Measure twice, cut three or four times

(Almost) naked staircase

When we left off yesterday, I had just finished removing all the carpeting, step by step (right).

As much as I wish I could dispense with the carpet entirely, it's not going to happen. The treads are extremely unlovely 2x12 pine with rough bullnoses cut into both edges and riddled with staples holding down the carpet underlayment. Not only is staining them out of the question (and I don't want painted steps), but the treads are captured in rather loose mortise slots in the stringers that can only be disguised by carpet. It is possible to get thin hardwood treads to cover pine treads – and they look pretty nice – but I'd be looking at at least $600-$700 to do that, which isn't in the budget.

So... the carpet pieces will be reused to cover the treads once I've gotten the risers installed.

About those risers. Here's my plan for inserting them:

Retrofitting the staircase with risers, cross-section (rough sketch, not to scale)

I need to slice off the rear bullnose on each stair (see upper stair in sketch), then fit a board in each opening, nailed or screwed through the riser into the back end of each tread and through the tread above into the top of the riser. Then I'll recarpet each tread from the back edge at the bottom of the riser to the front edge and down around the bullnose (which isn't as long as this unscaled sketch implies). Actually, I'm going to experiment to see if I can attach the riser directly to the rear bullnose and skip the step of slicing them off – the carpet would cover the small dip at the back of the tread – but I suspect it will leave the front bullnose extending too far.

That is, I'll experiment once I get a board cut to the correct length. I measured the the distance between the stringers, which looked to be 35-1/4", maybe a tad less. I marked the length on a 1x8 board and marked the cutting line with my speedsquare. A quick pass with my handy-dandy Craftsman Nextec lithium-battery-powered 3-1/4" power saw and I took the board in to try it in an opening. It started into place then jammed. Too long, apparently. I took it back out on the deck and shaved a bit off the end. Still wouldn't go into place. Rinse and repeat... okay, this is getting frustrating. I remeasured between the stringers, and remeasured the board. It should fit, dammit.

Unless... something isn't square? I know the board ends are square. Which leaves the opening between the stringers and steps. I got my speedsquare and set it flush against the bottom of the tread, with the top corner against the stringer. And there's the bottom of the square, almost 1/4" away from the stringer.

               

Just a bit out of square

Checking the other side confirmed it: the opening is a parallellogram (right) instead of a rectangle. I haven't checked every step yet, but so far it looks like the whole staircase is slightly racked to one side (but not as much as the parallelogram pictured, thankfully). If so, then I'm going to have to cut each board a couple of degrees out of square on each end to match the openings; the discrepancy is way too much to solve by simply cutting the boards short.

I think I need a miter saw...

Downstairs, Downstairs

When I bought my house, I didn't think much about the fact that the coat closet was two rooms away from the front door, next to the downstairs bathroom and master bedroom. Or that the only linen closet was upstairs. I put up a peg rack by the front door for a couple of in-season jackets; crowded the rest of my coats and jackets into my bedroom closet, along with bedding, blankets, and bath towels; and put free-standing shelves in the coat closet to house hand towels and washcloths, backup toiletries and my toilet paper supply, the vacuum cleaner, and assorted hats, scarves, and gloves.

That was almost twelve years ago. I long since started hankering for a coat closet near the front door to take the pressure off the bedroom closet, and I decided several years ago just what I wanted to do about it: close in the space under the stairs. As you can see in these photos I took before moving in, there's a ton of space there. The coat closet will go in the high end, and there can be more storage under the lower end – a dedicated cupboard for the vacuum cleaner (my current one won't fit in the old coat closet) comes to mind.

I have never used the "breakfast bar", and want to at least partially close off the opening from the kitchen so I can install some normal-height upper cabinets to replace the short, high cabinets that are nearly useless. So walling in the section behind the staircase fits right into my plans for the kitchen.

Open risers

Something that's hard to see in the old photos, but is clear in a current one (at right), is that the staircase has open risers, with the stair treads individually wrapped in carpeting. This, unfortunately, is not conducive to using the space for a closet, as dust and debris from the stairs drops into the space (not to mention that you wouldn't want this view into a closet). The need to close in the risers is one of the many circumstances that have so far kept my coat closet from making the transition from wish list to reality.

