100 Things #3: Plumbing

What I have learned about plumbing includes this interesting fact: water pipes aren’t the only ones that are plumbed, gas lines are plumbed too.

Your house may or may not have gas available to it. If you do have a gas line in your house, it is a relatively inexpensive matter to have a plumber hook it up to a gas furnace, a gas stove, or a gas log in a fireplace. You shouldn’t attempt to do it yourself unless you are thoroughly competent in the procedures involved, because gas leaks are highly explosive. Natural gas has no odor of its own, but the gas company adds a chemical to it to give it a strong, tell-tale scent. If you ever smell gas in your house you should shut the gas of at the main (make sure you know how to do this) and exit the house immediately, leaving the door open behind you to help vent gas out of the building. Then call the gas company.

On to water pipes. Unless you live in an extremely old house with no updates, you have indoor plumbing. Somewhere between the street and the place the water line enters your house, the water company’s responsibility for the pipe’s well being ends and your responsibility for it begins. This is important in three situations: (1) when you are digging on your property, to make sure you don’t damage the water main, (2) when tree roots have grown into and damaged the lines entering or exiting your house, and (3) when pipes freeze in cold weather. I only have personal experience with issue (3).

Usually the point at which you become responsible for the pipe is where it actually enters your house, and at that point you can take steps to prevent your pipes from freezing. Only pipes that run along outside walls are at risk, because the inside of your house is heated. When you move into a new house, make sure you know where the water lines are running. Find the point where the main enters your house, and take note of where all the sinks, toilets, tubs, showers, and washing machine hookups are. If any of these are on an outside wall, you may want to wrap the water lines with insulation, leave the cabinets they run inside open at night to let warm air from the house circulate better, or (worst case scenario) let the tap drip overnight to keep un-frozen water running through the pipe. If a pipe inside your house freezes, the expanding water will damage the pipe and when it thaws later you will have a water leak. The leak will be your problem.

It is possible for the pipes to freeze outside of your house, where you are not responsible for them. If this happens, you will wake up one cold morning with no running water. You should call the water company to tell them. They will send someone out who… here my exact knowledge fails me, but this person has a machine that they attach to the main outside your house which, I think, runs electric current through it and heats it up, removing the frozen blockage.

You want to treat your pipes kindly. Drains require especial care, because things other than water go down them and these things can stop them up. If leftover cooking fat is the kind that turns solid when it gets cold (butter, Crisco, lard, and bacon and beef drippings are all in this category) then DO NOT put it down your sink drain, as it will adhere to the pipes and over time cause a clog. My method is to let the fat cool in the pan, then pry it into the trash with a spatula. You can soak it up with paper towels, too, or if you’re a certain kind of hard core foodie you can keep it for more cooking later.

Other things can cause problems with drains, especially if you have an automatic disposal in your kitchen sink and therefore are less careful about what goes down it. One especial danger is things that have a fine, sand-like quality. These can compact in the pipe–especially where it bends–and clog the pipe. Egg shells and coffee grinds are the two often-named culprits for this, and I can personally attest to coffee grounds causing problems.

If you have an automatic disposal, read the instruction manual for it. Some say that grinding small bones is good for the disposal blades because it cleans them off, while others say they will damage the blades. Putting some ice cubes down the disposal periodically is definitely a good idea. Putting citrus peels down the disposal can help the drain to smell better.

If you do not have an automatic disposal in your kitchen sink, then you need to keep a trap in the drain to catch bits of food. When you are done using the sink you empty the trap into the trash.

Bathroom drains are apt to clog with hair and soap scum. Put a hairpin turn at the end of a piece of wire about 12″ long. When a drain begins to run slowly, remove the stopper (you will have to figure out how yourself, as there are many stopper mechanisms and they all come apart differently) and use the wire to physically remove most of the clog. You may find it necessary to use a chemical to further unclog your drain after doing this, but you probably won’t. Go easy on these unclogging chemicals because they are bad for your pipes.

A good routine for keeping drains fresh and running smoothly is to shake a good amount of baking soda into the drain, let it sit for several minutes, pour some white vinegar down the drain and let it sit for several minutes, then pour a kettleful of boiling water down the drain. This will help to break down greasy buildup and deodorize. Pouring some bleach water down a drain periodically couldn’t possibly hurt, either.

