Sometimes even at the ripe old age of 29 41 I amaze myself with my own stupidity.  This time it involves our lawnmower.  For most of this year, well the last two years if you must know, the mower has been running a little rough, with the engine sounding like it was throttling up and down in a fairly random way.  Me, not being on the mechanically inclined side, figured it was my 4-year old mower showing its age.  Finally last week it stopped running altogether and when I tried to restart it I couldn’t get it to turn over.  I looked at it a little while, fiddled with this and that, and repeatedly pulled the rope harder and harder to try and start it.  No dice.

After a great deal of pondering and some time looking at the stupid thing I realized that it has a spark plug. "Hmmm," I thought, "I wonder if a new spark plug would help?"  So I put the mower away and decided to weed whack the remainder of the long grass around our patio (roughly 1/8 acre).  Two hours later I was done and sick of thinking about my yard so I showered up and decided to procrastinate re. the mower.

Later in the week I was running errands and decided to find a spark plug.  I was nowhere near an auto parts store, but I was near Wal-Mart so I held my nose and went in.  Thus I was confronted with the fact that there are several sizes of spark plugs for small engines to choose from, and I didn’t have a clue which would fit my mower.  So I took an educated guess and spent the $2.50 for a plug, figuring that if I was right all was good and if I was wrong I could afford to have a spare spark plug lying around and go buy another one at the auto parts joint.

Lucky for me I already had an appropriately sized wrench for removal of the mower’s spark plug thanks to my shower repair job two weeks ago, so I was able to remove the old spark plug in a jiffy and compare it to my new one.  Lo’ and behold they matched!  Better lucky than good I guess.  On went the new one and then a I gave a sample pull to the starter rope.

Eureka!  The mower purred and roared like a teenage boy on Viagra.  It hadn’t sounded so good in at least two years, and at first I was overjoyed.  Then it occurred to me: I’ve probably wasted gallons of gas over the last two years because I didn’t think to replace one $2.50 spark plug!  And how many times had the mower stalled when confronted with tall or thick grass?  Now it was cutting through those patches like a hot knife through butter.  "Jeez, I’m an idiot," I thought.  Okay, I’m paraphrasing my thoughts.  They were actually much saltier.

I’m thinking I need to write a manual for morons like me; "A True Idiot’s Guide Suburban Living."   

Well, it doesn’t qualify me for the Handyman Hall of Fame, but I pulled off a household DIY that, frankly, I thought was beyond me.  Try to follow the technical explanation here; in our master bathroom the doohickey that you push in to make the water come out of the shower nozzle instead of the bath nozzle was regularly being expelled with force every once in a while.  When I say with force I mean that the doohickey flew out of its home, heretofore known as the doohickey hole, with such great force that it would slam into the wall on the other end of the bathtub, which is approximately five feet, with enough force to sound like small arms fire.  The first time it happened it missed Celeste by about two inches.

Anyway, for months we were able to finesse the doohickey back into its hole and it would work for a while and then, seemingly out of nowhere it would try to impale one of us.  Finally, this week the doohickey refused to be finessed and it was time for repair.  As I’ve documented many times here I’m no Bob Vila and this project intimidated me, especially since it took a plumber an hour to fix the drain system in the same tub.  I figured I was in for a long week.

So, I pulled the face plate off of the faucet to see if I could figure out what to do.  When I pulled it off I found that the doohickey was actually a part of a larger piece that screws directly into the whatchamajiget that tells the water whether or not to be hot, cold or indifferent.  For a while I thought I might have to shut off the main water supply, but then I realized that if I kept the faucet off it would act as a shut off valve since it was located at the top of this particular operation.  This was of great relief to me since the last time I shut off the main water supply we had all kinds of creepy noises coming from our pipes for days afterward, which of course deprived Celeste (aka Bat Ears) of her beauty sleep.

My next step was to jump online and see if anyone sold replacement doohickeys.  My worry is that like everything else in this house our shower is a tad on the old side and I was worried that replacement parts would be hard to find.  After a little hunting and pecking I found a plumbing supply site that had a picture of what appeared to be our shower equipment.  Here it is:
It seems that our shower faucet is a Delta 602, and that the doohickey is actually called a diverter.  After a little more hunting I found that the diverter is sold in most hardware stores, so this morning I went over to Lowes and purchased my shiny new doohickey.  Once I came home I attempted to remove the old doohickey but unfortunately my wrench set seemed to be shy the 7/8″ size I needed and unfortunately my adjustable wrench and lock pliers were too bulky to get the job done.  I gave it my best shot but despite my sweating and cursing I couldn’t get my crusty old doohickey out of its hole.

Unfortunately the lack of appropriate tools is common for my DIY projects so I made my way back to Lowes to buy my new wrench.  I bought it and all the other wrenches over 5/8″ just to be safe (5/8 being the largest wrench I could find back home) and justified it in my mind by telling myself that surely a 1″ wrench will be needed at some point in the future for another project on the Money Pit.  I also decided that while I was at it I’d buy a new knob for the faucet since our old one was crustier than the doohickey and I might as well do it while I had the whole thing torn apart.

