Old School Tools: Percolator Perfection!

Unlike me, my late father-in-law was not picky about coffee. Yet when I perked some for him using a stovetop peculator, he ordered one himself from The Vermont Country Store. I'd ruined him on weak and tepid Mr. Coffee, forever.

I inherited his pot, and I have my original too. It's time I got those old pots out more often. I tend to use them when we have company. And when I smell that coffee, good things happen to my mood. My mom used an electric peculator, and I liked that coffee a lot too, partly from the smell of brewing and also from memories.  Mom's coffee maker had no off switch; you leave an electric or stovetop on too long, and you can smell the ruination. You only do that once.

On some dreadful days, my parents and I would brew coffee and enjoy it in dainty stoneware cups and saucers around the kitchen table. It was a rare moment when my dad's guard was down and we could talk about serious things. When mom was in the hospital once, I showed dad how to make coffee (he got very good at it, too). I also recall that after dad passed, mom and I would fire up the peculator and share a few cups. This ritual eased, for a little while, her grief.

But it also united us around a favorite beverage. Mom hated coffee machines for producing weak brew. So do I. So did my sadly departed friend Steve Gott. For him, old-school percolation was the only way to make coffee.

Today we have wasteful coffee-pod coffee going to our landfills, whereas I have been composting my Melita filters and coffee, from a plastic cone I've had since the early 1980s. But the peculator! It's even less wasteful; it has a metal basket where I dump my grounds into the compost bin.

 Now, with only one coffee drinker in our house, I think smaller. This means that I have a Goldilocks dilemma.

My favorite pot is made for a LOT of coffee. My other peculator is a cafetera from Madrid; it reverses the process by pushing the boiling water up, under pressure, from the bottom of the pot. It makes a superb brew. I bought it in 2002, to replace one I'd lost in the late 80s. Sadly, it makes one tiny cup. I need two cups every morning.

Now I need a coffee maker that is JUST right. As for the design? Those stovetop and electric percolators, like safety razors or car controls from before about 2005, perfected a technology that has only gone downhill with each "innovation" since. I'd claim that everything afterwards just tries to empty our wallets. 

I'm not talking about a cappuccino machine; that's another form of perfection. I lack counter space for that, alas.

Pressure Washers: Why WOULD Anyone Not Want Electric?

In keeping with my recent post about our electric lawnmower, I'll post an update about another useful tool: a pressure washer.

I simply despise gas-powered ones. They have proven finicky and fragile in my experience, and they are noisy. They emit pollution I don't wish to breathe.

A year ago, I pressure-washed the stupid vinyl siding (I hate the stuff!) that we have not yet removed from our house. We still have it on the back of the home. Being old-school by nature, I would rather paint weatherboard or at least Hardie-Plank siding. They both hold paint well and...do not look like plastic.

In any case, a neighbor loaned me his 2000 PSI plug-in washer. I used a transfer pump from the bottom spigot of a rain barrel to get water. The results were astounding. It looked like I was respraying the vinyl white as it stripped off dirt. I used a cleaner that does not harm plants near a house, which you should research before letting a washer go wild near your hostas.

This year, I purchased my own 3000 PSI electric washer for under $200, ahead of the ludicrous and self-destructive US tariffs against Chinese goods. I've since purchased a 24' telescoping wand to clean second-floor areas without venturing onto a wet ladder. It includes a scrub-brush attachment.

Folks PAY money to have their homes washed. I suppose it lets them watch more TV shows or play golf.

I'd rather do it myself. I get to use up surplus stored water in the fall, as the garden winds down. The house looks great for the holidays. I still don't love vinyl siding, but it looks nice when clean. 

If it's above freezing, get outside and put on waterproof clothes. Let the water fly! As with any tool, practice. Using the wrong nozzle (read the instructions!) can peel paint. With the right nozzle and technique, my washer can blast farm equipment clean or remove gunk from the underbodies of vehicles. 

