Category: Life

Garden hose

Don’t buy garden hoses with aluminum fittings — generally silver colored instead of brass.  These fittings will corrode and seize to your hose nozzles, sprinklers, and faucets.  They then have to be cut off and generally ruin the mating part.  Existing hoses can be salvaged by cutting off the aluminum fittings and installing brass fittings available from any hardware store.

Also, try to avoid aluminum in electrical fittings and switches.  The aluminum eventually forms a surface oxide layer that causes open and/or intermittent circuits and, in some cases, fires.  Years ago there was a brief effort to use aluminum wire in residential wiring before the fire hazard was recognized.  It is hard to avoid aluminum in cheap lamp sockets but the effort will be worth it.  As a couple of personal examples: our son kept fighting an intermittent ceiling light — replacing bulbs, switch, and breaker — until I swapped out the old aluminum lamp socket.  At another time, my garage door manual button stopped working — the remotes worked fine.  This was eventually traced to the use by the manufacturer of an aluminum washer under a terminal riveted to a circuit board.  There was no visible corrosion, just an invisible oxide layer that formed under the rivet head.  A bit of solder bridging over the washer from the terminal to the board cured the problem.

Aluminum is great for cookware and airplanes.  Not so much for water fittings or electrical connections.

 

P.S.  Since I posted this the Chinese have noticed people catching on and they are now coloring their aluminum and zinc hose fittings to look like brass.  The solid brass fittings should say so.  Any weasel words like brass color, brass filled, or brass plated should raise a red flag.  Generally brass fittings are machined compared to plated zinc which is usually molded.  Brass is over 3 time heavier than aluminum.  You can tell the difference as aluminum just feels lighter.  Brass is only 20% heavier than zinc but you can usually tell zinc by the mold marks.  If you have a scale you can use it to determine the density (specific gravity), and thus material of a fitting:

Material Specific density g/cc

Aluminum 2.7

Brass 8.5

Steel (stainless) 7.9

Zinc 7.1

Fungus and mildew and mold, oh my!

Each time you take a shower or a hot bath, the air in your bathroom warms up several degrees and its humidity approaches 100% — excellent conditions for growing things.  You can see the effect of  humidity in the fogged mirrors and the damp feel in the room.   To help with this, run your bathroom vent fan for 30 to 45 minutes after bathing with the bathroom door pulled almost closed to keep the damp air in the bathroom until it is exhausted by the vent fan but not completely shut to provide a path for cool dry air drawn from the rest of the house.  This will help clear the mirror too.  You can get an inexpensive humidity gauge from the hardware store to track the change from high back to normal humidity to know how long to run your fan.  If you have screw base vanity lights, going back to incandescents in the bathroom will help too — leave them on with the fan.  If you’ve been fighting mold in the bathroom, this will improve the situation.

Blind Spots

The blind spot mirrors on cars are becoming irrelevant tech.  Many people now believe the side mirrors are rear view mirrors and mistakenly adjust them to look at the car directly behind, giving three views of the same vehicle.  If you pull up behind such a car, you will see the driver’s face in the side mirrors.

Automobile side mirrors are not rear view mirrors.  The rear view mirror is the one in the center of the windshield.  The side mirrors are safety additions to cover “blind spots”.  These are the areas behind and to each side where a car in the next lane is invisible when it pulls forward out of the rear view mirror’s field and isn’t yet far enough forward to see with peripheral vision or a glance to the side.  Properly adjusted side mirrors allow you to see a car in the blind spots and avoid a potentially disastrous lane change or turn resulting in a collision that will be your fault.

The blind spot mirrors can be roughly adjusted while parked.  Put the driver’s seat in its normal position and adjust the mirrors up or down until the horizon is in the middle of the mirror.  Lean to the left until your head touches the window and adjust the left mirror until you can just see the side of your car at the right edge of the mirror.  Lean the same distance to the right and adjust the right mirror until you can just see the side of your car at the left edge of the mirror.  This procedure produces a good approximation and will cover most blind spots.  The adjustment can be fine tuned in traffic as you observe whether you pick up passing cars in the next lane in the side mirrors before they leave the rear view field and whether you can see them with peripheral vision before they leave the side mirror fields.  Even with properly adjusted mirrors there are still blind spots for cars two lanes away and also for cars on a highway when you are merging at an angle.  But properly adjusted side mirrors will allow you to scan for converging traffic in these cases by moving your head and avoid an accident.

