So yesterday evening, hubby tells me that a house down the street was broken into last week during the day. I was just playing with Cale in the living room when I heard some thumps from the other end of the house. Whoops! Time to investigate! Since I was on the side of the house with all the doors, I wasn’t too alarmed since it would be hard to get in my house right now without me noticing. But, ah, it was still time to investigate heavy mystery thumps. It turns out that Cale had turned on Roomba who is quite creative at getting stuck in unusual places. Roomba can escape the normal obstacles, but in this case had rather noisily climbed inside the sturdy metal circular base of the nursing rocking chair … a regular Roomba prison!
Our new dishwasher uses just 7 gallons of water for a typical wash. I just flushed our old toilet, the only one in the house that hasn’t been replaced yet, and it ran and ran. I had to jiggle the handle four times before it stopped running. I really think that toilet uses more water per flush than our dishwasher does per load! That’s sad about the toilet, but at least its replacement will get installed this weekend. On the other hand, that’s pretty nice about the new dishwasher!
HouseJuly 12, 2009 10:32 am
Well, this morning DH pulled out the GE Potscrubber 1425 dishwasher that was built into the house 25 years ago (and hard-wired and hard-plumbed). For a 25-year-old dishwasher, it has features that not all new dishwashers have. The delay start in particular (a feature we love, since we’ll set it to start when we plan to be out of the kitchen) really weeded out newer dishwashers. Add in that we wanted a metal tub for the energy savings of the condensation drying (as opposed to forced heating dry), and we were not looking at the low end. Every time we went to the store, we ended up picking a Maytag JetClean II or JetClean III model based on features for the price. (Consumer Reports liked that model too, not that I can find that link anymore.) However, yesterday we went to Lowes for the Build and Grow clinic (where kids build toys, and Karston has a blast), and there was a Bosch on clearance. I picked the Bosch as the model to end the looking because it is rated 51 dBA (quieter than the Maytag’s 56 dBA I had in my notes) and it was rated 259 kWh annually (less than the 315 kWh that I remember for the Maytag). I do wish I had seen them side-by-side before picking one, especially since we could have gotten the Maytag for $200 less while it’s on sale, but I also know I like quieter and more efficient. So Bosch it will be! Bye-bye Potscrubber 1425!
In the seven summer seasons that we’ve lived in this house, I have never seen a daylily here … until this morning! I have daylilies when the deer aren’t ravaging my yard! I’m sure it won’t last, but I’m enjoying it today! I used to enjoy these flowers before we had so many deer.
We went to Lowe’s on Saturday, and browsed toilets while we were there (yeah, we’re married). One toilet had their 5 star rating for flush power and had the high water efficiency 1.28 gallons per flush: the Jacuzzi Espree. Jacuzzi should be a good name, right? I liked our Jacuzzi hot tub in the first house.
Short version: DON’T BUY THIS TOILET!
- It’s made in China, and the quality is even less than I would expect for that since the tank broke while we were nudging it into place (gently! I’ve leaned on tanks with more force than that, so I know tanks are supposed to be able to handle more than what broke this tank).
- The included fittings were cheap, for instance using brass instead of bronze.
Luckily Lowe’s has good customer service and replaced the tank for us with no problem, but that doesn’t do anything about having a flood in the downstairs bathroom that has a hardwood floor and raw wood trim (who would put wood floors in a bathroom and unfinished wood trim throughout a house is another question). High on the annoyance scale, low on the quality scale, and much too high on the price scale to forgive any of that. Don’t do it.
We have replaced toilets before without a problem, so it’s not a lack of skill. And I trust DH on all matters mechanical and manufacturing (cheap, brass) since that’s his background. I’m very disappointed in Jacuzzi, and I’m happy that our next two hot tubs were not made by them.
Last weekend, NASCAR caused us to miss our usual Sunday cartoons (Simpsons, King of the Hill, American Dad). Luckily we can use Hulu! It also made me want to try Front Row … and integrate … luckily there’s understudy to fill in the blanks (or sapphire)! It works, although I did have to exit Front Row and come back in a few times. Video RSS is good. So is a VGA extender cable so we don’t have to crowd around this laptop.
So our dishwasher gave out yesterday, as did its first patch. We’ll be looking for an efficient dishwasher.
I asked for advice at Will’s family gathering last night, and his grandma Jenni said to get a German stainless steel model, like Bosch or Miele.
Online this morning, I learned that I want an air dry option (or Bosch’s condensation drying) for energy efficiency.
In the store this afternoon, we learned a subtle trick (the hard way): bring some dishes. The main difference between two Bosch models was the rack spacing. If we had had two plates, two cereal bowls, and two salad bowls, we could have decided if that were a difference worth paying (a lot) more.
We’ve been talking about re-purposing an old computer to be a home server, for easy sharing of cute kid photos, but we decided against it for two reasons. One, building your own server takes a serious amount of time that we would rather spend playing with those cute kids. And two, even putting a small price on our time for building a server and then adding in the energy costs for a year of running an old computer instead of a new NAS just doesn’t add up.
(Our uses: cross-platform file sharing especially media like photos, and backup which is why RAID is so attractive.)
So I went through the NAS comparison charts and the reviews, and settled on Synology or Qnap. Daddy convinced me to look at RAID 5, so I went through it again. The bottom line for us, balancing features (how to get on the list), performance (how to make the short list), and price (tie-breaker), is the Synology CS-407 (not 407e) or the Qnap TS-509. Since I don’t care between 4 and 5 drives, I figure I’ll go for the cheaper 4-bay model. And newegg generally has the best price and certainly good support so that’s easy too. Whew. Not cheap, but it’s a well-researched decision now.
Our Roomba Discovery hasn’t been right for a couple months. First there was the lightning storm, and Kurtis decided that Roomba needed another battery after that (wasn’t charging). So I got a new battery for it. Now it runs in small backward circles for a minute or two, stops for a minute to beep, and then repeats the cycle until we turn it off.
So I thought we should look at Roomba Diagnostics. Other sites also cover the Roomba Diagnostic mode. Most of it comes down to a serious cleaning.
The result of the diagnostics is that the right wheel motors has a problem. Not sure what we’ll do next, but the kitchen is getting crunchy, and the toddler is saying “Robot broken.”