Bob Vila offers some reviews. We opted for a generic unit something like the Earthwise shown in the reviews. I now see no advantage now to gas-powered units except their use away from an electrical outlet. For ease of starting, sound, emissions, and power, electric washers work just fine.

Creative Commons image by Debbie Wolfe from Bob Vila’s site. 

 

 

A Simple Ceiling-Fan Hack

Admitting something obvious, something you did not know before, should be counted as wisdom. Let's hope. I just learned a means of using our ceiling fans to best circulate warm air through our home, in wood-stove season.

In Winter, set the fan to rotate clockwise, which pushes hot air trapped near the ceiling down and draws air near the floor upward. In summer, set the fan counterclockwise, to push air down and give you that lovely fanning effect. Run your fans low, and yes, even if you have central heat and air, running them will reduce your bills.

Of course, mine were set backward, by me.  How to change the direction? Find a small button on the fan housing; you'll need a ladder. Some newer fans with remotes likely have that feature, but I'm averse to anything that I must use a remote control to master.

Hack that fan and stay warm. It's my favorite time of year. 

Silly question: same trick south of the equator? Sure. 

image credit: pexels.com 

Six Months With An Electric Lawnmower

A full month slipped by without a post, but we got busy with several projects as soon as the heat broke.

One thing that did not break? Our new push mower. I am utterly delighted with my first cordless electric grass-cutter, a Stihl RMA 510V.

We needed a unit that would handle about 5,000 square feet of patios and edges where the tractors cannot mow; I know those figures would have boggled my mind 20 years ago, too. On rural land, one thinks about acres of open space if one has pastures. I'd love more in woods right up to the house, but then the copperheads might come indoors. No, thank you.

A political aside: How did getting a vaccination or an electric lawn mower become an act of civil disobedience? Well, I did both this year. For the grass, I spotted a Stihl landscaper-grade mower in the dealer where I buy parts for our gas-powered weed eaters (My saws are all Husqvarna now). One selling point, beyond being on sale and coming with an extra battery? That it would cut all our patios and more on a single charge. Stihl promises that the batteries would be supported long-term. That matters a great deal. I have a nice set of DeWalt tools for which batteries are no longer made. Luckily, I found re-manufactured ones from China (with the stupid tariffs now, I'm not sure I can get more). In consequence, no more cordless DeWalt for me.

With this lawn-mower, there's no more replacing carburetors, no more running out to get ethanol-free 93 octane (or at least as much of it). No oil changes, no smell of gasoline or breathing exhaust. Just sharpen the blade once a year, and clean the underside of the mower at season's end. It's so quiet I do not wear earplugs.

This model has a self-propelled feature with enough torque to scare me when I first engaged it. It's a landscaper model, after all. It will roll on a bit after I disengage the driving wheels, but we plan for that, as we do when mowing pasture with a Ford 8N: you learn to give the machine a little room to stop. After mastering that trick, we learned how to run the mower, quickly.

The driving wheels are shielded from long grass, unlike our old Craftsman, which would get wire grass tangled around the axle and grind to a halt. On flat ground or downhill, the self-propelled feature need not be activated, but I have several grades to mow where a tractor won't fit. This proved a godsend for my back and stamina in hot weather.

We found we can cut everything without running down the battery past 50%, even though our patios exceed the square footage Stihl estimates. We did run out of juice once, because we'd not recharged the mower. In any case, the chassis has space to carry a second battery.

You'd do well to consider an electric. If you like having all your tools using the same battery, this unit's batteries work for Stihl's lawn tools and latest chainsaws.

If electric chainsaws had enough run time to cut up a big tree, I'd switch tomorrow.  

The Boy on the Burning Deck

 

No, I don't mean the Victorian-Era poem by Felicia Hemans. I doubt many of you have ever heard of "Casabiana," but it was once very popular. It's maudlin stuff today, dreadfully melodramatic to modern ears, or perhaps we are simply too jaded and declined as a culture to appreciate the poet's sentiments. Maybe I'm a barbarian, but I begin to see where Mark Twain got his "Ode to Stepehen Dowling Botts, Dec'd." I stand with Sam Clemens when it comes to hating Victorian verse of the popular sort.