Until now. I have finally taken the first step toward modifying the staircase: removing the carpet from the stairs so I can install risers. The photo at right shows the staircase with the carpet removed from two treads in the middle of the run. (They were the easiest to get to.) This was a fairly strenuous procedure; the carpet on each step was secured underneath with two rows of staples along the cut edges, requiring the vigorous application of a small prybar once a corner could be located to start the process.

Carpet fastened on bottom side of stair treads

I couldn't just slice the carpet off with a utility knife, because I'm going to need to use the pieces to recover the treads once I've installed the risers. More on that in the next installment.

Screwed and unscrewed

So, it looked like I should upgrade the poor old eMac in hopes of getting somewhat better performance and facilitate the conversion/preservation of my brother's genealogy files. Adding RAM is a simple process, illustrated in the User's Manual. The eMac has two slots, each of which can take up to a 512MB chip. I decided to add 512MB to the second slot, leaving the original 128MB in place. 640MB would be plenty for OS X 10.4, which is as high as you can go on an eMac.

I found the chip I needed on Other World Computing for a grand $14.95 (back in 2002, when this computer was made, a 512MB chip was $99, which probably explains why my brother didn't upgrade it back then), and while I was at it I ordered a new backup battery ($4.95) for the PRAM. Might as well replace that while I had the case open – it's in the same compartment. In a few days, I had my RAM and battery, and set out to install them. Should be, oh, a 15-minute job, right?

My favorite version of Murphy's Laws comes to mind here:

• Anything that can go wrong, will.
• First corollary: Nothing is as simple as it seems.
• Second corollary: Everything takes longer than it should.

I made it through the first two steps of the procedure before Murphy raised his ugly head, and then the main law and both corollaries came into play.

1. Turn your computer off... Disconnect all cables except the power cord from your computer. [That amounts to the keyboard and mouse. Think I can handle it.]
2. Place a soft, clean towel... on the desk... Slowly lift up and turn the computer so the screen is facing down on the cloth. [Not quite as easy, given the weight of the monster, but doable.]
3. Use a Phillips screwdriver to loosen the captive screw on the memory access panel.

Hah. Easy for them to say. Since it didn't specify what size Phillips screwdriver to use, I tried every size in my considerable arsenal. While a plain old #2 seemed to be the best fit overall, nothing would budge that damned screw, which promptly stripped its head. I tried every trick I could dredge up on Google for loosening stripped screws, from placing a rubber band over the slots to give the screwdriver something to grip, to covering the screwdriver with duct tape, to wedging a straight-head driver in the stripped slots. The screw has a very thin flat head that recesses into the cover, so it was impossible to grip it with Vise-Grips. And it's too small for any readily-available screw-removal tool to work, even if I had one, which I don't. "Captive" screw, indeed – I was almost convinced that it had been super-glued in place.

After about three hours or so of screwing around, or, more accurately, not screwing around, I decided the only remaining option was the brute-force method of cutting a straight slot across the screw head that would take a large straight-head screwdriver. That left only the problem of what to use to cut the slot. As far as I know, I don't possess a hacksaw, and even if I did, the recessed screwhead meant I couldn't get at it with a hacksaw. I do, however, have a Dremel rotary tool, which could simply cut into the plastic surrounding the screw. A quick check of the kit revealed that it did not contain any cutting wheels. A road trip was in order.

A short time later I was in the tool aisle of the closest orange big-box home-improvement store. I did peruse the drill-bit section for screw-removal tools, but as I feared, there was nothing intended for small electronics screws. So I moved on to the Dremel display, where I snapped up a package of 10 cutting wheels.

Back home, I installed a wheel on the Dremel and carefully started cutting a slot in the screwhead. It took longer than I expected, given how soft the metal appeared to be to strip the head so easily, but finally I got enough of a slot to give a screwdriver some purchase. (The screwhead was so thin, I was worried about cutting straight through the outer edges.) I inserted my large straight-head screwdriver, applied pressure – and it started to move! At last, I removed the screw (which was not, it seems, "captive" after all) and pulled off the user access panel.

In short order, I completed the remaining steps for installing the RAM, and replaced the PRAM backup battery. I briefly got hung up in step 7 of the latter procedure, which was "Locate the PMU reset button inside the computer." The drawing clearly shows the button below the RAM slots on the right side of the opening. There was no button in evidence in my eMac... until I noticed a small button in the corresponding location on the left side, which I duly pressed for one second as instructed. (At least, I assumed that was the PMU reset button, and so far the eMac hasn't shown any signs that the PMU isn't operating correctly.)