Upon my return I found that the 7/8″ worked perfectly and I had the old doohickey off in a flash.  I put some thread tape on the new doohickey and inserted it in the hole, tightened it, put the face plate (also known as the escutcheon) back on, put on the new knob and gave it a test drive.  Miracle of miracles it worked on the first try and it didn’t leak.  I’m thinking I’ve earned a mid-day beer.

Here’s a pic of our broken doohickey (click on it and the picture below to enlarge them).  The white piece is what sticks into the water pipe to divert the water to the shower head.  It’s supposed to be attached to the other parts, but it became separated from the “button arm” (which looks like a button when it’s installed) that’s supposed to push it into the pipe.

 
Here’s a picture of the part all separated.  You see that the “button arm” actually fits inside a spring which fits inside the “sleeve” of the piece.  When the water is running and you push the button arm in the water pressure against the white part will keep the spring from pushing the “button arm” back out.  When you turn off the water the pressure against the white part decreases and the spring pushes the button arm back out allowing the rest of the water to drain out from the tub faucet.

So for those of you who may face your own battle with a Delta faucet here’s the glossary of terms and steps for repair:

Glossary

Doohickey – Diverter
Face Plate – Escutcheon
Whatchamajiget – Valve

Steps

1. If you want to be really safe turn off the main water, but I didn’t find it necessary.
2. Remove the handle from the faucet.  Pry off the little hot/cold top and you’ll find a Philips head screw.  Remove the screw and the handle will come off.
3. Remove the two screws holding the escutcheon on and then pull off the escutcheon.
4. Using a 7/8″ wrench remove the diverter.
5. Check to make sure a part of the diverter isn’t left in the valve hole.  There was one in mine and I used some needle nose pliers to remove it.
6. Insert the new diverter in the hole and hand screw it until you can’t easily turn it, then use the 7/8″ wrench to tighten.  I’ve learned the hard way to be cautious with all water-related stuff so I put thread tape on the threads of the diverter before I inserted it.
7. Put the escutcheon back on and screw it in.
8. Put handle on and screw it in.
9. Put hot/cold cover back on handle.
10. Voila, you’re done!

Last night our son Michael was trying to do a load of laundry when he discovered that the washer wouldn’t start.  Our LG Tromm front loading washer would light up when you hit the “program” button but when you hit the “start” button nothing would happen.  “Hmm,” I thought, “maybe I can fix this.”  I must be delusional from all the holiday cheer.

We’ve already had the washer serviced before and I knew for a fact that you could access the inside by popping the top off.  Well, I thought you could pop it off but after multiple attempts to pry the dam thing off I was ready to give up.  That’s when the brains in the family, Celeste, mentioned that she thought the top slid off.  Once again I was forced to bow to the wisdom of my wife.

So I get the top off and find neat bundles of wire that all appeared to be connected properly.  I did what I do with all things mechanical or electrical: I poked and prodded and pretended to be doing something.  After I’d spent what I felt was a sufficient amount of time not knowing what I was looking at I plugged the washer in and tried to start it.  I felt quite wise that I did this before I put the lid back on since it would be necessary to not know what I was doing for another indeterminate amount of time if it didn’t start.  Sure enough it didn’t start so I spent another couple of minutes poking and prodding before I finally stopped kidding myself and put the lid back on and plugged the washer in again.  Then I kicked it.  That’s always my last resort and it works more often than you’d think.  Not this time.

While I was pretending to do something Celeste was on the phone with LG and when asked for the washer’s symptoms was told by the customer service rep that they’d received feedback similar to this in the past.  Apparently this problem can often be alleviated by following this scientific method:

1. Unplug the machine for about 10 minutes.
2. Repeatedly push the start button until it starts.  It may take several pushes (make that about 100) before the machine will start.

Sure enough it worked. We were told that this process effectively re-sets the washer’s “board” or in other words we had to re-boot our washer.  I’m now convinced that LG is Korea’s answer to Microsoft.

Until we moved to North Carolina I’d never had a septic system.  In other words all of our waste (i.e. poo) was sent through pipes to somewhere far away to be taken care of.  Now we have a big tank (1,000 gallons) buried in our front yard that stores it until someone comes along to pump it out.

We’ve lived here for two years and figured it was time we had that someone come by.  The way things have gone with this house we didn’t want to take any chances and good thing we called when we did because our septic tank was all "full up" and the last thing I want is poo in my yard unless it’s the dog’s.

I asked the guy we called if he ever watched Dirty Jobs and he said yes, and that the episode where the host tags along with a septic crew (pilot episode that first aired in ’03) was pretty much dead on.  He said our 1,000 gallons of poo was nothing; that the real nasty job is cleaning out the grease traps at places like the local school.  All I can tell you is that 1,000 gallons of poo is plenty nasty for me, and I’m not sure I’d ever want to find something nastier.

Below is a little video of the poo-sucking process I took with my camera phone.  I wasn’t originally going to shoot it, but just before I got my camera going our cat was sniffing around the hole and almost fell in.  I’d have paid some good money to see that!

Finally, if you’re looking for a good septic company in the Triad I can highly recommend Celestial Septic.