Speaking of Appliance Heck

Busy Mom’s bragging about the fact she hasn’t had any appliance problems lately. (While confessing to being a serial digital camera killer). I haven’t lost any digital cameras lately or ever, but appliance problems - I’ve had those.

A little while ago our dishwasher stopped draining. Everything worked, but the water wouldn’t drain. I figured I could find all of the information I needed to fix it online. I tried removing the basket to see if it was stopped up. Nothing. I took out a dozen hex screws and looked under the basket contraption. Nothing.

I didn’t give up. For four weeks I used the wet-dry vac to vacuum the water out of the dishwasher before the rinse cycle and again when the rinse cycle finished. With two kids we run the dishwasher almost every day. You do the math.

Finally, I gave up. I paid for a spiffy new Bosch at Lowe’s and got the number to call on a weekday to schedule installation.

The next day I told my brother and he asked if I had tried cleaning the whatsit. I read up on that and in the process discovered that sometimes a failure to drain is caused by a hose that’s clogged at the sink end. I unscrewed the drain line under the sink, stuck a shish-ka-bob skewer in to clean out the gunk, and SHAZAM! Dishwasher fixed.

Sunday night we came back from the Fourth weekend to find an 81 degree house. We’ve now had our AC serviced for the second time this summer. Once I expect - our AC always goes out at least once a year over a fuse or capacitor or somesuch - but twice?

My heat and air guy came out Monday and fixed it by installing a “hard start capacitor”, but he warned me that he didn’t know how long it would last and suggested I start thinking about buying a new unit to the tune of four grand or so. If that happens I may get a heat pump so I’ll have another heat source if our similarly-old gas furnace konks out.