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Appliances

Appliance Hell/Appliance Heaven

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Okay, first off, the plug: If you live in the Phoenix area — as many of Funny’s readers do — and you think you’ll be needing a new large appliance at any time in the future, you need to know about B&B Appliances, up in Sunnyslope.

Remember how Sears used to have an outlet where they’d sell returned appliances or appliances with tiny (essentially unnoticeable) dents or scratches? Well, B&B does that as a business model. They also sell new appliances for a number of brands. And they have a very highly rated repair service. I went up there this morning to ask the proprietor a question, and…I think I’m in love!

Late, a double oven; now, two storage cabinets
Late, a double oven; now, two storage cabinets

Seriously: you’ll recall the nonfunctional oven. At last, the dust being more or less settled between client projects just now, I decided to get the control panel fixed, then leave the breaker switched turned off permanently so that if I ever sell the house or my son wants to sell it after I croak over, the place will have a working oven without my having to go out and spend $2,500 for the privilege. Sears, we know from experience, charges a little over $500 to fix the damn thing — which they’ve had to do twice since I moved into the Funny Farm.

On the outside chance that a few bucks could be saved on the present fix-it job, I got a referral to an appliance repairman from Wonder-Handyman. This guy will be visiting a little later today. While we were on the phone, he looked up the model number and opined that the control panel is no longer being made, but (said he) it could be shipped off to a place that will rebuild it. Cost: about $450. That’s a little less than I’ve paid for Sears’s repairs.

But I wondered. So this morning I trotted up to B&B and asked if it was true the part is no longer made but can be refurbished. After much prestidigitation. the guy discovered that no, it’s not true; yes, you can ship off the Deceased to some place back East, where it can be rebuilt; that the rebuild cost is indeed around $500…and…if you want a BRAND NEW one to blow out by using your oven in a normal way, you’ll now have to pay $750 for the damn thing.

Well. IMHO $750 is the same as “no longer made.” It’s no longer made in my world, anyway.

The B&B guy recommended the rebuild as the least expensive alternative: that is…rebuild and never use the oven again. Let the next owner figure out what to do with the thing. He also remarked, in passing, that these fine made-in-China control panels last an average of five years.

While he was exploring the Internet in search of full and accurate answers to my questions, I explored the old-fashioned high-inefficiency (read “working”) clothes washers on display. They had a nice variety of agitator washers, new and refurbished, from major brands.

i. hate. the. samsung. goddamn. washer!
i. hate. the. samsung. goddamn. washer!

So I asked him about his choices, explaining about the wonderful clothes-braiding Samsung and remarking that Samsung had given M’hijito $150 for his recalled exploding Samsung. He laughed and said that one of his customers had been offered $34 for hers . She opined aloud about where Samsung could shove it.

He drew my attention to the Speed Queen, a brand I’d never considered in my life. Speed Queen, he said, for years has focused on the commercial market: they make heavy-duty washers for institutions and for laundromats. When the fine, politically correct new HE washers came out and Speed Queen’s executives became aware of the Season of Our Discontent, they decided the company should venture into the consumer market. Hence: these sturdy, large-capacity, steel-tub machines.

And…hang onto your hats, folks…SPEED QUEEN WASHERS ARE MADE IN AMERICA! The guy said they’re not just assembled here: the parts are made in the USA, too. He added that the life expectancy for the machines is about 20 years.

Halleujah, brothers and sisters!

I thought about that. Stuffed a lightweight cotton summer blanket into the hated Samsung. Ran the hour-and-ten-minute cycle. Pulled it out, pretty much sopping wet, and threw it into the surviving Kenmore dryer. Thought about it some more.

As soon as New RepairDude is safely on his way with the dead oven control panel, I’m gonna jump in my car and FLY back up to B&B to buy one of them thar Speed Queens.

Samsung Washers: Told you so!

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P1030121My son alerted me to the new recall of “exploding” Samsung clothes washers. My own piece of junk is not on this list. Which is just as well: Samsung isn’t doing much to help people who own machines that have fallen apart or are likely to.

Consumer Reports, the poor fools, placed the Samsung at the top of its ratings. If you get a kick out of other consumers’ squawks of outrage, don’t miss the hilarious (and not so funny…) endless string of CR readers’ eye-popping experiences with these fine machines. Scroll to the bottom of the article, down to the comments section, and start reading. It’s amazing.

And gratifying: now I feel like maybe I’m not a total nut case. Many a Samsung user reports half-assed performance, ruined clothing, long cycles that leave you with dirty clothes…and on and on. And apparently models other than the ones on the recall list have some alarming mechanical problems.

