunch of 2x4s full of dirt. I'm hoping that when I explain I meant tabletop systems on a drip feed, the answer may be different. In any case, I'm thinking of things to do with deck gardens, using the tiny spaces in the front yard, and so on. Also check to see if a self wicking raised bed is okay. (eg: https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/2016/04/03/wicking-bed-construction-2/) as they utilize a non-permeable layer between the ground and the bed and the overflow pipe can be sent where ever that's okay. Weight limit might be your issue though. unknown fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Mar 14, 2024 |
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Mar 14, 2024 14:26
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I chatted with my neighbor today (she was bringing banana bread.). She volunteered that she had, in fact, asked the stepchildren about selling land, and had gotten no reply. So everybody tried. Sorry if you’re still not ready for solutioneering, but if you’re looking for ways to maximize your front yard growing space, I’m a big fan of these guys: https://greenstalkgarden.com/ I’ve seen people grow everything in them, from strawberries and herbs to green beans and even tomatoes and peppers, with the right supports. I’ve even grown fingerling potatoes in one tier a couple years ago, and they did pretty great! I get a little sad each time I think about your first post saying you didn’t think you’d be able to garden at all at your place. That would be a huge bummer for us, so I hope there are some creative solutions you can find for your situation.
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Mar 14, 2024 14:37
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Rooftop garden with the water draining back into a gray water collection barrel and re-using it.
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Mar 14, 2024 14:50
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I have a weirdly specific toilet cleaning question: So, this is probably TMI, but whatever- back in January I started Jardiance for my type 2 diabetes, which makes you pee out *a lot* more sugar. Even though I'm not a "let it mellow" guy and flush every time, this appears to have jump-started some kind of bacteria/microbe/biofilm/whatever growth. Every other flush or so results in a tiny piece of some kind of bacterial gunk floating to the top of the toilet bowl (tiny enough that the first time I thought it was just a dead gnat or something). The toilet flushes fine- it's definitely just an aesthetic annoyance at this point, but I want to get rid of it. After observing where the stuff was floating up from, I determined it was coming from the bottom siphon jet (the hole opposite the side where the water is actually being flushed down). This isn't really a spot you can reach with a normal toilet brush/toilet bowl cleaner, so normal routine cleanings were doing nothing. I bought a long bottle brush and stuck it up the siphon jet hole to see if I could clean it out- this resulting in me pulling out *a lot* of the gunk- that's definitely where it's coming from. However, it seems impossible to get all of it with a brush- it's still floating up after flushing. The issue is that the hole I can put the brush into is basically a bottleneck for a much larger area (cavity? chamber? dunno what the right term would be) that the water flows through- there's no way I can get a brush in there that's small enough to fit through the hole, but large enough that it can actually scrape the sides of the entire siphon jet chamber. Everything I can find online suggests pouring something down the path to that second siphon jet through the toilet tank (I have one that has two flappers- I'd just be putting it into the one that leads directly to the jet), but the issue I'm anticipating is that it won't completely fill the chamber since it will just run through the toilet and straight out of the siphon jet (unless I can figure out a way to block the jet oulet?). So, one idea I just had was pouring some of that foaming pipe snake stuff down there- however, I want to make sure that won't destroy anything before I do it. I know I don't want that poo poo to touch any of the flappers or gaskets, but is the inside of the toilet okay? Is there a better way? This is annoying the hell out of me. And I feel like calling a plumber is overkill for this.
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Mar 14, 2024 15:14
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I had pink mold in a toilet and fixed it by putting one of those slow release bleach pucks in the tank. Long term they are a bad idea since they can degrade the rubber and plastic bits in the tank, but after a week or so the mold was gone. The puck keeps bleach filled water in the toilet bowl and cavities at all times so whatever is growing can't survive.
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Mar 14, 2024 15:39
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Time to start using those tidy bowl 2000 blue water tank sanitizers. Sounds like you're introducing a ton of sugar and ammonia which is going to always cause problems unless the water parameters are actively hostile to algae
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Mar 14, 2024 15:39
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Hadlock posted:Time to start using those tidy bowl 2000 blue water tank sanitizers. Sounds like you're introducing a ton of sugar and ammonia which is going to always cause problems unless the water parameters are actively hostile to algae Do those cause the same issues that the bleach tablets do? I keep reading about how a lot of those degrade the flappers/gaskets really quickly. I realize that's not an expensive fix when it happens, but I'd rather not deal with it all the time.
