Soft Water Is Hard

So what am I supposed to do?

A couple months ago, I started noticing a little water on my basement laundry room floor.  From the washing machine, I thought, and since it wasn't bad and dried fairly quickly, I ignored it.


About two weeks ago I observed that the wetness was really coming from around my Sear's Kenmore water softener, a few feet up the basement floor slope from the washer.  I looked inside the tank, and it was full of water!  I've never seen that before.  Never, ever.  I tried regenerating right away, but the water only crept higher.  Not what one wants, right?


So I unplugged it, found out from the manual (which was hanging there in its plastic envelope) how to activate the bypass valve (good job for a rubber mallet), and went upstairs and called Sears.  Oh.  $65.00 just to come out and look, before parts and labor.  Not in the budget.  

I sent out a veiled SOS to my friends on Facebook.  Too veiled, obviously, because I got no response, not even one word of useless advice.  Oh, well, there's always the Internet.  So I Googled "Kenmore water softener full of water leaking."  And got advice there, yes, I did.  There were at least four different things various posters recommended be tried, each one of them looked complicated, and each one of them seemingly had to be done first.  

Please understand:  My water softener is in a dark corner of the basement, my eyesight is not very good, I never can see that stupid gray-on-gray display, and I couldn't find the place in the manual to show me where to find the venturi or the resin bed or anything else that needed to be cleaned or adjusted or whatever it was.  So I put it off.  

On the weekend, at the customary front porch gathering, I asked some of my neighbors if they'd ever serviced their water softeners.  No, they hadn't.  In fact, the guy across the street said they didn't even have one.

Well, if they can get along with hard water with a family of seven, I supposed I could for awhile, too.  And I left the softener on bypass the next ten days. 

But yesterday I think I spent a half hour or more rewashing supposedly clean dishes from the dishwasher.  I folded some white laundry last night and it looked yellow and dingy.  I can't get my shampoo to lather, and the water tastes funny.  Still I was putting off doing anything about it, until this afternoon after work.  

I have lots of laundry to do.  I'd really like it to come out clean.  Oh, phooey, I had to try cleaning the venturi at least.  I mean, come on, buck up.  Found the diagram in the manual (I'd been looking at the installation guide before--oops).  Found the venturi on the appliance.  Took it apart.  Barring a little red iron scum, it was clean.  Put it back together and turned the softener on.  Made no difference-- water level still high.  Found the page with the Manual Regeneration Check.  Put the softener through its paces: brining, brining rinse, backwash, fast rinse.  Water level actually went down a little bit, out through the drain hose-- then started filling up, higher, higher, scarily higher.  Oh, no, you don't!  Unplugged it and hammered the bypass back in place.

Back to the Internet.  No, sorry, the only way to get the water out is to siphon it or suck it out with the wet-dry vac.  OK, fine, I've got one of those.  After a few vacuum tankfuls (and a salty-wet basement floor), the water in the softener was gone.  But my vac was sucking up flakes of salt off the bottom.  Going by the mop handle that I use to distribute salt when I fill the WS, maybe 2" or 3" was hardened in there.  

Time for the hot water to melt it out. 


Hot water, hot water, hot water.  Ram it with the mop handle to break it up.  Ram, ram, ram.  


Take a look to see if I'm making any progress.  Poke the camera down in to document the event. Take a few pictures, using the flash.


Review the pictures to see what's going on, since I can't see down there very well.

Uhhhh, wait a minute.  There's this big cylinder in the back of the WS, that looks like it's made of heavy cardboard, but when you rap it, it sounds more like ceramic.  If I understand my manual correctly, that's the resin tank.  And there, down at about the 0.5 salt level, was what looked like a V-shaped rip in its side.

Did I do that damage right then, myself, with my plastic mop handle?  But no, the picture I took right after I got the water sucked out shows the crack already there.  And I haven't gone after a salt bridge for several months.  No, that resin tank cracked by itself.

I've been on the Internet (did I mention that before?).  I've learned that a cracked resin tank is doom for a water softener.  That if it ruptures, it can be doom for whatever's in your basement (especially if the water's still running through the WS).  That the resin in a broken tank can go running throughout your whole plumbing system, and while I haven't delved into what that means, it sounds bad.  And that replacing the resin tank and its contents can cost more than buying a new water softener.


My resin tank is toast.  I am not going to experiment with running the WS with the tank in that condition.  So what do I do?  This is not in the budget.  Do I stretch my credit even further and buy a new water softener?  Do I run hard water for the foreseeable future and ruin my clothes and coat my plumbing with lime? 

Blast it, what do I do?

Where I Am with Things

I admit it:  I haven't done anything with the hall floor sanding since Monday the 20th.  Too much going on since then with choir concerts, year-end paperwork, Christmas cookery, and general holiday-making.  Even if I'd had time to sand, my friends wouldn't savor my bread and candy any more with a dusting of wood floor over it.