In any case, for Hemans' tale of the doomed lad, I had never been forced to memorize it in school, as had earlier generations. We instead learned the much more durable "Ozymandias" and a few of Poe's poems by heart. For that kid on the flaming ship, I simply knew the line I've used as my title because these past few weeks, I've lived it. The heat broke, for which I'm thankful, but so did a wooden deck in several places.

The past several days have been consumed with removing rotten boards from our rental property's deck. Buried nails, likely from the 1990s, prove hard to exhume, and then I must plane some of the replacement boards down to fit into the empty spots. Of course installation proves a snap, as I use a screw-gun and star-headed screws I can back out later with ease, when--not if--more repairs need doing. I like these new coated screws; while they are not cheap, they hold up. I've backed out and reused several that still look new and do not round off like Philips-head screws can do. I stain all sides of the board too. Rot creeps in from any angle.

At the end of each session, sore to the bone, I am reminded why I despise wooden decks. Why did they get so damned popular? I share a theory espoused by, among others, Western Doughty, that Americans retreated from their front porches after the 1960s. I was lucky enough to grow up in the last years when, on a blue-collar block in Richmond before AC was common, all the neighbors would sit on the porches on hot nights. When you strolled down the street, greetings got exchanged.

It was no utopia; the dark side was that everyone knew your business. Still, the nation could have done better than treated wood, when we retreated to our back yards. 

Wooden decks require the constant maintenance that a sailing-ship needs, lest someone fall through the deck and into oblivion. I've found that heavy, solid penetrating stain works well enough, as it has for a fence I rehabilitated at our rental property, but decks, by their nature, get a lot of traffic. The one at our rental house, for now at least, bakes in the sun. I plan to change that with a strategically planted Willow Oak this Fall.

 The issue with decks of treated wood (were I forced to build from scratch, I'd use the new composite decking) is dry rot. We know that term, but I began to think about what it means on a deck. Here's an explanation for boats, from the Wikipedia page on dry rot (yes, they have a page for everything):

An explanation of the term "dry rot" circles around boatyards periodically. In the age of wooden ships, boats were sometimes hauled for the winter and placed in sheds or dry dock for repair. The boats already had some amount of rot occurring in the wood members, but the wood cellular structure was full of water making it still function structurally. As the wood dried out, the cell walls would crumble. In other words, the wood was already rotten and as the boat dried, the wood collapsed and crumbled, causing the workers in the yard to determine it was "dry rot", when in fact, the wood had been rotten all along.  

Even with good penetrating stain, dry rot happens to decking in time, because water will find a way into a crevice and sit. Cycles of drying and wetting just give dry rot more chances to begin; fungus follows, invisibly, into the hearts of each board. Think of how cavities form on your own teeth. For decks, what may look great may leave your leg broken when you fall through a big, new hole in a seemingly intact board.

I do like one aspect of repairing decks: Whenever I do a rehab, I clog around in my "Jed Clampett" Redwing boots to see which boards are bad. Breaking a board or two is great fun. Replacing them? Not so much. 

Save yourself. Use composite boards or build a damned patio! 

As with horses, sailboats, swimming pools, or lots of vices I cannot name here, it's better if a friend has a wooden deck.  No, that is NOT my deck up top. It's from the Wikipedia page.

Never, Ever Give Up on Fixing Something

I learned a great deal from my Depression-Era parents and grandparents not to throw things away needlessly. That habit can lead to hoarding, but in my case, my Type-A personality tends to sort things and only toss or recycle what can possibly have no future use. I find all sorts of useful items tossed out in city alleys, when working on my rental property. Many I have repaired and put back into service.

Sometimes, however, I still make mistakes. 

A few times this month, I nearly spend money needlessly. It's a lesson to 1) read the instruction manual on appliances and 2) Watch more YouTube videos.

