Hello again.  In the interest of saving you, the homeowner, a little more money, I thought I would dedicate this article to some plumbing maintenance tips.  Obviously the best way to save money on emergency plumbing repairs is to do your best to eliminate them altogether.  While that . . . → Read More:]]> Hello again.  In the interest of saving you, the homeowner, a little more money, I thought I would dedicate this article to some plumbing maintenance tips.  Obviously the best way to save money on emergency plumbing repairs is to do your best to eliminate them altogether.  While that is not always possible, there are a few simple things that you can do to help.

Water Heater Service

This is, by far, one of the biggest ways to not only save your water heater, but your entire plumbing system as well.  Now this is obviously for storage tank style water heaters.  If you have a tankless, this won’t apply.

Here is what happens: cold water fills your water heater tank, it is heated at the bottom, and the hot water is sent out from the top of the tank to your fixtures.  Even though most tanks are designed to “swirl” the water around at the bottom of the tank (self cleaning), it doesn’t really work as well as you might think.  Two things wind up accumulating at the bottom of the tank – calcium and rust.  The calcium and rust get sent throughout your house and clog up all your faucets.  Not to mention the damage they do to the water heater itself. Another thing to think about is that rust begets rust.  It’s not unlike a fungus.

Performing a water heater maintenance is usually as simple as putting the thermostat on “pilot” or “vacation” mode, turning off the water to the unit, hooking up a garden hose to the little drain bib at the bottom of the unit, opening the drain bib, and finally opening up the hot side of a couple of fixtures to let air flow.  The tank will begin draining through the garden hose, taking the rust and calcium with it.  When you are done, simply reverse the order of everything you did.  Wait until the unit is completely full and you have clear water coming from your fixtures before you turn the thermostat to its previous position, and you are done.

Doing this, once a year, can be the difference between your water heater lasting 10 years, or 50 years.

Cleaning your Aerators

I went through a quick how-to on aerators in my Plumbing 101a | Flow vs Pressure post.  The why of it is simple – obstructions are bad, proper flow is good.  The aerator is sort of a filter.  Filters need to be cleaned so that they continue to do their job effectively.  It’s really as simple as that, and since cleaning one takes about 5 minutes, why would you not?

Garbage Disposers

Another bit of useful plumbing maintenance is keeping the blades in your disposer sharp.  The job of a garbage disposer is to take large chunks of food and grind them into smaller bits of food, so that those smaller bits can be sent down the drain line without clogging it up.  In order to do the job properly, the blades should be kept sharp.  How do you do that?  It’s simple really – every once in a while, grab a handful if ice cubes and grind them up in the disposer. This will do a great job of keeping the blades sharp.

Drain Lines

Drain line maintenance can be the hardest, because there is not a whole lot you can do except try to minimize the amount of hair and grease that go down the drains.  I do, however have a little trick that I use (as do many of my past customers) to keep those drains flowing.

For this you will need a big pot that you can use to boil a lot of water and some lemons. Squeeze the juice out of the lemons into the pot (by hand or with a juicer), fill the pot with water and boil the mixture.  Once it gets to the boiling point, remove it from the stove and pour it down the sink. The hot water desolidifies the grease and the citric acid from the lemons helps to gets rid of it.  If you want it to be even more effective, run a bunch of hot tap water down the line first for a couple of minutes.  Once every six months should help.

Seeing as it’s time for me to cook dinner, I will wrap up thins article for now.  Please let me know if there is anything you were looking to find here that you didn’t, and I will either add to this post, or create plumbing maintenance 101a.

Hello, Steve here.  Welcome to Plumbing Info.org.  If you don’t know who I am yet, you may want to read my “About Me” page before reading further.

So, I guess the question is: why does this website exist?

Well, you can relax, . . . → Read More:]]>

Hello, Steve here.  Welcome to Plumbing Info.org.  If you don’t know who I am yet, you may want to read my “About Me” page before reading further.

So, I guess the question is: why does this website exist?

Well, you can relax, because, unlike 99.9% of the websites on the net, I am NOT trying to sell you something.  You will find no affiliate links anywhere on this site.  The ONLY way I can make a penny off this website is if:

• You choose to click on one of the sponsored links
• You choose to make a donation

Now that that’s over, let’s get down to plumbing!

Spending a lot of time at home over the last couple of months has given me a chance to reflect on my career and all that I have seen in my more than 15 years as a plumber.  When I look back on it, I realize that the most important aspect of my career was my customers.  Every job I did was dependent upon the interactions between me and my customers.  The best and most satisfying work I ever did was when I was working for people that were knowledgeable and capable of making informed decisions.

Why is that?  There are several reasons.

• People that know what’s going on keep me on my toes.  Someone who knows nothing about plumbing knows nothing about what I am doing.  I can be lazy and “cut corners” and they would not know that difference.
• People that know plumbing appreciate the value in what I do.  It is nice to be appreciated by a customer that knows that the work I did was top notch.  I can sense when someone knows that they got quality work.
• People who know the game cannot be taken advantage of.  When a person has had bad experiences with plumbers, it is all that much harder to get them to trust an honest plumber.
• People who know their plumbing system are far easier to communicate with.  I cannot count the number of times when I arrived at someone’s house and had them tell me “the trap is on the roof” or something equally unhelpful.  It seems like it takes forever to get them to a point where they can actually give me information that I need (“the toilet is backing up into the bathtub”).

I actually have another reason for starting this website.  The long and short of it is that it is not possible for me to interact with people in a service environment for so many years without actually caring about how they are treated.  I have spent so many years, watching what some other “plumbers” did or seeing the work they left behind and shaking my head with disgust.  In the past, I had the option of outperforming them and making them look silly.  That is no longer an option, however.  I hope that this site will actually do more than that.  I hope that I can affect thousands of people, who will, in turn learn what they need to make sure that the bad plumbers and the cheats fail and the plumbers who worked hard to get where they are, by giving quality work at a fair price succeed.

So, why should you read this?  There are so many benefits to you being “in the know” that I can hardly list them all, but I will list a few.

• You will only hire qualified plumbers
• You will only hire plumbers that do quality work (there is a difference)
• You will get the work you need done done correctly
• You will save money (lots of money)
• You will be able to choose what work you need to do now vs. what can be done later
• You will never be taken advantage of again
• You will have information that a lot of plumbers do not want you to know

There are many more, of course, but I will leave them up to you to discover.

Talk to you soon!

Steve