Your drains might run to a city sewer system or they might run to a septic system. If you have a septic system you need to know how to maintain it, which includes a knowledge of what chemicals you cannot put down your drains.

Your water may come from a city supply or may come from your own well. Again, make sure you know how to maintain your well if you have one.

Many houses used to have a cistern to supply water to them. In these systems water would run off the roof into the gutters, then into a holding tank in the yard or the basement, and this was the water for the house. I would guess that the number of houses that are still using cisterns instead of wells is vanishingly rare, but I don’t have any statistics to cite.

If the water in your area is extremely hard you may wish to install a water softener (or you might already have one). Old water softeners needed to have bags of salt pellets poured into them periodically, but I believe that newer versions use silica beads and need less maintenance. Extremely hard water will leave rust stains on your plumbing fixtures and cause soaps and detergents to be less effective. Over-softened water will make it hard to rinse soaps and detergents away. It also tastes bad compared to slightly hard water. My own preference is to avoid a water softener unless the water is so bad that it leaves rust stains.

Low-flow plumbing fixtures are environmentally responsible but come with some drawbacks. A faucet or shower head can be fitted with a device that reduces the amount of water that flows through it without affecting the water pressure. This results in reduced water usage. It can also take longer to rinse shampoo out of your hair in the shower, and it will definitely take longer to fill pots and glasses from such a tap. If you are interested in one of these devices, try it and see if you like it. You may not notice the difference. Low-flow toilets used to flush with less force because they were sucking less water down with each flush. As a result, it could take two or three flushes to empty the bowl. New toilets may use less water and also flush with decent force, I don’t have any information about that (our house still has the toilets that were installed in 1974).

The width of the drain the toilet flushes into determines how liable the toilet is to clog. If you are building or renovating, it is worthwhile to know what diameter drain is being put in.

A toilet sits on top of a wax ring that prevents leaks out the bottom. The wax can compress and dry out over time. It is probably worth replacing this ring every ten years or so.

Finally, a flush toilet is a simple mechanism, and if the pipes are sound and clear it cannot “break” in any way that you cannot fix by taking the top off the tank and fiddling with the mechanism. If your toilet stops flushing, take a few minutes to learn about the mechanism on the internet, and fix it yourself.

Shower heads are almost ubiquitous in the United States. An American feels riotous when faced with a bathtub that doesn’t have one. Many older houses have a shower head that is placed too low to get your head under. My explanation for this is that people use to wash their hair far less frequently than they do now, and when they did wash it the job was done in a sink–so shower heads were fixed low to keep hair dry. I find that a hand shower is more useful than a fixed shower head. You can more easily bathe small children with one, you can rinse the whole shower surround after scrubbing it, you can spray sand or grass clippings off of just your lower legs. Hand showers are either attached to a bar on which they can slide up and down, or to a hose, and they then have a holder to fit into somewhere. Many cheap hand showers come with a plastic hose that will crack after a year or two. You can buy a metal hose to replace it without buying a whole new shower head.

And that, dear readers, is all I feel like writing about plumbing right now.

100 Things #2: Climate control

Exposed forced-air duct in our kitchen ceiling during the 2009 renovation

What I have learned about climate control in a dwelling falls into three categories: heating, cooling, and humidity control.

Heating keeps a house warm during cold weather. A few old houses may still be heated by fireplaces, wood stoves, or propane heaters like the Warm Morning heater. Other houses may have a furnace that takes advantage of passive heat flow. In these furnaces, a tube goes up from the furnace (in the basement) to each register in the house. The warm air created in the furnace naturally drifts upward.

By far the three most common kinds of heating at this time, though, are radiators, baseboard heaters, and forced-air furnaces.

A radiator is a metal device filled with water and connected to a boiler. When you turn the heat on the boiler heats the water and the hot water circulates through the radiator, which then radiates heat into the room. Old radiators are bulky. New radiators have low profiles and in new bathrooms, are often replaced by heated towel racks tied into the boiler, which sounds like a nice luxury. The drawbacks to radiators are that you need to keep them away from furnishings or the heat will affect the furniture over time (and they will radiate less efficiently), that they can get air in the water lines which creates a noisy creaking sometimes called “air hammer”, that once water has gotten in the lines the only way to fix the problem is to drain the whole system and fill it up again, which is an involved process that many landlords are reluctant to undergo just to remove a noise problem for their tenants, and that radiators do not circulate air inside the house. Radiators are often old installations in buildings and not necessarily tied in to a thermostat; many people find that even those that are, are almost impossible to control. I lived with radiators in a college dormitory and the only way to be comfortable when the heat was turned on was to keep a window open too.