First it was our lightweight Shark Vacuum, a well-rated device we'd paid decent money to buy at a big-box store. It simply stopped running. A quick check on YouTube and a vacuum-repair site showed me a second filter in the body of the machine. In ours, it was completely clogged. In five minutes, the machine ran again, saving us perhaps $800 on a new vacuum we'd been eyeing.  For under $30, we purchased new filters to keep the old vacuum going for (I hope) many years.

Then it was house paint, something that costs forty dollars a gallon or more already, not considering how ill-conceived presidential tariffs may influence prices soon for so many things we buy. I have saved a lot of paint for a decade that was used when renovating our rental property, but a good deal of it came in older metal cans. These rust, unlike newer plastic paint cans. Some paint had to be tossed out, but I carefully opened two cans, salvaging what I could and finding the paint still viable. I put the remainder into plastic jars saved from the kitchen, in case our tenant needs more touch-ups.

I was ready to get a new range for the rental house too; the oven door had gotten liquid between its two glass panes. It proved tedious work but I removed the door, disassembled it, and cleaned the glass. Now it again looks nearly new. The culprit? The door's handle was loose, and the handle seals the top of the door assembly. My last tenant must have burned something in the oven, so steam worked its way into the door's innards.

Finally, I was faced with hard water and stained porcelain. Our commodes looked horrible because of our well water, as did our shower floor. No amount of scrubbing with brushes and Barkeeper's Friend (or more caustic products) would clean things.  I was about to purchase two new commodes and consider re-tiling the shower when I read about pumice blocks. Suffice to say that these did the job, for under $10. The grout in the shower and the basin in the commodes look clean again. The shower will take constant vigilance, and here Barkeeper's friend with pumice and a small brush for nooks and crannies made showering a pleasure again.

 Learn about your house and vehicles. From an HVAC tech I learned how to unclog a drain-tube in our heat pump; last year that saved me an expensive service-call. Then I learned to flush my hot-water heaters annually, too. Do you know how to do that? It can save you hundreds of dollars in deferred replacement costs, since it extends the life of the heater. 

The economy looks shaky to this cheapskate, with lots of wishful thinking and tomfoolery of crypto-currency that screams "Charles Ponzi" at me.  I suspect that hard times lie ahead for spendthrift nation that is so poorly led. What can you do now to save money on repairs and replacements? Might be time to read that owner's manual again, or maybe for the first time. 

 

 

It Ain't the Heat...But the Humidity Can be Tamed

I recently installed two large dehumidifiers, at a cost to me of under $500, in a building that simply is too large to air-condition. I've been pleasantly surprised by the results.

Our large out-building is cinder block with a metal roof. The ground floor was built into a hill on the southeast side, which provides some natural cooling at the cost of being damp, causing mold to form in spots on our camper as well as anything else left there. The upper floor bakes in summer, and until later year, could be difficult to enter on a hot day. Last year I added more circulating fans, which did help move air around on both floors, but the humidity persisted.

Now with the dehumidifers running, for a few dollars each month, the entire building is dry and pleasant (downstairs) and tolerable to pleasant (upstairs). I can now work on cars, farm machinery, or carpentry projects without dying of heat stroke.

I set the target relative humidity at 60% for each floor. The units have a garden-hose adapter and the water goes under a garage door to the outside. These units can remove tens of gallons of water from the air daily, but there's not enough of a drop to collect the water in a barrel, something I'd like as I use distilled water from our home AC to flush the radiators in our cars, when I change coolant. I will figure out a system later. Note the starting humidity after I had the bay doors open for 30 minutes. Within half an hour of closing the doors, we were back at 60%.

Such adaptations won't solve all problems, even when I install solar on our property to reduce our carbon footprint. Meanwhile, parts of each floor remain more humid that others, though the circulating fans help reduce that problem. For those like me with a large garage but little money for HVAC, this solution may help you as human-driven climate change makes our summers ever less pleasant.