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Mar 14, 2024 15:47
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m0therfux0r posted:Do those cause the same issues that the bleach tablets do? I keep reading about how a lot of those degrade the flappers/gaskets really quickly. I realize that's not an expensive fix when it happens, but I'd rather not deal with it all the time. You might try getting a bleach puck to put in the bowl of the toilet and only using one in the tank temporarily to kill what's there. I think a bleach puck in the bowl would keep anything new from growing with regular use, and would avoid degrading anything in the tank. E: I'm thinking like the commercial ones that hang on the bowl rim, but I'm having a hard time finding them. SpartanIvy fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Mar 14, 2024 |
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Mar 14, 2024 15:52
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SpartanIvy posted:You might try getting a bleach puck to put in the bowl of the toilet and only using one in the tank temporarily to kill what's there. I think a bleach puck in the bowl would keep anything new from growing with regular use, and would avoid degrading anything in the tank. I know the kind you mean- I'm just not sure that would actually get to my problem because of how the water mixes/moves around. I tried dumping a bunch of bleach into the toilet bowl water and let it sit for about a half an hour and it did absolutely nothing. It's possible that maybe 30 minutes wasn't long enough, but I think the issue is that it doesn't flow back into the siphon jet area enough to do anything.
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Mar 14, 2024 15:58
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m0therfux0r posted:I know the kind you mean- I'm just not sure that would actually get to my problem because of how the water mixes/moves around. I tried dumping a bunch of bleach into the toilet bowl water and let it sit for about a half an hour and it did absolutely nothing. It's possible that maybe 30 minutes wasn't long enough, but I think the issue is that it doesn't flow back into the siphon jet area enough to do anything. Put it in the tank, not the bowl. Let it sit for an hour, then flush. Then do it again after another hour or so because the bits you're talking about might have only gotten soaked in bleach water when the flush happened. Hell, put it in the bowl too. Point being you need it in the tank. This is why all those toilet cleaning pucks you see for sale go in the tank rather than the bowl.
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Mar 14, 2024 16:06
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Are there any that don't use bleach that would kill that stuff though? Everything I see online says that the bleach tablets destroy all the components in your tank. I'd almost rather have this stuff floating in the bowl than have to constantly be replacing flappers and valves.
m0therfux0r fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Mar 14, 2024 |
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Mar 14, 2024 16:14
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One puck in your tank isn't going to destroy the components unless they were already near end of life. It's when you're always using the pucks, as a substitute for cleaning the toilet, that you run into issues.
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Mar 14, 2024 16:18
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George H.W. oval office posted:Rooftop garden with the water draining back into a gray water collection barrel and re-using it. Even better, rooftop garden using a thick curtain of moss as a soil medium  One of these days I'll realize my dream of building a berm house 
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Mar 14, 2024 16:19
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:One puck in your tank isn't going to destroy the components unless they were already near end of life. It's when you're always using the pucks, as a substitute for cleaning the toilet, that you run into issues. Gotcha- thanks! I was interpreting the other advice as me always having to have one in there- if treating as-needed is less likely to accelerate the degradation of the components, then that seems like a good option.
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Mar 14, 2024 16:20
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The puck should do a good job of cleaning out your current infestation. Nothing says that it can't re-establish itself later, but hopefully if you're diligent about cleaning the toilet regularly, that won't be a problem.
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Mar 14, 2024 16:52
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m0therfux0r posted:Do those cause the same issues that the bleach tablets do? I keep reading about how a lot of those degrade the flappers/gaskets really quickly. I realize that's not an expensive fix when it happens, but I'd rather not deal with it all the time. It'll degrade the rubber in like, 7 years instead of 15. You're not going to be changing the flapper every 6 months
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Mar 14, 2024 16:59
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I installed the Fluidmaster 8300 Flush 'n Sparkle Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaning System with Bleach Cartridge in my toilets, claims to bypass the tank and go straight to bowl as it refills so it won't degrade the components. Give it a look, and if i'm off base I'm sure a smarter person than me will tell us why this is dumb. I had the red/pink ring issue in 2 toilets that never went away until I added these and it's been clean since then
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Mar 14, 2024 17:16
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Hadlock posted:It'll degrade the rubber in like, 7 years instead of 15. You're not going to be changing the flapper every 6 months This. Also, those components are wear parts. If they get consumed in half their life span because of your specific needs to have a clean toilet, so be it.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:24
