People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
Technology Connections told me about the filter in the bottom of the dishwasher, how cleaning that out can do wonders for the performance. And he said if you hadn't ever cleaned that he felt sorry for me when I would open it up and find out what's inside. I was afraid to, so I sold the dishwasher and got a new one. Checked the filter, clean as a whistle, disaster avoided.
Afraid to check your dishwasher filter, so you bought an entirely new dishwasher?? Do you also throw your clothes away when they get dirty, and keep buying new clothes? Lazy irresponsible financial decisions like this remind me of the infuriating saga of Albert Clarke .
No it was a joke, the dishwasher was over 20 years old and I had maintained it properly. I had repaired it many times, replacing or repairing components, improvising fixes where needed. I am remodeling the downstairs, so I removed the kitchen. I made sure almost all of the cabinets got a second life in a garage somewhere (helped move and install them). The dishwasher was still functional, even though it was old, so I gave it away for free and somebody was happy to have it.
In the end all that actually went to recycling was one cabinet which was totally rotted, it fell apart as I removed it. Some wood trim that was made to fit exactly this kitchen and the hood which was broken beyond repair (needed a new motor, which is almost the entire thing and I couldn't source it).
I plan to re-use the fridge and the hob. The oven has been nothing but trouble since I moved in, with a post-it on the electrical panel for how to reset it when it goes into failure mode that looked like it had been there for decades. That might need to go to recycling. I re-used part of the kitchen counter as a workbench, but part of that has gone to recycling as well.
I'm all about reduce, re-use and recycle and wouldn't just buy something new when I don't need to. I'm still waying my options for the new kitchen, if I'm going to go sustainable or recycled materials I'm going to have to build it myself. Which is in my capabilities, but perhaps not in my time constraints. So not sure on that yet. For now I've uncovered a world of hurt with very questionable and dangerous electrical and plumbing. How this house hasn't burnt down yet is a wonder, and I have uncovered evidence of multiple fires in the past. So that's a big job that takes priority for now.
Mr. Clarke wears a gray button-down shirt so fresh from its plastic packaging that it still bears a symmetrical grid of creases. “I spend a lot of money on clothes for me and May and Aly,” he says. “We wear them two or three times. When they get all wrinkly and funky, we throw them out.”
Holy wow, hard to believe!
Found and removed the filter screen in my moms dishwasher when it broke, scale buildup from the water had grown down into the pump, ruining it :(
Oh yeah, they can get gross, but the easy solution is to just stick it in the dishwasher, and boom, clean as new!
If this is what her lint trap looks like, I can't imagine what the dryer vent looks like.
Btw, get your dryer vents cleaned out! Annually is ideal, but absolutely no more than every 3 years. A blocked dryer vent is a huge fire hazard.
Two houses on my street have burned down within the past two years for this exact reason. It happens more frequently than I think people realize.
I rented a house once that the previous tenant had been living in for about a year with 3 little kids. She had mentioned to me that the dryer worked ok when she moved in but it wasn't working anymore. It still ran but it didn't really dry anything.
Not a big deal I thought. Went over to the dryer and took a look at it. First thing I did was pull the filter. It was clogged solid. She didn't even know it had a lint trap, never mind that you're supposed to clean it after every single load. Not only was the trap plugged, so was a bunch of the hose and ductwork. I spent several hours taking everything apart and cleaning it out, finally got it all back together, turned the dryer on, and it worked like a champ. Not a single problem for the 7 yrs I lived there.
She was a lady already in her thirties with 5 kids (3 lived with her)... you'd think she would have known how to use a dryer at that point. I'm just happy she never burnt the house down..
I genuinely think that you should take a class in highschool that teaches basic life skills like this. 1 class each year. It could cover cooking/nutrition, mental health, chores, financial literacy, First aid basics, etc. Then by the time thye graduate they have had 4 years of teaching about basic stuff like that. I bet it would save tons of lives.
This is a common opinion that never holds up. Kids' schedules are insanely bloated compared to a few decades ago and honestly, think about what would have been taught as "useful" at home 30 years ago and how much of that would still be in use today... Its just a waste of expensive teaching resources for something that anyone with a search engine can teach themselves.
I think your arguement is kind of silly. Kid's schedules are bloated? With what though? Is it actually valuable? Maybe if they're bloated we should... get rid of the bloat and add in things that would actually help them.
Also, you aren't teaching them what will be useful in a home in 30 years. You are teaching them what will be useful NOW. When they go to college, or get an apartment in a few years. If we didn't teach people things that changed we wouldn't teach SCIENCE! But we do. Because when you have a baseline and things change you can update what you know over time.
On top of that, your argument is self defeating. You are similtaneously saying kids are too busy for a class on this stuff but also saying they should just teach it to themselves in their free time. If they're so busy when do you expect them to do that? The entire point of a class is so that we can MAKE TIME for them to learn this stuff.
We could call it something like Home Economics, or "Home Ec." for short.
I am that person who gets after my friends if they don't clean out the lint from their dryer every load of laundry.
I may be a pain in the ass, but my friends aren't gonna burn alive if I can help it!
I used to live for the satisfaction of pulling thicc lint sheets out of the filter every time I used the shared dryer in my student house
There's gotta be a modern fairy tale about a witch who uses that to make a magic shirt or homunculi or something.
You're a good friend, people are surprisingly clueless about shit like this and the risk is substantial. Most people don't care about their friends that much. You should be proud of who you are, you're a good one.
My sister in law refuses to clean the dryer filter, and also wants to be the one in charge of the laundry for her and her husband. Whenever I do a load of my clothes, I clean the filter and it's at least 10 layers of fire hazard
I'm also wondering "my what" upon hearing about furnace filters. As far as I can tell, my furnace has none. The "filter" is the size of the hole I chuck logs through. If log too big, it no go in.
I'm wondering what "furnace" entails too. I realize I'm showing my ass here but do they mean like the water boiler, or the heater? Do gas burners have filters?
In the US we refer to the large heater for central air conditioning to be the furnace whether it is gas or electric. The filter is on the blower that pushes the hot air around the house.
Interesting. We tend to heat with water in my part of the EU so that specific chore doesnt really exist here.
The HVAC system.
My Girlfriends aunt complained about her dishwasher not Wirkung properly the other day, GF asked Ehen was the last time you cleaned the filter? Aunt was linke the WHAT? She has owned dishwashers for 30+ years and never heard oft that.
I saw one of these posts about ten years after buying a washer/dryer. So I checked mine. Absolutely nothing in it. What the hell are these people washing? Vacuum cleaner bags?
And where are those located on the heat pump? Asking for a friend.
Just before the inside air handler. The big box, usually in the basement, the one that makes noise when the blower kicks in.
Lint trap is easy. Exhaust ducts are the real danger. Not only can lint build up in those, but critters like birds and mice can make nests in them which further blocks the airflow. Even if you have the outside vent gated off, they can get stuck open enabling access for critters into the duct. Clean out your ducts at least once a year.