So far mine has not done anything that looks dangerous — but I hardly use it. Most of the time, I wash my clothes by hand (because the washer either won’t get them clean or braids them into knots, as above) and just run them through the washer’s rinse cycle. That doesn’t make much of a demand on the washer.

My son’s crapped out a couple of years ago…and since he bought his a couple years after I bought mine, his didn’t last long at-tall. Considering the price of the damn things, that is just outrageous. Apparently they’re going to send him about $150.

Whoop de doo.

Here in town there’s a store that sells brand-new scratched and dented appliances and that does repair work. It’s NOT a big box store. It’s NOT Sears  (never again!). And it IS a locally owned business. Even though my Samsung is running OK on the rinse cycle, I’m seriously thinking it’s time to pay that merchant a visit to see if they can come up with something that…oh…you know…works?

Presto-Digito! NEW KITCHEN CABINETS

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WallOvenBlackSears2Yes. Magically, two new wall cabinets have materialized in the Funny Farm’s kitchen.

The previous owners handsomely refurbished the kitchen, which was one of the reasons I bought the house. They put in a lovely Kenmore double oven, very excellent. And because (unlike them) I cook a lot, I actually…well…used it.

Yes. I know. Bad move.

What can I say?

After a bit, as you might expect, the thing went on the fritz.

Control panel needed to be replaced.

Time passed — not much of it, we might add.

New control panel has to be replaced.

WTF!?!?? I say to the Sears repairdude. I just changed this thing out, to the tune of $500!

Why, replies he, are you using the self-cleaning cycle?

Huh? say I.

As it develops, if you have a self-cleaning wall oven, you’d better not try to use it. There’s not enough room around a wall oven installation for enough ventilation to cool the motherboard, and so if you turn on the self-cleaning cycle, you will fry the motherboard.

Yup.

Since then, I’ve never once turned on the self-cleaning cycle.

But. I did use the broiler the other day — wanted an open-face melted cheese sandwich. Mistake, apparently. When I got home from today’s junketing, I walked into a kitchen resonating with the oven’s pathetic bleating. And yes: the error message is F7: bad motherboard.

I was less broke then, when I learned about this quirk, than I am now, and it took several months before I could afford to have the damn thing fixed. Today, it’s flat out of the question.

Fortunately, there’s a breaker switch dedicated to the oven. So…the oven and its convenient little digital clock are off. And they’re going to stay off.

I’m going to convert the two ovens into storage space, which will be handy.

countertopovenAs for melted cheese sandwiches? I may get one of those countertop toaster ovens. A fancy Kitchenaid convection(!) oven can be had for less than the cost of a new motherboard, and a regular boring toaster oven costs all of $129.

For serious baking, the grill in the backyard does the job. Yes. I have actually baked bread in a backyard grill. Does a very nice job, indeed.

 

Fleas?????? Is there ever a break from the timesuck?

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So I wake up this morning with a nice little pattern of bug bites on one arm. Now, there’s nothing unusual about the occasional solitary bug bite around this place. Arizona, as the local climate has warmed and the feckless humans have flooded in and tried to clone the upper Midwest wherever they come to light, has been overrun with mosquitoes.

You never used to see a mosquito here. Now they fill your house every spring and hang around until December, when the weather chills down a bit. One day a couple of years ago, I killed a dozen of the little monsters inside the house!

We haven’t had so many this year. I don’t know why. Haven’t had many flies, either.

WhatEVER. All that notwithstanding, I happen to know what a mosquito bite looks like. Having grown up in the Middle East, I also happen to know what flea bites look like.

Mosquitoes are not piggish eaters. They sit down to dinner once and then get up and fly away. Fleas, on the other hand, have never met a blood meal that they didn’t want more of. Right away, please.

So three or four really itchy bites clustered within a radius of an inch or two or three usually means a flea has come visiting.

And you know what that means?

Oh yes.

TIME SUCK!

Time suck of the first water.

You need to get on the job of flea-whacking instantaneously if you’re to have any hope whatsoever that your DIY efforts will work.

So. First thing after the requisite doggy-walk (we do the doggy walk at 5 a.m. because i wish to live and because one corgi will boss a human around but two corgis will reduce the human to full obedience at all times), it was into the bathtub with the hounds.

Actually, before we left, I inspected both pooches for fleas and didn’t find any signs that I recognize. It’s pretty easy to tell if the animal is heavily infested. My mother once brought a badly infested cat home from a pet store…the vet taught us how to recognize flea eggs and flea debris. They don’t seem to have any eggs in their fur, nor did I see any flea sh!t. However, both dogs had a strange dark deposit around their hindmost titties. I think this was dirt — probably congealed urine, since a female dog can spray her belly by accident, especially when it assumes as deep a squat as a corgi does. So I smeared these areas with olive oil, figuring some oil would loosen whatever that was.