But this afternoon I really am going to do something.  Need to rehang the plastic over the doorway to the 3rd floor (it fell down day before yesterday) and 120-grit sand the last 2/5 of the hall way floor.  Then drape the openings to the stairhall on the 1st floor with plastic-- not my favorite sport, and the animals won't appreciate it, either.  Then, then, maybe I can start on the 1st floor stair treads.  Nothing gets shellacked in there until the sanding is done.

Meanwhile, here's a couple-three pictures from the most recent work:

Where I cracked a groove during the medium sanding.  May've had something to do with countersinking that nail beyond the board's tolerance.

Securing down that cracked groove.  I used some small annular nails I had in my workshop, toenailed in, as recommended by various websites.  Wish I'd used regular finish nails instead.  It doesn't look too bad in this picture.  You don't want to see how it looked after I tried countersinking those flat heads.

Ran my carpenter's pencil over the surface (actually wrote myself a monitory message) to keep from oversanding before I started the 120-grit fine-sanding phase.  When the pencil marks are gone, it's sanded enough.  Period.

How the part that's totally sanded looks.  Pretty!  (I think.)

Not What I Call a Solution

This afternoon, the neighbors across the alley had a tree service chipper out there, presumably taking care of the big spruce or hemlock that toppled over in the windstorm last week.

I was just out there with my dog and decided to "inspect" the cleanup work.

And this is the sight that greeted my eyes:

What on earth--? Why would anyone do that for? They took them all down! Sliced through at fence level! Of all the--!?

So now we're left with a big hole against the sky where those trees used to be. And I'm trying to figure out why my former neighbors took such a drastic measure.

Is it because the house is empty, and they figured they should cut down all their evergreens because they can't keep an eye on the property? In that case, why shouldn't every absentee owner cut down every tree on their land?

Was it because they figured if one tree's roots were loose, the roots of all of them must be? How would they know? And that assumes we get big winds like that all the time. Hey, at that rate, if you go to the dentist to get one rotten tooth pulled, have him pull all your good ones as well!

But maybe I'm being hypocritical. I had one of my arbor vitaes cut down to make room for a rose bush in September, and now because another one of them has fallen down, I'm planning on taking out the third as well. Maybe I'm theorizing ahead of my data. Maybe they discovered all those trees were infested with the dread Herplelopolipsis sprucius mite and taking them down prevented it from spreading throughout western Pennsylvania!

But somehow I can't believe it. Somehow I think this was a case of "What the hell, might as well!" on the part of my former neighbor or as instigated by the tree chipping company.

I hope they take out those rampikes. They look creepy standing there, like dismembered bodies.

Well, damn. It's too late now, but in my not very humble opinion, they should have left those evergreens standing tall against the sky. What they did is not what I call a solution.

Something Else It's the Wrong Time For

The west side of my house has three tall arborvitae shrubs.

Rather, it had three tall arbor vitae shrubs.

One I had taken down last September, because I really want to plant a climbing rose in its spot.

I'm not that fond of the other two. They've been going brown here and there and I'd really like to plant hollies in their place. But they shield the air conditioner unit and I've got enough to do inside without messing with non-crucial landscaping.

Rather, they did shield the air conditioner unit . . .

We had a big wind through here early yesterday morning. When I took my dog out to the alley I saw this in a neighbor's backyard.

I thought myself unscathed. Except for sticks and twigs, my maple trees were intact.

Then I came back in, and looked out the dining room window to check the level of the seed in the birdfeeder.

And I couldn't see the birdfeeder. All I could see were arborvitae fronds that weren't in view before.

Yeah, it's toast. Pulled up by the roots like a lot of other evergreens around here. And its companion is leaning ominously. Looks like I'm going to have to get a chainsaw at the secondhand tool shop and clear both of them out.

And start looking for holly bushes. Preferably the self-pollinating kind.

Repairs

I admit it: Amongst hacking early winter bronchitis, squeezing the last possible juice out of my student AutoCAD program, and Christmas activities (I finally got the last of my "Christmas" letters out last Thursday), I've done Nothing. What. So. Ever. on woodwork stripping since November 23rd.

And there's a little something, a tedious, boring, but essential little repair, that I have to do before the Woodwork Stripping Express again gets underway.

On November 9th last, I was in my 2nd floor hall prying door trim off the walls when I heard a crash from my study above. I ran up the steps and this is what I saw:









Oh, bugger. Silly shelf piece had fallen off the wall again. Upper mollie of the righthand bracket had pulled right out.









Blessedly, the way it fell, nothing was broken. But for the past two months and more I've been studiously ignoring the mess in my study and doing ten other things other than remounting my shelf piece.

No more. My holiday tasks are over (barring taking the decorations down, but that's another issue) and there's a chance-- a happy, tentative chance-- that I'll need my drafting board to do some actual, paying design work. I've got to get that piece rehung and the mess cleaned up.