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Hadlock posted:It'll degrade the rubber in like, 7 years instead of 15. You're not going to be changing the flapper every 6 months Now that I think about it, 7 years is eerily spot on in my experience... I installed new toilets when we moved in about ten years ago, and during the pandemic I noticed the tank gasket on one had slowly started leaking, and the flush tower seal on another had quit fully seating. We had used those bleaching tank tablets for a couple of years, and I definitely noticed the corrosion a bit on the parts I swapped out (eg the tank gasket had a layer of crumbled black residue). Altogether 15-20$ in parts and an hour or two to google up the model and double check I remembered how everything was put together and replace all the seals in both tanks. Could've also been Monday Friday seals from the factory, or slightly chlorinated municipal water that did them in too 
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Mar 14, 2024 18:05
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The anal/nuclear option (talk about TMI!) you could try this: 1. shut off the tank supply 2. flush the toilet. 3. use a wet vac or towel to get the bowl water level down into the bottom well/as close to the top of the jet outlet as you can. 4. Remove the tank lid, pull the flapper back, and dump in a pint of bleach. It should fill the bottom well of the bowl and displace some of the water. If you have kids / pets, tape the lid down. 5. Leave it like that as long as possible, overnight if you can. 6. open the fill valve & operate normally. I'm not sure if it's the same thing or what (I also take Metformin, Jardiance, and Januvia), but while the jet seems fine, my rim sluice holes get super-cruddy with this yellowish gunk. I go up into them with a bottle brush & cleanser (like Comet) every few weeks. A surprising amount of material comes free. They used to make blue cakes that could be clipped to the underside of the bowl. Not sure if they still make them. E: yes, they do: https://www.amazon.com/Lysol-Hygien...SA%3D%3D&sr=8-5 These may work for the jet - the bowl water gets a dose - but I don't see them working for the rim sluice holes. PainterofCrap fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 14, 2024 |
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Mar 14, 2024 23:54
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DoubleT2172 posted:I installed the Fluidmaster 8300 Flush 'n Sparkle Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaning System with Bleach Cartridge in my toilets, claims to bypass the tank and go straight to bowl as it refills so it won't degrade the components. Give it a look, and if i'm off base I'm sure a smarter person than me will tell us why this is dumb. I had the red/pink ring issue in 2 toilets that never went away until I added these and it's been clean since then I have this thing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LPEO64G/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 It goes between the tube that fills the bowl and the rest, so at worst I'll be replacing a few inches of hose if it screws anything up
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Mar 15, 2024 00:17
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I'd probably dump a gallon of bleach in the upper tank, let it sit all day, then flush it once, then add a gallon of bleach to the bowl and let it sit overnight. That ought to kill/sanitize everything; stuff that gets caked up can survive a pretty intense bleaching event. After that your bowl sanitizer thing should be able to keep up with it
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Mar 15, 2024 01:10
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Lawnie posted:I get a little sad each time I think about your first post saying you didn’t think you’d be able to garden at all at your place. That would be a huge bummer for us, so I hope there are some creative solutions you can find for your situation. As it happens, I already have two Greenstalks in my living room, waiting to be unpacked. They're destined for the back deck this year; in the long term, who knows. You really succeeded with potatoes? How many did you harvest?
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Mar 15, 2024 02:49
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Speaking of toilets, banjo counters are something I’m glad are gone because this is the dumbest poo poo. Do you just assume you’ll never need to work in the toilet?!?
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Mar 15, 2024 02:58
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Awww, thanks! Yeah, I’d say we probably got between two and three dozen thumb-sized fingerings from one tier of plantings. The Greenstalks are great.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:01
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George H.W. oval office posted:Speaking of toilets, banjo counters are something I’m glad are gone because this is the dumbest poo poo. Do you just assume you’ll never need to work in the toilet?!?
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Mar 15, 2024 04:06
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PainterofCrap posted:The anal/nuclear option (talk about TMI!) you could try this: It's funny- I had already considered your nuclear option and was like "man that sounds like way too much of a pain in the rear end", which was exactly why I posted here in the first place. I'll try that out if it comes down to it though. As far as the Jardiance stuff goes, apparently it increasing toilet bowl grime is pretty common- I found a lot of people posting about it when I was looking it up online. The funny thing is a lot of them were like "I didn't know Jardiance would cause this problem!" accompanying a picture of like... a normal dirty toilet bowl (like what happens to every toilet if you don't clean it for a few weeks). Which made me wonder... had these people even been cleaning their toilet at all before?
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Mar 15, 2024 19:26
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Can I get a sanity check here on water usage? 3BR condo, no yard. 2 adults + 1 kid. 2 baths and probably 10 showers between the three of us per week. 5-6 load of laundry, plus let's say ~4 dishwasher loads per week. Efficient front-loader for the washing machine, and a low-water-usage bosch dishwasher. Standard toilet stuff, no other major water usage except for cooking and drinking. 121 gallons per day, average. Does that seem in-line with other people's usages? There's no comparator in our billing to see how we do vs neighbors, and I know a lot of our neighboring units are empty right now anyway.