Olive oil will not harm your dog, BTW. Baby oil and bath oil may, since they consist mostly of mineral oil. That’s antithetical to an animal that can be guaranteed to lick the stuff off.

So by the time we got home from a mile’s stroll, the dogs had been marinating in olive oil for twenty or thirty minutes.

Into the bathtub.

You do not want to know what a circus it is to launder a corgi. When they say a corgi is “a big dog in a small dog’s body,” that’s not quite spot on. The fact is, under certain circumstances, a corgi IS a big dog.

Two wrestling matches later, the dogs were clean and the bathtub was filthy.

Scrub bathtub out.

Now it was time to gather ALL the bedding, including the bedpad, all the mats the dogs lay on, all the area rugs in the house, all the clothing I’ve worn lately all the towels I’ve used, all the…whatever. These all needed be washed in HOT hot water and then dried on the dryer’s hottest cycle.

Six loads of laundry got stacked in the garage next to the washer.

The ACCURSED GODDAMN SAMSUNG WASHER!

That thing takes about an hour for every load. So we’re looking at SIX HOURS OF LAUNDRY out there!!!!!!!!!

One of the damn thing’s many charms is that you can’t select “hot” water on most of the cycles. There’s actually only one cycle that lets you select very hot water: the one that’s intended to “sanitize” the inside of the thing, since as we know these so-called “high-efficiency” washers tend to grow mold and stink to high heaven.

“High efficiency.” SNORT!!!!!! How exactly is having to run the electric for SIX HOURS to do a three-hour (or less) job “efficient”?

Then it was time to drag out the vacuum. Vacuum every nook and every cranny in the bedroom. Vacuum every square inch of the mattress and bed springs. This is complicated by  the fact that it’s one of those “pillow top” monsters that were in style at the time I bought the thing. “Pillow tops” are held in place by stitched-down patterns, which collect…yes…dirt and debris. Had to get an orange stick and a stiff brush to dig that stuff out of the stupid stitch thingies and THEN vacuum all that up. Endless.

Then climb under the bed (which weighs too much for me to budge) and vacuum every square inch under there. And vacuum every square inch under the dressers. And in the closet. And up the hall. And in the other rooms. Ugh.

Thank god for tile floors.

It’s almost 10 a.m. Good thing the dogs rousted me out at 5, otherwise I’d still be doing all that. Well, I am still doing all that: the accursed goddamn Samsung washer is grinding away out there.

It’s 10:03 a.m. and I have done no work. I mean, real work on the writing empire. Well. I uploaded an image to the Camptown Races blog, which will be called “Camptown Ladies Talk.” The images I wanted to use turned out to be a) too large and b) too difficult to fit into the header image space without some serious Photoshopping. But I found some images in the public domain that simply defy belief.

If you’d like a preview, you can peek at her here. But IF YOU ARE WITH THE CHURCH, DO NOT GO THERE, DEAR FELLOW CHOIR MEMBERS, CLERGY, AND HANGERS-ON because that will pop your eye out. That site is strictly adults only. Racy adults.

Yesterday I finished what I hoped would be the last chapter of the current Bobbi and the Biker bookoid, but as it fell together, I found Bobbi and Billy demanded at least one more chapter. This is alarming, because we’re already over 7,000 words. Whatever wraps this episode up is gonna have to be succinct.

This weekend I also posted book III of Fire-Rider. The marauding war bands get back on the road, after having flattened a major enemy stronghold, and the journey begins…

And now, speaking of metaphorical journeys, I must away!

Tang Me! Tang Me! Yuh oughta take a rope an’…

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…hang the dishwasher? 🙂 Remember the rage, a few years back, for cleaning out the dishwasher with Tang, the fake-food sugared orange drink mix? Ever wondered how that worked?

Welp, after much scrubbing and cleaning and vinegaring of the stinky freakingbrandnewDishwasher, I got the weird smell out. For awhile. But within a week or so, it was back.

The machine doesn’t seem to be dirty. In fact, I began to wonder if it was the water — the city adds some very strange chemicals to the water as the weather starts to warm. This is a new odor, but every now and again we do get a new odor. Sometimes even the dogs won’t drink the water. Then I have to fill their dish with filtered water for days on end. But after much sniffing around, I decided that probably wasn’t the issue.