I've made progress. I've filled the crater (with that new DAP DryDex spackle that goes on pink and dries white), sanded the patch, located and drilled the new screw hole, primed the patches, and applied one coat of new paint. I'll wait till tomorrow to do the second coat, because I'm not totally sure the touch up paint I bought Friday exactly matches. Close, but I might have to mess with it a bit.

This wall backs onto an accessible storage space under the roof. Looking at it from that side, I've determined what's wrong: the mollie at that point goes into the plaster between two laths. With the weight of the shelf piece, the papers and things that I keep in it, and the cats that sleep in the inbox above the righthand bracket, no wonder this is the second time it's failed.

So here's the plan: This time, I'm using a toggle bolt. But I'm not drilling a big hole in the plaster to put the toggle through. No. The bolt will go through from the study side, then the toggle will screw on from the attic storage side. With a strip of wood between the lath and the toggle to span the lath at right angles for bracing.

I may draft a neighborhood kid to help with one side or other of the assembly; I may see if I can take care of it myself. Either way, I should get this repair done and the shelf piece rehung sometime tomorrow.

And then I can go back to woodwork stripping.

Oh, joy.

Copping Out . . . or Facing Reality?

No luck today finding any skilled amateurs to deal with my fallen tree problem. My friends with the chain saw seem to be out of phone contact; there's a good chance they still have no power. My neighbor Jim East* asked at work about a chain saw he knows of, but it's broken.

Last night, while I was at choir, he was over here with his Saws-All, cutting more of the smaller branches off. "I was hoping I could do enough to get them off the fence so I could pick it up for you."

But as he worked, he said, he heard an ominous creaking from up in the tree where the two severed limbs are supported only by a branch about 1-1/2" in diameter. Meanwhile, his four-year-old and the six-year-old twins from across the street were running back and forth between his yard and mine. Nope, the piece of fence wasn't getting righted last night!

And anyway, the Saws-All blade broke, and he didn't have a spare.

So . . . the tree surgeon called me back this afternoon. He gave me a price that isn't wonderful, but seems reasonable considering it's not that much more than he charged me in June of 2004 when another limb of the same tree came down and took out a portion of the fence . . . You have to consider the higher price of gas, at the very least. I got him to come down a bit by leaving out the small branches we cut down yesterday: I still want to grind them up for mulch.

But you see, I did not get additional bids. I told this guy to come round and do it tomorrow morning. It'd take me to the end of the week to get callbacks from other arborists, everyone is still so busy, and by that time, those branches could come down and go through my porch roof.

At least, that's my reasoning.

And by hiring it done, I'm not running the risk of some friend of mine getting brained by an errant tree limb while he's doing the chainsaw polka with it. If anyone is going to be brained in the process, let it be the professionals with their own insurance.

But of course, I want no one brained at all. Not the tree surgeon, not the kid next door, not my dog, not me. Easy to say I can't afford to pay to have it done professionally, but can I afford not to? And as soon as possible?

That's what I'm telling myself-- if I'm not just copping out.

Anybody Got a Chain Saw I Can Borrow?

We got a bit of a blow through here a few hours ago. A leftover from Tropical Storm Lowell from way out west, out in the Pacific.

Well, maybe more than a bit.



Now my parents live in Houston, and yesterday I was on the phone sympathizing with my mom over the three trees in their backyard that blew down early Saturday morning, in consequence of Hurricane Ike. One of them, she said, took down part of their fence.

Well, guess what, Mom: It must run in the family, because a big limb of my sugar maple came down in the windstorm this past evening and knocked down a big section of my fence.

Funny, it didn't fall outward into the neighbors' yard. No. It collapsed inward and apparently took out my sunflowers, my volunteer cherry tomato bush, and my new blackberry bush. And maybe a cabbage or two.Can't tell for sure till morning. And maybe not even then, not until I can bum somebody's chain saw and wood chipper. I don't see getting a tree surgeon over any time soon. Whole town's in the same mess I am, and a lot of people probably have it worse.

Poor Dog, Poor Door, Poor Me!

I've got a very smart dog, I do. But he's not enough of a canine genius to remember over night which side of the back screen door he's supposed to come in by, now that the dog door is installed.

He's also very strong. And when he came barrelling back in this morning, this was the result:

(Maybe I shouldn't have hooked the door?)
I've put the screen back the best I can. And I stuck warning tape on the Wrong side. Though since then, it's fallen off.
But by this evening, my mutt seems to have caught on. "Aw rawt, rawt, yuppins, dis is da side Aw paws at an' it moves an' Aw ken go throo! Yuppins, here Aw go!"

But as they used to say, don't the screen look Dogpatch? It's no longer a matter of redoing the mesh, the whole frame has literally gone to rack and ruin.

I'll worry about it later. I have a sermon to finish for a pulpit supply assignment. It's for a service tomorrow night at a Lutheran church down the river, with a repeat on Sunday. Sung Communion. Should be interesting.