Soon it'll be getting cold and wintery on the Mainland, which means that it'll be time for people to plan their Hawaii vacations. I have a blog post going up next Monday about using a new tool for that-- and using it right on the blog.
We learned more home-improvement lessons this week. A few days ago spouse and I decided to replace the 23-year-old water valves for the washing machine. Of course the old plastic box in the wall was falling apart, so we needed to replace that too. But it turns out that our washing machine's drain pipe is on the left side of the box, and 99% of today's homes are plumbed for the drainpipe on the right or in the center. The drain pipe is thick-wall ABS and it's been firmly glued in place to the rest of the waste piping.
Yeah, I know. Buy a right-drain plastic box, cut the back off with a jigsaw, and flip it around. Luckily we finally found a left-drain box.
Spouse wanted a single-lever dual-valve control manifold, but we couldn't find a left-drain box that would support it. I also would have had to do my first PEX connection job for that configuration, and I was hoping to avoid learning that new skill. So we went with two separate 90-degree ball valves with big, easy-to-move levers.
Just to make this more challenging, our garage is fully finished: drywall, tape, mud, texture, and at least two coats of paint. (I'm starting to hate having a finished garage.) The washing machine wall backs up against a bedroom, so I can't go in through that wall either.
Sooo.... it was like arthroscopic surgery through an 8"x10" hole. It took a couple days to finish cutting the old box out of the wall (without cutting the PEX) and to cut the remains of the old box off the ABS pipe (they were glued together). Then I wrenched off the old valves and put on the new ones. All I had to do then was stuff the new plastic box in the old hole, right?
I couldn't reach all the way around the ABS pipe to cut off every last bit of the old box, so it was still a millimeter too big for the new box's left-hand drain. The ABS pipe had zero slack, too, so I couldn't cut off any pipe without having the new box sit lower on the wall (and a bigger drywall hole).
After removing half the skin from my knuckles, I finally shaved down enough of the ABS pipe (and enough of the left-hand drain) to fit them together. But we still had to insert the water valves through the holes in the box, and the PEX pipe is twisted so tightly around in that stud bay that it's hard to get the valves to stay vertical. By the time we solved that problem the plastic box was deformed by the strain of the PEX, so I had to mount wood blocks inside the drywall around the hole to brace & shim the box.
The box is finally mounted on the drain, the valves are inserted through the box, the box is braced & shimmed. All we have to do now is finish shoveling in the joint compound to get the hole small enough for the box's trim piece to hide everything.
I thought it'd be easier to work through the hole, and I was wrong. Next time I'm looking at a job like that, I'm just going to carefully cut the drywall off the studs below the box. I can fix everything right with the perfect box and the ideal valves. Then I can put back the old drywall, mud the gap and texture it and paint it, and hide it behind the washing machine.
But this box looks good enough, the job is nearly done, and spouse is happy that the valves are easy to operate. I hope I never have to do that job again!
The photos are pretty funny. There is a separate evaporator for the refrigerator section that is iced over now. It never got below about 50 degrees on its own, and we never detected air flow from the fan. The controller is sending power to the fan. I'm betting the fan isn't connected to its wiring harness. Since the freezer and ice maker work, we are cooling food in the fridge side with ice and a couple of the biggest Blue Ice blocks from our ice chest, cycling them between the freezer and fridge.
A separate evaporator for the fridge. Well, I guess that means there's not a stuck air damper between the freezer and the fridge-- because the manufacturer decided that would be just too easy to fix...
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