In a moment of desperation, I decided to try this folk remedy. Looked it up on the Web; found a few handymen holding forth on YouTube, explaining how much to dump in. Took a drive to the Safeway, which carried the stuff, oddly enough, down at the end of the aisle full of fake drinks.

A small plastic bottle of ominous-looking orange powder costs about three bucks.

You empty the dishwasher, and then you sprinkle about a cup of the stuff — about half the small Tang container — around the floor of the washer. Turn the kitchen faucet to hot and run it till the water coming out is is hot as it’s going to get. Set the dishwasher on the sani-cycle. Then turn it on and let ’er rip!

After a couple of hours of this, the Bosch came to the end of its cycle and sat there in dignfied silence.

Opened the door, stuck my head in, and took a whiff.

It smelled very much like…well, orange Kool-Aid.

Better than how it smelled before, anyway.

After the first washing of dirty dishes, the machine still smelled a little of artificial orange flavoring. (Do astronauts really drink this stuff? REALLY???? And it takes a research grant to figure out why they’re ailing when they come out of orbit?) But that scent dissipated within a day, and we went along for several days absent the weird odor.

By  now — about three weeks later — the odor seems to be coming back slightly, but not bad.

You’d expect to clean out the filter thingie in the bottom of the washer about once a month, if not more often. It does collect a little grease, which may be the source of the smell, although…I’ve never had any other washer create a smell from its filter, and I’ve had a few dishwashers in my life, including an earlier model of the Bosch. Nothing like a little upgrade to make your life more pleasant, eh?

So if you dumped in a cup of Tang each time you washed the filter (I soak mine in hot detergent water laced with about 1/3 cup baking soda), you’d use one package of the stuff a month, adding an extra $3.00 to your monthly housekeeping bill.

No doubt you can get the stuff cheaper if you shop in venues other than Safeway. Plus it’s the sort of stuff that coupons are made for — I’ll bet you can get the small size for two bucks, if you look around.

How to Wash Clothes in a Samsung Washer

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How to wash clothes in a fancy, expensive Samsung top-loading washer? Don’t.

P1030351The Samsung top-loader is not up to the job of laundering garments. If an item has a sleeve, a pants leg, or a strap, it will end up literally braided into anything else you put in the machine. Packing every stitch of clothing into mesh bags does not help and often ends with a tangle, too. These wads can take a good ten minutes to pull apart, and the extricated clothing will often be damaged and always be wadded into intractable wrinkles.

The machine does a decent job on sheets, comforters, and blankets, which do not seem to tangle inside the Samsung. But it simply is not designed to wash clothing.

Well, owning one of these pieces of junk and finding myself unable to afford to buy another washer that probably won’t work any better, I realized I had to find another way to wash my jeans, underwear, and shirts.

Luckily, my house came equipped with an indispensable tool that makes this project possible: a utility sink, conveniently  located next to the washer/dryer hookups.

Here’s what you’ll need to do your laundry-day chore:

• Samsung top-loading washer
• Good-sized household utility bucket, plastic
• A utility sink, preferably adjacent to the washer, preferably with running hot as well as cold water
• A functioning dryer or clothes line
• Dirty clothes, separated into whites and coloreds
• HE detergent, or a small amount of clear, unperfumed dish detergent
• Oxygen bleach (optional)
• Spot remover such as Spray ’n’ Wash (optional)

P1030350Place your bucket in the sink. Place a load of clothing into the bucket. If you have a lot of dirty clothes, you may have to divide the whites and the coloreds into several small loads each, by way of discouraging the Samsung from twisting them into braids.

Pretreat stains and extra dirt: spray or squirt on some spot remover; if desired, spot-treat stains with oxygen bleach. In some cases, such as stains from blood and other bodily excretions, O2 bleach will foam up and “eat” the offending substance — that’s because it contains hydrogen peroxide, the same stuff that foams up if you pour it on a cut, imagining H2O2 will disinfect. It won’t, but it looks impressive. And it does bleach blood and wine out of fabric, more or less.

For whites: Add a small amount of HE detergent —  no more than enough to fill the cap to the line, but really much less is needed; about half that amount will do, especially if you have a small load. Add a capful of oxygen bleach, if desired.

If you are using oxygen bleach, fill the bucket with enough HOT water to cover the clothes. Oxygen bleach is activated by hot water, so if you choose to include it, wash in water that is as warm as you can stand it without being hot enough to burn your hands. It also sometimes contains the equivalent of old-fashioned bluing (that’s why it’s blue…get it? heh heh heh!), which causes white fabric to come out looking DayGlo white. So if you like your whites extravagantly white, use plenty oxygen (not chlorine!!!) bleach.

