If someone wants to experiment with this, then great, more power to you, but methinks that plopping a new (and clean) $69.95 toilet into position is lot less hassle than dealing with multiple trips to the store for missing/misfit/broken valve parts.
And I believe a lot of other people think that way, too. Call me shallow, call me a victim of our disposable society, but I can think of a lot of other things I'd rather be doing during an afternoon than monkeying with a 40-year-old toilet's float level.
That being said, we may start to see the Toilet Police begin to fall off the replacement bandwagon very soon. As evidence that the Porcelain Gods do care, you can now have your cake and flush it, too. Keep your old throne in place, but replace the handle and flush mechanism without an engineering degree.
Kits can be purchased (for $9.95 to $50) that provide two separate flushes. Flip up on the handle for lighter duty (1.6 gallons), and down on the handle when you really need to get some work done (3.5 or 5 gallons - or whatever the original flush capacity of your toilet was).
Not to be left out, dual flushability is a feature available on new toilets as well.
Exploding dishwasher
Below are theories and suggestions readers have regarding the exploding dishwasher I wrote about recently. A dishwasher exploded three minutes after a Navy housing inspector turned it on during a routine bimonthly check on vacant buildings at his base.
The investigators' theory was that a build-up of hydrogen gas in the dormant hot-water system was ignited by the timer or relay switch in the dishwasher.
Here are what some readers had to say:
• Hydrogen could be produced in a water heater by reaction of the cathodic protection rod with water. The reaction can be expected to be faster if the water is hot, but not eliminated if the water is cold. Shutting off the heater if it is not to be used for an extended time will save energy and reduce the likelihood of significant hydrogen formation. After restarting the heater and letting the water heat up, running a tap in a well-ventilated room until hot water flows will largely eliminate any hazard.
• The hot-water tank probably had an electrical leak that created electrolysis, which separates water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen would be reabsorbed by the water as there's 200 times more oxygen in water than in air. The hydrogen would have then gone to the dishwasher. When it started, it didn't blow up because it hadn't entered yet, and when it sparked the next time, it blew.
• It was hydrogen sulfide, not plain hydrogen, that exploded in the dishwasher. Hydrogen sulfide production is common in electric water heaters with aluminum heating elements in water systems with high sulfur content. But hydrogen sulfide has a distinct odor of rotten eggs. (Editor's note: No mention of any smell was made. Hydrogen sulfide is flammable in air between 4.3 and 45.5 percent, while the strong smell is detectable at 0.001 to 0.1 parts-per-million (olfactory fatigue does occur quickly at high concentrations, however). We do not know about the sulfur content of the water in this case.)
Mold coverage
I stand corrected on my column last week when I said insurance companies exclude mold from coverage. In some instances - according to Jeff Greene, insurance adjuster from Los Angeles - mold damage is covered when it is the result of damage from a covered peril under most homeowners' policies (i.e., a pipe breaks, mold forms). Where isn't mold covered? Under the exclusion portion of the policy. |