I reinstalled the access panel – tightening the screw barely enough to keep it in place – set the Mac upright, plugged it in, and booted it. It recognized the RAM, and I reset the system date/time once more.

The next step was to upgrade the OS. I put that off to another day, seeing as how I just killed an entire day completing a 15-minute RAM upgrade. But, as of now, I have an eMac with adequate RAM and OS X 10.4.11, with Word: Mac 2004 and iWork '09 installed. It remains to be seen what I have to do to get those documents converted, but at least the memory and the OS shouldn't bog down in the process.

Lost in translation

OK, so I now have my brother's electronic genealogy writings. But they're not much good if I can't read them. And this where I ran smack into the issue of technological obsolescence.

The email archives actually were easy. Both the older ones, in an ancient version of Eudora, and the more recent ones (i.e., circa 2002-2005), in early Apple Mail.app, were in a standard mailbox format that I could import directly into a more recent version of Apple mail. So they're readily readable.

The word-processing files, apparently a mix of AppleWorks 5 and Appleworks 6 formats, are another matter. When Apple declared "end of life" status for AppleWorks in 2007, they intended that the new iWork suite would replace AppleWorks, and iWork Pages was supposed to be able to open/convert AppleWorks Word docs. Furthermore, AW is supposed to be able to save files in Microsoft Word format. Finally, some versions of Microsoft Word are supposed to be able to open AppleWorks Word docs.

That's an awful lot of "supposed tos". The reality, I have found, is that there is no simple way to convert an AppleWorks Word doc into a modern word-processing file – at least, not with formatting retained. And, in the case of my brother's files, formatting can be pretty important; they tend to include embedded images; differing paragraph styles/font sizes/bold and italic styles to distinguish generations and types of information (formal and informal); footnotes; and even heavy use of a glyph font (WingDings) as a shorthand code for genealogical terms (born, died, married, divorced...). Poor translation of formatting can have results ranging from confusing to incomprehensible.

Let's start with iWork.Turns out the latest version (iWork 2013) won't have anything to do with AppleWorks. Fortunately, I have a trial version of iWork '09, which is the last version that can read AppleWorks. I copied one of the AW Word files (definitely AW6, per the tell-tale "[v6.0]" that AW inserts in the file name when it converts an earler file) to my MacBook Pro and attempted to open it in Pages. No dice. Whether I went through the File>Open menu or Ctrl-clicked on the file and told it to open in Pages, all Pages would do was give me the remarkably unhelpful message that "The file could not be opened."

OK, maybe it had something to do with the MacBook Pro running Mavericks. It wouldn't be the first time some process went totally wonky with an updated OS. I fired up my long-dormant MacBook – still comfortably running 10.6 Snow Leopard – installed the iWork '09 trial, and tried again. Same result. Can't install iWork on the old eMac; it requires at minimum 10.4.11 (Tiger), and probably more RAM than the old beast has.

How about Microsoft Word? Well, Word 2011 certainly doesn't recognize AW, but Word 2004 is supposed to, and that's still installed on the MacBook. Sure enough, it had an AppleWorks 6 file selection in the Open menu. Unfortunately, it seemed to believe that my file was not an AppleWorks file, and refused to open it.

Maybe I needed to go back even further with Word – I still have the install disc for Office: Mac 2001. It's only for PowerPC, so I couldn't install it on the MacBook, but I could install it on the eMac. Unfortunately, it turned out to have an import translater only for AppleWorks 5, not 6. I could scarcely believe I had a version of Word too old for my purpose! And I couldn't try Word 2004 directly on the eMac, because it needed 256MB of RAM.

(I should note that Word can in fact "Retrieve text from any document", including AppleWorks docs, but that strips all formatting and images, converts all special characters and fonts to plain text, and leaves a considerable amount of garbage at the beginning and end of the file. It's a method of last resort.)

Maybe I should try this from the AppleWorks end and export in .doc format. Since I didn't have Word on the eMac to open an exported document, I copied the AppleWorks app to the MacBook (AW won't run on anything higher than Snow Leopard) and opened my test document. The result? Pure gibberish, mostly consisting of the little boxes that signify unprintable characters. I suspect that AppleWorks, unlike most modern Mac applications, may require actual installation rather than just dropping it into the App folder. I was probably missing some crucial components that the installer package would have provided. I do not, unfortunately, have the eMac's install discs.