The really bad effect of this is that some current car engineers either do not know what the side mirrors are for, or kowtow to their marketing wonks who decided that customers do not know and shouldn’t be informed.  As a result, the blind spot mirrors on some new cars cannot be adjusted to cover the blind spots and can only be used to give a duplicate rear view.  Check this when you shop for a new car by trying the above procedure.  If the mirrors can’t be correctly adjusted, register your dissatisfaction, go somewhere else, and save yourself from a potential accident.

The Great Banana Conspiracy

The Great Banana Conspiracy was triggered by a technological advance.  Around 1880 the commercial production of residential kitchen iceboxes began, bringing the promise of preserving perishable foods.  The governing board of the world banana cartel immediately recognized the threat to their bottom line.  The cartel decided upon a disinformation campaign based on a kernel of truth: in a sealed container the natural plant hormones released by bananas accelerate ripening.  This effect was already used commercially to ripen bananas for market.

The word went out: “Do not put bananas in the refrigerator.  They will turn brown and go bad.”   It was passed to the grapevine, fed into the rumor mill, gossiped over back yard fences, and inserted into the interminable Senate filibusters of the time.  It was picked up by our great-grandmothers, passed to our grandmothers, who taught it to our mothers, and now we indoctrinate our own children and grandchildren.  It has resulted in 130 years of soft, sticky, and blah bananas resting in cute little mesh slings or dangling from crescent-shaped hangers on kitchen counters.

In point of fact, when fresh bananas are put into the refrigerator, they do develop a superficial light brown dusting on the surface of their skins after a few days.  Yet when you take one out, you find that the peel underneath is still crisp and the fruit inside is fresh, firm, and sweet.  (Keep green bananas at room temperature until the bodies just turn yellow and then put them in the refrigerator.)

We were also told to not put bread in the refrigerator, effectively the same misdirection.  As a practical matter, the early iceboxes were small, and what little space they had was needed for eggs, meat, and milk.  Bread was baked at home and generally eaten on the same day.  So the habit of no refrigeration became the rule.  Modern refrigerators have eliminated the space problem and store-bought bread has replaced daily baking – however, the rule has remained while modern smaller families are taking longer to finish a loaf.

The fact is that bread keeps just fine for several days in its plastic wrap in the refrigerator.  It doesn’t get moldy, it doesn’t get soggy, it doesn’t dry out, and it doesn’t become stale.  It toasts the same way, makes perfectly good sandwiches, and stays generally indistinguishable from non-refrigerated bread.  If you need a room temperature slice or two, a mere 8 or 10 seconds in the microwave takes care of that.  And since in the refrigerator the bread does not get moldy, you won’t find yourself trying to remember how many days ago you bought it.  There may be an exotic crusty French boule that’s edible only while still warm from the oven, but if your bread came from the grocery store, throw it in the fridge.

 

Magic Rub

If you want to erase pencil marks, get a MAGIC RUB® eraser — nothing else compares.  The soft composition doesn’t damage paper fibers, and its adsorbent porosity just vacuums graphite off the surface with a light rub.  MAGIC RUB® does a good job of removing pencil marks from other surfaces as well.  This non-hardening eraser wears with use, leaving a constantly clean, fresh surface.  If you’ve only experienced the standard kind of abrasive red eraser, either block or pencil tip, which leaves a rough reddish smear, you will be surprised by the the results.  There are other white erasers — vinyl, plastic, polymer — which are not the same.  MAGIC RUB® is better than gum, kneaded, white or pink pearl®, and the long cylindrical white erasers used in stick type or powered drafting erasers.  The only close equivalent I’ve ever come across is the eraser on the end of Pentel® mechanical pencils, which may be identical for all I know.

Try it, you’ll like it.