Some time ago I noticed that our ChefsChoice Hot Pot was taking much longer to boil water than it used to and boiled a long time before shutting off. And it was making a roaring noise as it was heating up. Finally, one day it made a "crack" noise and a chunk of the scale that was building up on the bottom of the pot had broken off. I thought that maybe all these things were related.
I put a cup of vinegar in the hot pot and turned it on, let it boil, and let it sit for a while. The scale dissolved. The funny noises while it was heating went away. The water boiled faster and the pot turned itself off soon after it got the water boiling. I had solved the problem.
If your hot pot exhibits any of these symptoms, perhaps it is time for a descaling. Vinegar, an acid, works wonders.
If it's yellow, let it mellow
Jerry and I are practitioners of the selective flush (is that a chorus of "ewwwwwww!!!" I hear?). Well, we live in a desert where water is imported from hundreds of miles away. (I never have understood the insistence on having a lush lawn where there isn't any local water to keep it lush.) And now we are in another year of below average precipitation in the areas we get our water from and we might be facing water use restrictions. Besides, our water goes into a septic tank and we might as well reserve its capacity for water we really need to use (especially in El Niño winters when the ground gets saturated).
Anyway, even though Jasmin is a low-flow toilet, it used to be that when we flushed, whatever was in the bowl was more than eager to leave. There was nothing that Jasmin couldn't handle. That gradually changed. Lately, we had to hold the flush handle down so that all of the water in the tank would be used to take care of business.
Something was wrong.
I thought that something might be clogging the pipe on the way to the septic tank but that really didn't seem likely since once things started moving, things left.
Over the years of mellowness, we would get a buildup of dark minerals on the bottom of the toilet bowl. I'd chip at it now an then and attack it with some vinegar. The minerals would loosen up and chip away more easily. What I didn't think of was parts of the toilet I couldn't see.
I finally thought that maybe there was mineral buildup somewhere I couldn't see and that was slowing down the operations. So I bailed most of the water out of the toilet and filled it with our Costco-sized jug of vinegar and let it sit.
I used an old toothbrush to probe in the toilet's trap and siphon jet. A lot of large chunks of minerals came out.
Jasmin now flushes like new! Vinegar rescues us again.
If you have minerals building up on the bottom of your biffy, you might be getting low performance. Vinegar, anyone?
Here's a diagram of a toilet I found on the Internet in case you want to see where my toothbrush went. (It's not going into my mouth!)
6 comments:
Thanks for the helpful hints, HeloiseBert.
We drank liquid mineral in Maxwell, and the scale was about an eighth inch thick in the bottom of our tea kettle. I discovered it when I accidentally dropped the kettle and heard a cracking sound. I worked on the scale for a while and brought out slabs of the stuff.
I'm so glad Jasmin's ills have been cured by vinegar. Now you must tell me how to get years and years worth of coffee stains out of my plastic coffee mug. Kip-It just doesn't even touch it.
P.S. I've been practicing the "Selective Flush" routine, but only about every second use.
Momberts question about coffee stains in plastic mugs takes me back to an embarrassment in junior high school.
We had to take a prop for some activity. I was to bring coffee cups. I took a couple of the blue melamine cups Mom and Dad drank out of. They were heavily stained with coffee.
Upon seeing these stained cups, one of my classmates said "Ewwwww! What dish washing liquid do you use?" I said "We don't use dish washing liquid" because we didn't. We used Tide. Jack, in his infinite frugality, decided that laundry detergent was just as good for dishes as it is for Levis. God, what did it do to people's hands?
Anyway, the classmate's reply to my answer was a sneering "I can tell!" I live with this embarrassment to this day.
I forget what you used, Mom, but some time later you did something and the insides of the cups became blue again. It can be done but I can't tell you.
Hmmm...I did a lot of dishes in junior high and high school, and I remember using liquid dish washing detergent and not Tide. Maybe the Tide was elementary school.... I think Mom used to put vinegar in the coffee cups to clean them. I remember the stinky smell and cups sitting in the sink with stuff in them to get the stains out.
I use vinegar and baking soda to keep my drains clear. CLR is good for coffeemakers, but you aren't supposed to use it on glazed surfaces, so I guess I have no coffee cup solutions--except to always buy dark-brown cups.
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