Exporting a .doc from AppleWorks on the eMac and transferring it to the MacBook, I opened it in Word 2004. Well, the text was there, but the formatting was dreadful, most of the images were missing, and the fonts were... erratic, to put it mildly. Some of the WingDings symbols appeared as they should; others were converted to symbols such as ≠; and still others to accented Roman letters. I even downloaded a demo version of an application that purported to convert AppleWorks documents to RTF, and opened the RTF in Word. No images, dreadful formatting, and more erratic translation of WingDings.

Some additional Googling suggests that the WingDings issues stems from differences between the Microsoft, Macintosh pre-OS X, and Unicode character maps; in brief, when the modern version of the font is used on a modern Mac, it doesn't necessarily display the same characters as the original. Which leads me to believe that, in order to correctly display (and possibly print) these documents, I need to do it using AppleWorks, on the old eMac. And I may even need to edit them in AppleWorks to change anything in the WingDings font to the plain text equivalent of my brother's "code", before converting them to Word docs.

The trouble is, the eMac's measly 128MB of RAM and elderly OS make it both sluggish and erratic; the system froze and had to be either Force Quit or hard-booted several times in the course of backing up the files, subsequent attempts at conversion, and installation of Word. So it seemed like my best bet might be to upgrade the RAM and the OS.

To be continued...

An antique computer and a digital legacy

Not my eMac, but it looks just like this.

When my younger brother passed away ten years ago, he bequeathed me all his genealogical research, including the contents of his 2002-vintage eMac. While the estate was settled long ago, the whole mess (I'm talking 30 years of research here, and "mess" is the operative word) had remained in the "custody" of my older brother, and had languished in a storage unit until two and a half years ago, when I finally had the time (i.e., had semi-retired) to make the 600-mile trip to New England to fetch it.

I filled the back of my (very spacious) Scion xB with boxes upon boxes of the most important-looking papers and reference books. I didn't come close to fitting everything in. The computer didn't make the cut. So a year later I made a second trip. (Neither of these trips were solely to pick up the research materials, but were just my last stop on vacation trips before returning home.) Once again I filled the back of the car with more papers and books. Once again, there was still plenty left over. Once again, the computer didn't make the cut.

Last year, I didn't have the time to make a trip north. But after sifting through much of the reams of paper I had hauled home, replete with marked-up drafts of various research reports, presentations, and possible journal articles, I had concluded that in most cases I did not have the final versions of these writings on paper. Ergo, they must be on the computer. Retrieving it became a priority.

This spring, when I decided to attend a genealogy conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I realized I would be close enough to my brother's house to make it feasible to stop by for the computer after the conference was over. The arrangements did not proceed without incident – he didn't know I was coming until I called him the night before (not one, but two, emails from me had inexplicably ended up in his spam folder), and Google Maps decided to to go AWOL from my phone just as I was leaving the hotel for my brother's – but eventually I found my way there. He had his visiting son lug it out to the car ("It's heavy," said my brother), where I wedged it in with a duffle bag full of dirty laundry, along with the keyboard, mouse, and power cord.

A couple of days later, I was home. When I unloaded the car, I discovered what a whopping understatement my brother had made about the weight of the eMac. I barely managed to get this behemoth into the garage and onto the folding table that I wasn't sure could take the weight for long. I've been using laptops and LCD monitors exclusively for so long I had completely forgotten just how much a CRT, even a fairly small one, weighs. (Later I looked up the specs online and found that it weighs an even 50 pounds.)

About a week later, I heaved it off the groaning table and staggered into the house with it, where I deposited it on the coffee table, which now has another dent in its top. I hooked up the keyboard and mouse, attached the power cord, plugged it in, held my breath, and pressed the power button. Look, this computer is thirteen years old, and hasn't been used for ten years (aside from my brother booting it up once some years ago just to see if it would). For all I knew, I might have just hauled home a 50-pound doorstop.

Lo and behold, it came on and booted up with no fuss whatsoever. OK, there was the minor fact that the computer firmly believed it was January 1, 1969, but what else can you expect with a thirteen-year-old onboard battery? Minor problem. I called up the System Profiler, and found that I was running Mac OS X 10.2, aka Jaguar. (For those of you who aren't Mac aficianados, the latest version of OS X is 10.10, aka Yosemite. Jaguar is, to put it mildly, ancient history.) More alarmingly, the beast possessed a grand total of 128 MB of RAM. Not what you would call expansive.

