Mark Miner

Hello PEP-guardians!

I believe I have completed the sand badge requirements in plumbing!

6 from Tiny list:
1) Install an Instant Bidet
2) Repair a hose
3) Perform a water quality test
4) Repair a P-trap
5) Unclog a drain with a zip tool
6) Put collected water through a Berkey filter

1 from Big list:
Install a hydrant

Thank you for your consideration, and happy homesteading,
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,

Part 3 of a drain saga here, following https://permies.com/p/2856463 and https://permies.com/p/2856467.

This is a kitchen sink drain, and had a handful of weird issues, like a non-standard vent hole (drilled in the pipe) and some intermittent leaking when heavily loaded with lots of water all at once. The troubleshooting began with examining the cross-drilled holes at the top of the drain stack, but the pipes felt very, very wiggly. Then I opened up the P-trap, so I had more freedom of motion, and lo and behold, the whole DWV assembly, from a coupling below the sani-tee, lifted off in my hand.

What the...

Upon examination, the pipes were lightly adhered with a silicone caulk. Jeepers. This had, of course, failed to maintain a watertight bond. The pieces were all the correct lengths, so in order to avoid spending money, I chose to scrub all the gooped joints thoroughly and rebuild the stack using real ABS glue. This dried overnight before testing, and the first test produced.... water coming up the vent.

So I opened it back up and snaked down the pipe to clear the deeper blockage (see "Unclog" BB). Then I reassembled, tested again with a basin full of water (I was confident), and yea verily, glug glug.

Happy homesteading,
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,
This is a companion post to my drain saga partly detailed here: https://permies.com/p/2856463

This aspect of the saga is using the snake to clean clogs out of the deeper drain. The P-trap was disassembled and repaired in the above post, but when reassembled the first time, the drain still backed up. Gunk further down. Yeesh.

While browsing on Amazon and not wanting to spend money on a drain snake, I recalled an auspicious tool left hanging on the wall in the garage by the former owners. It had looked like a drain snake at first blush, but upon inspection, it was a flex-shaft power take off with a hand wheel. I squinted pretty hard at it, and it looked like a drain snake again, so I figured it was worth a try, being free.

I had to modify the end into a tight hook that would allow both forward and backward motion through the pipe joints, since I had no interest in getting this thing stuck down my pipes. However, a little pliers work, and a nice hook with tucked tip was formed and ready to go. Down she went, a couple times, hauling up nasty sludge each go. After a few back-and-forths, I decided to try the drain again, buttoned it up, and thankfully, it flowed freely. Previously, it had made a "filling up" noise as water went down, which is not a sound I like to hear from drain pipes. Now, just a healthy gurgle.

This house does have pretty long drains, so a powered snake is probably somewhere in the future, but at least the heat is off for now, and the sink is usable. More fun on the DWV stack in another BB.

Happy homesteading,
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,

It's often the case with this kind of BB that I hope I don't have do one, but then it happens in its own time.
The second sink was slow, then it leaked (like down the wall in the downstairs, prompting blowers, etc.) - dumping a canning kettle is a lot at once. Looking under the sink, lo & behold, the former owners (or their plumber) did not like the under-counter vent, and drilled a through-hole across the pipe. Yeesh.

So I got together materials to plug those holes, and as I handled the pipe it seemed extremely loose. Yep. The ABS drain pipe was silicone-caulked together. No joke. Pulled apart very easily, and showed me that the leak was actually down at an ABS coupling that was being "held together" by silicone caulk/sealant. So I knew I had to rebuild the DWV pipes under the sink, and began to disassemble them.

I pulled apart the P-trap, and it was almost totally occluded with nasty gunk. One thing after another. So I blasted it out with water, and cleaned the P-trap (the burden of this BB submission).  You'll see the disassembled drain pipe in the sink, this was pretty nutty. I scraped off the silicone as well as I could, and rebuilt with the old (correct size) pieces, but with real ABS cement - but that's a story for another BB, I believe. The reassembled drain still moved slowly and backed up, so I put an improvised drain snake down it to clear that clog (refer to other BB), and this, finally, led to success and speedy draining. This sink was a piece of work.