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Mar 15, 2024 19:59
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Sundae posted:Can I get a sanity check here on water usage? 3BR condo, no yard. 2gpm shower head at 8-minute shower is 16 gallons per shower, 160/wk. I dunno what kind of bath you're talking about, but say it's 2x a shower, so 64/wk for your two baths. Laundry, call it 8 gallons per load, so that's 40-50 gallons/wk there. Dishwasher, say 4 gallons/load, so 16/wk. Say each person flushes the toilet 4x/day at 1.6 gallons/flush, that's 3*4*7*1.6=134 gallons/wk. That comes out to around 450 gallons per week for the stuff you listed, or around 64 gallons per day. Sounds to me like either you have a leak somewhere, or someone is drinking waaaaaay too much water 
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Mar 15, 2024 20:08
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My last bill showed 14k gallons for the quarter ~= 155 gallons per day. 2 adults + 1 kid as well, 2 weekly baths for the kid, daily shower for the adults. Replaced a running toilet, 1.5 work weeks at home between the two of us. We've been at about that rate for the last few years, around $200 per quarter.
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Mar 15, 2024 20:09
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Wow, we live in a house, 2 adults, 2 kids and I take long-rear end showers. We use 19k gallons / year. Guess those European water use mandates make a difference.
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Mar 15, 2024 21:11
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I might get 25% knocked off the bill for the 68k gallons I used in Jan, so that’s nice.
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Mar 15, 2024 22:36
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avg 153gpd. 2 adults, 1 kid, no baths, long showers, both toilets run every couple hours, 2 faucets with a slow drip, 800 sq ft lawn with sprinklers, and drip irrigation.
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Mar 16, 2024 03:19
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Replacing an lp gas stove. New one won't be in for a few weeks. Any danger in leaving the flex hose sticking out of the wall, so long as the valve is turned off and the end is capped?
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Mar 16, 2024 06:43
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Eason the Fifth posted:Replacing an lp gas stove. New one won't be in for a few weeks. Any danger in leaving the flex hose sticking out of the wall, so long as the valve is turned off and the end is capped? Shouldn't be, no. If the valve is off and gas is in the flex hose you've got problems but they aren't the flex hose.
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Mar 16, 2024 19:50
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Moved into our new house yesterday, one of the things we wanted was direct Ethernet in a couple rooms that ran back to a more central location. We tried testing it and not surprisingly it didn’t work. I wondered if maybe they screwed up the colors but it turns out the copper isn’t properly seated in the connector and it’s not making any connection. Gonna see if this covered under warranty
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Mar 17, 2024 13:43
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Terminating new ends is an easy enough fix and well within the realm of the average DIYer. Ive fixed or pulled a lot of ethernet from newer homes though too. Not uncommon for some contractor to put it in during reno or a new build and not know what theyre doing or run it because they just want to use it for low voltage power or some A/V setup.
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Mar 17, 2024 14:11
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Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but why not just reseat it and see? The tool for it is inexpensive.
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Mar 17, 2024 14:11
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It's 100% something you could do yourself, but if it doesn't work, it's new, and it's covered by a warranty loving get them out there to fix it. I'll happily spend my weekend fixing poo poo in my house, but if the problem is something I paid for not working hell yes I'm hauling them in. Good example: We just had a poo poo ton of work done on our plumbing, rerouting it out of the slab. My life currently is patching a gently caress load of holes in dry wall in 4 rooms where they had to get access. I'm fine with that. What I wasn't fine with was that our dishwasher - which they had to pull to get access to some lines - wasn't working after they left. Dead, no activity at all when you tried to use it. My guess was that someone forgot to plug it back in when they replaced it. Could I have pulled it myself and fixed this? Probably. Did I call the plumbers and have them send someone to do that? Absolutely, because my day is busy enough right now and this was their gently caress up, so they can take a few minutes and make it right. This was a crew that did good work, too. I'm happy with them, I've left good reviews, and I've told both the individuals and the person running the team as much multiple times. Hell, the guys who came to fix the washer went home with a mixed six pack out of my beer fridge. I'm planning on using that company the next time I have any plumbing work done. And they were cool with returning, too, owned the mistake, and corrected it. edit: and yeah, it wasn't plugged in.
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Mar 17, 2024 14:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:And they were cool with returning, too, owned the mistake, and corrected it. Yeah, this is basically how rework should go. It's what makes the difference from an otherwise good contractor into a great contractor to work with. Because mistakes WILL happen.
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