Still, it was running. And there, spread across the desktop (literally, every slot in the "grid" was occupied, with multiple files stacked in some locations), were a myriad of folders and loose files. (Evidently, my brother did not believe in the Documents folder concept.) With any luck at all, at least some of them would be the "final" versions of some of those research reports I was looking for. The first step would be to back up the files before the computer decided to, say, experience a catastrophic drive failure – which, given its geriatric status, was not at all far-fetched.

After resetting the system date and time, I started copying files onto a USB flash drive. The first problem I encountered was the glacial copying speed. In the time it took the bits to stroll through the USB 1.1 ports found on this very earliest of eMacs, I could almost have copied the files in longhand. On top of that, the OS apparently had allowed the creation of filenames containing characters like /, <, >, and & – and my brother had taken full advantage of this – but drew the line at copying said files. Every time it encountered one of these it would stop the copy operation dead. So I ended up going through directories and manually renaming all such files so they could be copied. In addition, the copied files all had their creation dates set to the current date instead of retaining their original date stamps. This seemed a bit ominous, but I figured I could always check the dates on the originals if I needed them.

Well, so far, so good. I finally had a copy of all my brother's files, including his email. But I still needed to be able to open, edit, and print these files. Did I mention that my brother's word processor of choice was AppleWorks, which was bundled with the system software (i.e., "free")? AppleWorks reached "end of life" status in 2007, and it won't run on anything higher than OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). My MacBook Pro is at 10.9 (Mavericks). I still had some work to do.

To be continued...

Flat-out nuisance

So, last month I went on a road trip, my first in a year and a half. The genealogist in me had been wanting to dip a toe in the conference waters, and when I heard about the New England Regional Genealogy Consortium's biennial meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, I took the plunge and registered for it, beating the early-bird discount deadline by only an hour. In the ensuing weeks, I made hotel reservations, plotted my route, packed my bags, and checked the tires and fluids in my Scion xB. I was more than a bit taken aback to discover that the right-side tires, far from being underinflated, were pumped up to about 45 (front) and 50 (rear) psi. They should be about 35 psi. I hadn't touched those tires since I had the car inspected back in September! I bled off the excess and made a mental note to have some sharp words with my Scion service manager.

Finally, I set off for Rhode Island. The two-day trip out was relatively uneventful, aside from intermittent rain storms the first day and a bit of sticker shock at the gas pumps. I don't think I even got lost more than once or twice. Yes, I have GPS, using the Google Maps app on my iPhone. I don't think it likes me. But that's another story. This one is about tires.

I had picked a hotel a few miles out of downtown Providence (I'm allergic to $169/night hotels, and that's at the "special conference rate"!) and checked in on a Wednesday night. Thursday morning I found my way to the parking garage in downtown Providence, and with no idea how to get most expeditiously to the conference center, I picked a parking place at random, exited the garage, and eyeballed my way to the conference center. Come to find out, if I had just gone up the stairs one floor, there was an exit from the garage directly into the conference center!

Well, I enjoyed a number of presentations on Thursday, albeit with aching feet (the Food Court in the nearby Mall was a formidable hike away), and found my way out to the parking garage (this time without taking the "scenic route") and back to the hotel without getting lost. Friday was pretty much a repeat, apart from missing a turn going into Providence and having to go around a few blocks, and this time I knew enough not to go outside the garage to get to the conference center. I left at the end of the day, missed another turn and got that sorted out, and in due course arrived back at my hotel.

That's when everything went sort of pear-shaped. I nearly drove past the entrance and made a sharp right turn into the parking lot... but apparently, not sharp enough. I heard a loud bang, followed by a thup thup thup, and as I pulled into a parking space, I noticed a new and unfamiliar light shining on my dashboard, similar to the one at left. Astute readers will recognize this as the TPMS, or Tire Pressure Monitor System, warning light. I had never seen it before, but I did recognize trouble when I saw it.

My left front tire was quite, quite flat (about like the one at right). Apparently when I turned in, the tire went up on the edge of the curb and then dropped off, slicing the sidewall. I wish I had thought to take a photo of it, but I almost never do. Oh, yes, I've had flat tires before – in fact, the Tire Gods (I think the chief one is Vulcan) smote me with flats no less than four times between 2006 and 2009. The last was a brand new tire that had been on the car for exactly one week. That was the only time I thought to take a photo. All four flats were on my previous car, a 2002 PT Cruiser that I ditched in 2011 when the transmission decided to up and die. That explains why I hadn't seen a TPMS warning light before; I don't even know if it had been invented in 2002, but the Cruiser sure as heck didn't have one.