After the trifecta of: disassemble & clean out P-trap, snake drain down ~10ft, and rebuild DWV pipe stack under the counter with proper ABS cement, it is running leak-free, even when a basin was filled and then the plug pulled. Hurrah. And now I have several fewer problems than I did before.

Happy homesteading,
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,

My trusty Kubota B26 tractor-loader-backhoe has almost 900hrs on it, still a very young machine, but was well overdue for a service. The service environment for its first 4 years of life was ultra-dusty and hot. The service environment now that we have moved is temperate to cold, so I think getting the vile old oil out was a good deal for its cold-starting. It's helping me on the hugel project these days, and continues to impress me as a very right-sized tractor for a lot of work. It's slower than a Bobcat or track-excavator for their specialized jobs, but as a swiss-army-knife tool that costs relatively little to maintain and repair, it's gold.

I hope the supplied photos indicate a full service to the standards of the BB, but let me know if there's aught amiss.

Happy homesteading,
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,

The most challenging part of this BB was finding a clean bucket and a clear spot in the icy creek. To gather the collected water, I walked down to our seasonal stream/pond system, which stores a decent quantity of water (guesstimate of 45k gallons in the lower pond, which is full after rain/snow). We have been Berkey users for a decade or more, and have pretty high confidence in them. The second challenge of this BB is waiting... I probably need to scrub the cartridges, and we do have the F/As afterfilters on (a relic of AZ where we did have moderate As levels from very deep water). I probably ought to do a mineral assay of our water up here in the PNW, but have not yet. Anyhow, water was gathered, filtered, and consumed.

Happy homesteading,
Mark

Hi Judith,
There's a lot to say for personal preference, but I have been impressed with my 8 y.o. MacBook Air, which runs almost as well as it did when new. My wife recently got a newer Mac laptop, and the quality seems to be consistent (though not as many years of data on the new one). Between my wife and myself, personal and work use, over the years, we've owned Sony, IBM, lots of Dell, and Mac, and the Mac is the only one that's really worth writing home about. It might be a little outside the budget, though, if you look new. I have had bad experiences with refurbished Dell & IBM, but would be keen to hear if there's a different take on Mac refurbs.
I use TexWorks/LaTeX for writing, sometimes use Gimp, and in general Mac's native program suite is fine (and no extra cost...ahem...Office...looking at you). The user interface on Macs used to be notably different from Windows, but even that is converging as Windows keeps aping Mac more in each release.
Good hunting!
Mark

Hi Tori,  
If you choose not to band, the meat quality is better with a somewhat earlier/younger kill, avoiding adolescence. If you think you might not get around to it before they go through adolescence, banding will buy you time. A wether goat (castrated buck) can also be used as a pack animal if trained to it, but while some friends of ours have gone this route, we have butchered the male kids. We have kept a buck for breeding in the past, but it's easier to cycle through different bucks to keep the bloodlines good. Letting one of our own bucklings mature would require new doe genetics, which is more of a hassle.

If you have really high quality bloodlines, though, keeping the best one as a sire-for-hire could be a path.

Congrats on the successful kidding, and good luck!
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,
I started my first hugelbed over the weekend! There will be more on that BB, when it is done enough to submit, but for now I will throw in the 3-scoops pictures for this BB. Fun fact about my property, which is not a geological surprise when you think about the name of the region's major geomorph "the Colombia basalt" - after 8-12in of clay, you're on basalt, nice porous lava rock. The top layer of the basalt is rain rotted enough to tear with the backhoe teeth, but, well, let's just say I am looking forward to building my soil, and the runoff patterns now make more sense. Once the top layer is saturated, water can't go down quickly, so it goes away.
Happy hugling!
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,
It's taken a while to get this badge, since our old house had these installed from time immemorial, and wit seemed silly to de- and re-install just to get a badge bit. But our new house did not have any (older folks lived here, we have kids with diapers and potties to wash out).

So, here it is: the pre-install, the up-close of the installed tee, and the action shot. Yay.

Happy homesteading,
Mark