When Special K told me the other day that there was no hot water getting to the washing machine we figured it was my past catching up with me. All the sinks and the tub were okay – but the washer not so much.
You see, we have issues with our hot water tank sometimes and we were pretty sure an inlet screen on the water hose had gotten plugged.
One of life’s hard lessons is that when you live in an area with a lot of minerals in the water that a fair bit of it settles to the bottom of the hot water tank over the years.
We have so many possessions these days – but understand so little of it. It’s a real bonus for guys like me that someone has figured out electric hot water tanks. If I designed it I would probably electrocute myself when I was washing my hands after using the biffy.
Our hot water tank problem snuck up on us. Not knowing that the hot water tank needed to be flushed out every year I had simply moseyed on along through life until one day the tank failed to deliver.
It seems that the minerals had piled up to the point where the lower heating element was sitting in the muck and had shorted out.
So I replaced the burnt out element and cleaned the tank as well as I could. But the hot water faucets occasionally get clogged with little flakes of minerals.
We figured that’s what had happened to the hot water line to the washing machine.
But when I took the hose off the back there was no water coming from the pipe at all. We have a set of shut-off valves behind the washer to those hoses aren’t under pressure all the time. It can save the major expense of water damage if you were to come home and find that the washer hose had burst and had been spraying the laundry room for the past six or eight hours while you were visiting Aunt Bertha.
What had failed was the shut-off valve.
New valve installed, happy wife = happy life. Hot water again – hallelujah!
All my troubles should be so easy.
***
Fred Marshall sent along an interesting Internet link last week – http://world.time.com/timelapse/
The site puts satellite images in front of you as a time-lapse slideshow stretching from 1984 to the present.
All thanks to NASA’s Landsat program, which was built for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth.
When you go to the page you can access any place on the globe by typing in a location in the Explore The World box.
You will be amazed at the totality of the clearcuts in this province, including the Boundary.
“The public really doesn’t know what’s going on and these visuals are like tracking a disease,” said Anthony Britneff who regularly blogs on the environment and commons of publicly owned natural resources in British Columbia.
He maintains these images show green washing slogans such as Forests Forever or We’ve Changed or Sustainable Forestry are a lie.
A word of caution though – one online comment about the site pointed out that these are obviously liberal satellites.