As it happens, all four of the previous flats had also occurred within five miles of home. Heck, the last one actually went flat sitting in my driveway. I do belong to a motor club (AARP's), and had made use of it all four times. But my car, like most these days, doesn't have a "real" spare tire, so even if I called them to put the "donut" spare on, I still had to get a new tire... in a strange city... with a conference I was still supposed to be at by 9 AM the next day. It was now around 7 PM.

I went into the hotel lobby and told the people at the desk what had happened. The young man looked up online and found a tire dealer that was less than a mile down the road from the hotel. Then he offered to put the "donut" spare on for me so I could go to the tire dealer first thing in the morning. Well, what the heck... it saved me from having to wait around the lobby for AARP to send someone out (that can take quite a while). I thanked him profusely and went up to my room.

The next morning I set off down the road to find that Firestone tire dealer. I had the street number, and it should have been on my right. I passed something where the signs said "Auto Parts" and "Mufflers", but I saw no trace of Firestone. When I realized I was well past the purported address, I looked for a place to turn around, and pulled off in the first likely-looking parking lot. I was about to back around and get back on the street, when it dawned on me that it was the parking lot of a car dealer. To be precise, a Scion dealer. And their service department was open... To hell with the phantom Firestone dealer; I parked the car and went in. Yes, they could replace my tire. Yes, they could do it right away. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes; I knew the sensor would be reset correctly; and they didn't even charge for labor. I was never so happy not to find the place I was looking for.

I missed the first session of the day, but made it through the rest of the day and the close of the conference. And when I went back to the hotel that night, I was very, very careful how I drove into the parking lot.

Down the Drain, Part 3

Continued from Down the Drain, Part 2...

While I did have a new toilet flapper on hand (heck, I'd been telling myself for months that I really ought to install the bloody thing), I didn't have a chance to fix the toilet part of the "leak" problem the next day, because I had to work (being only semi-retired). When I got home from the office, there was a hang tag on my front door verifying that someone from Public Utilities had come by to check the water meter, and sure 'nuff, found no water flow at that time. Well, that was to be expected, since by now I had shut off the hose in the back yard, and it was unlikely that the toilet would decide to refill precisely at the time he was checking the meter.

I wasn't in the mood for even minor plumbing repairs that evening, but the next morning I dug the new flapper valve out of the cupboard, shut off the water valve to the toilet, and flushed to empty out the tank. Then I unclipped the old flapper from its supports, unhooked the chain from the flush handle, and installed the new one. Easy, I've done this before. After taking up some slsck in the chain, I turned the water back on and waited for the tank to fill and shut off.

It filled. It didn't shut off. It came up to the top of the overflow tube and started overflowing. I tapped on the fill valve. I moved the float up and down manually. I pulled up on the lever. The water just kept (over)flowing. I had fixed a problem in one part of the toilet's innards, only to have another part give up the ghost. Just one damned thing...

I sighed, shut off the water supply valve, and flushed to empty the tank again. I had not fixed a fill valve before. I went hunting for my copy of the ever-useful Black & Decker Complete Guide to Home Plumbing. B&D informed me that I needed to remove the fill valve cap and, at the least, replace a rubber seal inside it. If that didn't do the trick, I would need to replace the entire fill cap. And as a last resort, I could replace the entire fill valve mechanism. I hoped the "last resort" would prove unnecessary. I have this aversion to unsealing an opening in the toilet tank, that will then have to be resealed. I have seen too many such endeavors end rather unsatisfactorily and wetly. My approach to plumbing is to go for the most minimally invasive procedure possible.

But in any case, I needed, at minimum, a new rubber seal, and maybe a replacement fill cap. I refused to contemplate needing more than that. Following the instructions in my Complete Guide, I removed the fill cap, dug out the old seal, and headed off to my friendly orange big box home improvement store. Checking out the plumbing repair section I found the exact FluidMaster replacement seal I needed. For good measure, I also picked up a replacement fill cap.

Back home, I flushed out the fill system and installed the new rubber seal, followed by the old fill cap. Once more turning on the water supply valve, I crossed my fingers and let the toilet fill. It filled to about an inch from the top of the overflow tube... and shut off. I flushed and let it refill. It shut off again. Success! It looks like I won't be needing that replacement fill cap. Not yet, anyway. I'm not returning it. If I have it, maybe I won't need it.