Baseboard heaters are electric heating units installed along the baseboards of a room. They were more common in the middle of the twentieth century than they are now, though there are places where they are still common in new houses. Like radiators they provide radiant heat that is in theory silent–though older metal units often creak as they heat up and cool down (like a forced-air furnace, baseboard heaters are tied to a thermostat and will heat up and cool down intermittently). Also like radiators they need to be kept away from furnishings, and they do not circulate air inside a house.

Forced-air furnaces are the most common kind of heat where I live. In this system a gas or electric furnace is tied to a thermostat, and will periodically fire up, heat and blow air through ductwork and out of registers in the rooms, and turn itself off when the house has warmed up a degree or two. Other than keeping registers uncovered, you do not need to worry about their effect on furnishings. They circulate air inside a house, helping to keep humidity levels steady throughout the house. These furnaces are always noisy while they are turned on, so having a furnace tucked away in a basement or garage instead of, say, in a hallway closet, is an advantage. Forced air furnaces come in a range of efficiencies, with more efficient furnaces costing less to use. The drawback of more efficient furnaces is that they have more parts, and more parts means they are more likely to break. If you have a high-efficiency furnace you are going to wish you had access to someone who knows a few basics about how to twiddle their parts to keep them going–or you will learn yourself. Forced air furnaces all have air filters somewhere inside them. These filters take dust and pollen out of the air before blowing it around your house. It is extremely important to keep these filters clean; as Mike Holmes says, they are the lungs of your house, and if the house’s lungs don’t clean the air, yours will.

There are a few variations on forced-air heating that don’t use a gas or electric furnace to generate hot air. One is a heat pump and another is geothermal heating. I know very little about them.

Cooling falls mostly under the umbrella of air conditioning. There are three types of air conditioners I am familiar with. The first is the window air conditioner, which fits into a sash window or a special cutout in the wall and provides enough cool air for one room. These are usually noisy and desirable only when installed air conditioning isn’t available.

The second kind is the one I am most familiar with, in which a large air conditioner sits somewhere outside the house and pumps cold air through the same ducts and registers that the forced-air furnace uses. It usually uses the same thermostat the heating uses. The large air conditioner is unsightly and is usually hidden behind the house or a shrubbery. You can’t really service it yourself if there is a problem; you have to call a professional. This kind of air conditioning, just like forced air heat, requires that ducts of a certain size be run through the walls and floors of the house. Houses with plaster-and-lathe walls often cannot accommodate the ducts.

The third kind is popular in the Caribbean. It consists of small permanent wall units that provide enough cold air for one room.

There are other strategies for cooling your house: shade trees that protect the house from the sun, awnings that stop the sun from shining into windows and doors, windows open in the cool nighttime and closed in the heat of the day, and an attic fan that blows hot air out of the attic are all worth pursuing.

Lastly and most often neglected is humidity control. A dehumidifier is mostly useful in damp basements and rooms that have been recently flooded. For whole-house dehumidification, forced air heating or cooling are effective–so effective that many forced air units include a built-in humidifier to put some moisture back in the air. Having a whole-house humidifier makes the cold months much more comfortable, as humidified air minimizes winter problems such as dry skin, static electricity buildup, and the discomfort of head colds. If your furnace doesn’t have a humidifier, you can buy small units that humidify a single room. There are many kinds available, some that create hot steam and some that create cool mist, and you should do your own research to decide which you like best. I seem to be in the minority in preferring hot steam humidifiers. I like them because unlike every other kind, they do not have a filter that needs to be regularly cleaned and replaced lest it begin to grow mold and spew mold spores into the air. The drawback of a hot steam humidifier is that a small child may be burned by the steam jet, and the steam itself can sometimes irritate a person who is sick with a cough–a problem that can be fixed by pointing the steam jet away from, instead of towards, the sick person.