Unless you like your clothing decorated with holes and white spots, do not use chlorine bleach with this method.

If you’re not using O2 bleach, don’t waste your money on heating the water. Fill the bucket with cold water.

Now go away for 20 minutes or more. Come back whenever you feel so inclined. Roll up your sleeves and slosh the clothing around in the bucket for a few minutes. Scrub any known spots, either by rubbing the fabric together vigorously or by scrubbing each spot with an old toothbrush, a nailbrush, or a scrub brush.

P1030352Pour out the water. Wring the clothes gently (no need to get rough with this) to squeeze out most of the soapy water. Place them in the utility sink. Put the plug in the drain and fill the tub with enough cold water to cover the wet clothes generously. Hot water is not needed for the rinse process.

Again slosh the clothes around, to rinse out as much of the soap as you can, easily. This does not have to be perfect, because you’re about to make the Samsung rinse them for you. In fact, if you haven’t overdone the soap and you have used HE detergent instead of dish soap, you can probably skip this step.

Wring the clothes gently again, squeezing out the (now soapy) rinse water. Toss each item into the washer tub after wringing it. Drain the utility sink tub and set the plug where it can’t accidentally float into position to stop the drain again.

Set the Samsung cycle on Rinse/Spin, with cold water. Close the lid and turn the thing on.

P1030355

Twenty minutes later, come back and retrieve your clothes. Place them in the dryer or hang them to dry, as desired.

For colored clothing: Follow the same instructions, with these two exceptions:

• Do not add oxygen (or any other) bleach.
• Use cold, not hot, water for washing.

Here’s how a pair of jeans came out of the Samsung this morning:

P1030359Straight out of the wash, they’re hardly wrinkled at all. A couple of sharp shakes, and they don’t even have to go into the dryer!

Apparently the braiding process occurs during the Samsung’s wash cycle, not during the rinse cycle. This load of colored clothes had two pair of jeans, two long-sleeved shirts, several kitchen towels, three or four pairs of socks, and a cami with spaghetti straps. Not one item tangled. They all came out of the wash almost wrinkle free, with the exception of a knit shirt, which will shake out nicely in the dryer.

Notice the amazing number of advantages to this strategy:

In the first place, the accursed Samsung takes an hour and ten minutes to run an ordinary load that my old Kenmore agitator washer would do in twenty minutes. To wash one piddling load of laundry!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Presumably  it takes some time to work 15 pounds of wet clothing into braids, eh?

Even if you let a bucket of clothing soak for 20 minutes — it’s really not necessary unless the stuff is very dirty, indeed — it only takes about five or ten minutes to slosh the stuff around in the sink and transfer it into the washer tub. The Samsung’s Rinse/Spin cycle runs through in just 21 minutes. So let’s say 20 minutes to soak + 10 minutes to wash (very generous) + 21 minutes to rinse and spin out the water: that’s 51 minutes: twenty minutes less than it takes the Samsung to wash a load of clothes on the only cycle that uses enough water to actually get them clean. If you don’t presoak a load, you’re done with the job in 31 minutes.

Second: You control the amount of water that’s used. You can use as much or as little water as necessary to get your clothes clean. Most of the time, that’s not much.

But when you do need plenty of water to deal with a large load or with something that’s stained or unusually dirty, you don’t have to do battle with an infuriating machine to get it.

Third: You use a very minimal amount of energy: the washer runs less than 1/5 of the amount of time the damn thing would take to run through a functional wash cycle.

Fourth: You can use as much or as little detergent as you please.

Fifth: You’re not chained to using ultra-expensive HE detergent. If you’re willing to stand there and rinse thoroughly by hand, you can use dish detergent or clothes detergent that actually works (assuming any of that is still on the market).

Sixth: Your clothes are going to last much, much longer. Machine washing is hard on clothing. Even if a machine doesn’t wrap everything into wads and braids, the action inside any machine abrades, stretches, twists, and wads fabrics, adding hugely to wear and tear. Hand washing, being gentler, extends a garment’s lifetime, saving you on your wardrobe budget.

Seventh: You will never be worked into a high rage by your wash machine, thereby reducing the wear and tear on you and extending your own functional lifetime.

Whites in the 20-minute rinse/spin cycle. NO BRAIDS, NO WADS, NO WRINKLES! Isn't that clear lid cool? Especially when you don't expect the machine to actually wash clothes...
Whites in the 20-minute rinse/spin cycle. NO BRAIDS, NO WADS, NO WRINKLES! Isn’t that clear lid cool? Especially if you don’t expect the machine to actually wash clothes…