Epilog

That was a little over three weeks ago. Since then (knock on wood), the toilet has not refilled on its own, nor has the fill valve failed to shut off. I called the Public Utilities service rep back the same day and reported that the toilet leak was fixed and he said he would put in for an adjustment on my water bill, which would automatically carry over to an adjustment on the wastewater treatment bill.

I got my adjusted bills this week, and I have to say they're rather disappointing. In all, they took only $21.44 off the water bill and 26.81 off the treatment bill. That still leaves both bills considerably more than usual. But I suppose, considering that the overage was really due almost entirely to the outside water tap being left on rather than an actual leak, I have to consider myself lucky to get any adjustment at all.

And looking at the weather we've had here over the past week – including several inches of snow and temperatures in the 5-25 degree range – it's a good thing I discovered that running tap when I did, or my back yard would have been a good imitation of an ice rink.

Down the Drain, Part 2

Continued from Down the Drain...

As I squelched back from the now-shut-off hose bib through my sodden back yard, the principle question running through my head – well, two questions, actually – was simple:

How long had the damned thing been running?!?
And, just as important:
Who had left it running?

Look, I'm not a "yard work" person. I use that hose mainly for watering the plants in the back yard during the hot weather. I planted several small trees and shrubs back there this year, so I had been giving them a good drink whenever I remembered to, in hopes they would survive the hideous summer heat. But I don't think I had had to water anything since at least September. And since the September and November bills had been normal, clearly I hadn't left it running since then!

Besides, the last time I was out there was in November, when I took the weed whacker to my overgrown hayfield grass. (I told you, I'm not a yard work person. And no one can see the grass in the fenced back yard. So it gets a little out of hand.) Believe me, I'd have noticed the squelchiness if the hose had been running. So it wasn't me that left the hose on.

OK, the A/C service man came November 30 for my semi-annual heat pump maintenance. (That's the only reason I was out there scything down the hay cutting the grass in November, for heavens sake.) He usually uses the hose to flush crap out of the compressor enclosure. Could he have left it running? I didn't believe it. 1: He's very conscientious about cleaning up after himself. 2: The hose end was nowhere near the compressor, which is right beside the hose bib. And 3: Considering that 300 cubic feet of water had pumped out in only five days, I calculated the bill would have been for at least 2400 cubic feet, not the 1700 it was. So it wasn't the A/C man.

Who else had been in my back yard? No one that I knew of. No one that should have been there. I did recall noticing one day, some time well after the A/C man's visit, that the gate into my back yard was standing open. I remember at the time thinking vaguely that the A/C man must have left it open... but surely I had checked it after he left? Well, I closed and latched it and forgot about it.

And then I remembered the plumbing incident caused by the cable company at my next-door neighbor's, and suddenly it all fell into place.

I would lay odds that someone involved in this incident went into my back yard to get some water – maybe the cable guys wanted to wash the mud off their hands or equipment, or maybe the plumber or my neighbor needed a source of running water before the line was fixed – then left the hose running and the gate open. Since roughly the first of the year. Which, interestingly enough, would result in just the excess water usage I would expect based on that "300 cubic feet in 5 days" logged on the new meter.

I called the customer service rep back and told him what I had found. He still wanted me to replace the toilet flapper, since it really was a known problem (albeit a pretty minor one), and, oh, by the way, they don't normally make billing adjustments just because someone left a tap on, so I really needed to fix that leaky toilet. I got the message.

To be continued...

Down the Drain

So, on Wednesday the latest wastewater treatment bill landed in my inbox. It generally runs about $15.75 for two months.

This one was for $65.11. Crap.

The wastewater treatment bill is based on water consumption, so I hastily pulled up the municipal public utilities bill (which covers not only water usage, but also "service availability," sewer service*, solid waste collection, and even stormwater removal) that had arrived the day before. Typically the portion of the bill for actual water usage runs around $13 for 400 cubic feet, or 3,000 gallons, of water for about two months (roughly 62 days, ± 1).

This bill's water usage portion was $56.08, for 1700 cubic feet, or nearly 14,000 gallons of water! Double crap.

Now granted, this particular billing period was for 70 days instead of 62, but 13% more time isn't going to produce 325% higher usage. Since I hadn't entertained a platoon of houseguests over the holidays, filled a swimming pool, or opened a neighborhood carwash in my driveway, something was very, very wrong. I called customer service.

