Category: around the house

When packing items with foam peanuts it’s important to ensure that they are compressed and will hold the items they surround firmly in place. One of the best ways to do this is to slightly overfill the box when adding the packing material, compressing it while taping the box shut. It’s easy to tell if this method is done right, as the sealed box will feel solid without internal movement when shaken but there also won’t be any bulging of the packaging.

When replacing the leaky toilet gasket I was reminded of another problem said toilet has: the valve on it sticks, and doesn’t really open all the way. That is, once closed the valve is very difficult to open again, without shutting off the water, removing the valve stem, and reassembling it with the valve all the way open. When I last had this problem I contemplated replacing the valve with a new ball valve, but never got around to it.

Well, today I did. After purchasing a BrassCraft (made in Novi, MI!) sweat-on ball valve I desoldered the old builders-grade globe valve, cleaned up the metal, sweated (soldered) the new fitting on, hooked it up, and was content with how things worked. While they are good allowing one to adjust flow, I don’t feel that this is needed for toilets and other places where valves can stick in place after being open for years or exposed to weather, and I seem to regularly have problems with gaskets and seats corroding leading to valves that either don’t shut off or won’t open all the way.

I also replaced the gasket on the other toilet today, and thankfully that valve worked just fine. I may replace it as well, but the effort required to drain the house to a few feet below the floor may preclude this, especially as that toilet doesn’t have any other problems.

After seeing this leak appear a few days in a row in the toilet off of my bedroom I believe that it is time to replace the toilet tank gasket. Thankfully this is an easy task, requiring nothing more than disconnecting the water supply, drying out the tank, unbolting it from the bowl, reversing all the steps after fitting a new gasket, and having a test flush.

I must remember to pick up two new gaskets tomorrow, as I shall replace both toilets’ gaskets at the same time. They were both installed at the same time (October 2001) and should wear based on age and exposure, but not use. Utilizing, cleaning, nor flushing the toilet should cause little wear on a gasket which normally sits just below the flapper and is dry save for during flushes. Thus as toilet usage patterns can be ignored when considering gasket lifespan, one can presume the other gasket is likely to fail soon as well due to simple effects of aging.

(Note that in presuming even wear between the two toilets I’m ignoring differences in the bathrooms such as airflow patterns, temperature, exposure to light, humidity, and the possibility of someone leaning back while on the toilet introducing stress to the gasket, as all of these have uncertain outcomes and would be much harder to quantify than simple age. And anyway, who really leans back against the bowl while sitting on the toilet? Things won’t come out right if one does that.)

Today I spent time rewiring my office to incorporate the new iMac. A few armloads of cables connecting the Mac Pro-bearing rack were removed and things were simplified / organized. I absolutely love having a quiet desk with cables only visible where necessary. I tucked a USB hub out of the way under the desk to the right of my chair for flash drives, and another behind the desk for more permanent connections.

As I’m not sure how it’ll be done the scanner is not yet connected, but I suspect it’ll involve a 10′ USB cable run to the hub on the back side of the desk and a shorter cable to Danielle’s desk for when she wants to use it. My older Dell monitor was moved to Danielle’s desk and fitted with a mini-DVI connector so that she can watch movies on it while using the Macbook screen for normal browsing / work. A new power strip was also added to the rack next to her desk to make plugging in her laptop and charging phones easier. This mostly carpet fisheye shot (full res) shows the two desks as they are with the rack.

Before doing all of this the Mac Pro was also wiped and reinstalled. Hopefully it’ll be photographed tomorrow for listing on eBay come Sunday evening.