And there you have it; a very dry entry in my list of 100 Things About Housekeeping. Hang in there folks, we have a couple more dry topics to cover before we move on to fun stuff like bed linens and pantries…

100 Things #1: Shelter

The first issue in housekeeping is having a house to keep. Your “house” might be an apartment, a condo, a row house, semidetached, freestanding, 300 square feet or 30,000. It is the place you retreat at the end of the day. Most of us sleep, eat, bathe, relax, and entertain in our homes on a regular basis. It is where we find our domestic unit if we have one, whether it includes pets, roommates, partners, children, or extended family. It is also where we keep our stuff, with all of its useful, beautiful, and intensely self-defining qualities.

Enough pontificating. Here is what I have learned about choosing your shelter:

First, that you often don’t have much of a choice. The rich and self-entitled on HGTV have given us all the wrong idea about what we can afford and what is generally worth having in a house. Dedicated guest bedrooms, dining rooms, offices, workout rooms, and multiple common living spaces are expensive. Since you will pay through the nose for every extra room, I encourage you to think hard, and outside the box, about what spaces will fit your life. I do believe that you should take advantage of every square inch available to you and turn every room in your house into one that is used every day. Can a guest room serve as a dressing room for you or your spouse? Would you like to have a library instead of a formal dining room? Would you rather have a king-sized bed in your studio apartment than a sofa, table, or desk? Follow your bliss and make it so.

There are some concerns about a house that I have become familiar with over the years. They are the following:

1. What are the windows like? Are they modern insulated windows or old aluminum or wood frame ones? This will make a huge difference in your heating bills and the temperatures in various rooms.

2. Do the windows open? Many high rise apartments do not have opening windows for safety concerns. Many mid-century houses have big picture windows that do not open. Fresh air is important, and without it you at least want a very good, quiet, high-volume air circulation system. Modern high-rises will have one. Mid-century houses won’t.

3. Does it share walls, floors or ceilings with neighbors? If so, how well was the building built and soundproofed? Which rooms share walls? How much does noise bother you? In my experience tenants, landlords, and police do not care about noise issues and will do nothing to help you with them. Your only choice is live with it or move.

4. How many bedrooms and bathrooms does it have? If you watch a lot of HGTV, you know that people often can’t afford as many as would be ideal. If more than one person is living in your house you will be much happier with at least 1.5 bathrooms if not two. Many older houses only have one.

5. How many electrical outlets are available, and what kind are they? Many older homes have fewer outlets that you could wish for, and practically no grounded outlets (the kind with three holes; you cannot plug an appliance with a three-pronged plug into an ungrounded outlet!) For that matter many older houses are in need of all-new wiring and electrical panels if you’d like to, say, run the dryer and a window air conditioner at the same time.

6. Finally, think about dust, allergies, and air quality. Would rather live with carpet, which is always a little dirty but usually looks clean, or with hard floors which can be cleaned thoroughly but which show dirt and dust easily? How is the house heated? If it has forced air, are you happy about the increased air circulation within the house or unhappy about having dust thrown into the air? Have you ever lived with radiators? With baseboard heaters?

Enough about shelter. Of all 100 topics I will write about, this is the one over which most of us have the least choice and control. The key to happy housekeeping is to make the space work for you.

100 Things about housekeeping

I guess it’s an accidental secret that I have a LiveJournal in addition to my WordPress blogs. Don’t worry, you aren’t missing anything. It is locked, only four people can see it, and of those four only two actually read it. Into my LiveJournal, I pour my incessant worrying about Mimi, rolling lists of chores, day-to-day-irritations, and household aspirations.

One of the two people who read my LiveJournal recently began doing an LJ challenge called 100 Things. In this challenge you write 100 blog entries along a theme of your choice, link them with tags, and thereby draw a huge following for your blog and revitalize the LJ community. It sounded nice. But for an audience of two (sometimes four), well, too much work. So I am going to do 100 Things here, on WordPress.

My chosen theme is What I’ve Learned About Housekeeping And Still Don’t Know. It is an homage to one of my two favorite books in the world, Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson (the other is the Merck Manual Of Diagnoses And Treatment). I have chosen my own topics for my 100 posts, but in looking them over, they are oddly reminiscent of Cheryl’s book. Mine will be my own discoveries, tips, opinions, and tribulations. I intend for it to be inspirational rather than instructive. I am only 31 and have been keeping house for less than ten years. It’s been a steep learning curve, and there is plenty I still don’t know. It is my favorite topic, though, and one of the few about which I could write 100 posts.

So watch this space–I hope these posts start rolling out soon.