The very nice gentleman who took my call pulled up my billing history, and readily agreed that something was fishy. After a few questions (e.g., Any houseguests? No. Anyone taking over-long showers? No), he observed that they had changed out the water meter five days before the end of the billing period (well, that explained why the usage was split into two meter readings; I had been wondering about that), so he wanted to investigate the possibility that the final "pull" reading had been recorded incorrectly. He said he would call me back later that day. Given my usual experience with customer service reps, I expected that probably meant, oh, next Tuesday, but in fact he did call back at the end of the day.

When he did, unfortunately, it was to report that the reading had proved to be accurate. Moreover, he noted that the usage on the new meter did indicate that I used 300 cubic feet of water in the 5 days after the meter was changed, that is, three-quarters as much as my typical usage in two months.

In short, I must have a leak somewhere. A pretty severe leak, at that.

I was, quite frankly, baffled. My house has no basement or even a crawl space where a leak could be hiding, there's no plumbing in the garage, and any leak of such magnitude from any of my fixtures ought to be painfully obvious, as in several inches of water on the kitchen or bathroom floor. I did allow as how the toilet tank has been auto-refilling periodically for months now – I even bought a new flapper and just hadn't gotten around to installing it yet – but we're talking about once every few hours (not every few minutes), and the frequency hasn't increased since my previous bill. So I didn't see how it could be that.

He said you'd be surprised just how much water a leaky toilet can use, and asked me to shut off the water to the toilet and monitor the water level in the tank for several hours, to see if that dodgy flapper was in fact the culprit. He also asked me to check all my fixtures, under the sinks, washing machine, water heater, and so on. If I found a leak and fixed it (or had it fixed), I would get an adjustment on my bill. OK, I could do that, though I still found it unlikely that I would find anything. Then he said he would request that someone come out and check the meter on Thursday to see if there was any noticeable flow.

At that point, I remembered and told him about an incident that might be relevant. Back in December, the cable company had had the underground utility lines marked along the front edge of several house lots, with mine in the middle. I think it was between Christmas and New Year's that a work crew came around and dug a number of huge holes along that line, which seemed to be for the purpose of repairing or upgrading the cable along that stretch. Some of those holes were right next to the water meter boxes at my house and my next-door neighbor's. They finally finished the work well after dark, filled in the holes, replaced the turf, threw some straw over the surface, and left.

The next morning, my next-door neighbor found he had no running water in the house. The cable guys had apparently cut his water line, and his front yard was soggy. Public Utilities couldn't get anyone out there till Monday. My neighbor got a plumber to come out and make a repair. I thanked my lucky stars they hadn't hacked into my water line, too, and forgot about it.

Except now I wondered if maybe they had hacked into my water line, only not drastically enough to be obvious. The public utilities customer service rep agreed that it was a possibility (though he thought it should have been noticed when they changed out the meter) and that he would have it checked, and said goodbye.

By now it was about 5:30. I decided to do a quick check of the kitchen plumbing before supper. Nope, no leaks. A glance at the patio door reminded me of the outside hose bib; better make sure that wasn't dripping. I stepped outside and off the deck.

The ground squelched. To my horror, the nozzle of the hose connected to that tap was lying beside the deck, not just dripping, but happily burbling out water at a pretty good clip. The whole area was waterlogged. I squelched to the faucet and shut it off.

I had found my "leak."

To be continued...
 
* Yes, we get billed separately, by two different entities, for the existence of the sewer pipes themselves and for the treatment of what goes through them. The line for "service availability" means I get billed for the potential of being able to run a tap or flush a toilet, even if I don't. For that matter, I get billed for stormwater removal even if it doesn't rain.

Welcome to my life

I used to keep a blog called Hinterspace. Oh, it's still out there, though my last post was well over three years ago. Given that some of my most frequent tags were "joys of home ownership" (39), "job hunting" and "unemployment" (total of 30), and  "misadventures" (25); bolstered by "weather" (16), "customer service" (14), "joys of car ownership" (9) and "malevolent appliances" (3) ... well, I think you get the idea.

In short, life in Hinterspace was – and still is – just one damned thing after another.

And now, after a year of posting snippets of my family history as The Down East Genealogist on my genea-blog, Pine Trees and Pedigrees, my renewed desire for a non-genealogical blog leads me to launch, if you will, the new Hinterspace.

Welcome to Just One Damned Thing After Another.