FreeLists / homeclinic / [homeclinic] Homeclinic'ers, Here's Your DRSNews!

[Dave Harnish <drs@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The DRSNews
September 2005  

Note: Due to all the spam filtering 'issues' with html 
email messages, this email version of the DRSNews 
will be delivered in text only, beginning with this issue. 
You'll always find the current, easier to read online 
version at: 

http://www.DavesRepair.com/DRSN/current.htm

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Hi Homeclinic'ers!

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A Special Welcome to all our new subscribers, especially 
my fellow YMMSS and FFSI members!

Note: to help this newsletter wade through all the ?spam? 
filtering now in use and reach you, I recommend that you 
add my address to your email program?s address book: 
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(In Outlook Express, just right - click on the subject line, 
then click 'add sender to address book')

In this issue:

1) A Ground Fault Interrupt (GFI) Can Save Your Dishwasher
    - An Old Codger Has a Change of Heart (sort of)
2) Yet Another Use (#16?) For The Trusty Shop-Vac 
    - 'Evacuating' Bees!

1)  I confess to never being a fan of GFI receptacles. Like 
nearly everything else we form opinions about, it goes back 
to my upbringing. Please allow me a few lines to explain. 

I grew up (OK, I know, some of you would argue that point!) 
spending as much time as possible in my Dad's motor repair 
shop, and have never been afraid of electricity (respect and 
fear differ, btw <g>). 

One of my earliest memories of the shop was 'arc-drawing' 
pictures on Dad's big old bench vise. 

We did this by plugging a patch cord into his 'test board' and 
attaching one side of the 120 volts to the vise mounting bolt 
with one alligator clip, and drawing pictures with the other. 

It was great fun and looked pretty dramatic to a little kid, 
with sparks flying all over (not to mention the cool static it 
caused on my sister's radio <g>). I can still smell the ozone 
that came from this game, and there wasn't a 'bare' spot on 
that entire, tortured old vise!

By the way, one of those test boards is a very handy tool if 
you do much electrical testing on your bench. Just a board 
with two porcelain pull-chain sockets and a receptacle 
attached, hung on the wall above the bench. 

The sockets are wired in series with the 'hot' side of the 
receptacle, allowing different sized bulbs and higher wattage 
'cone' heaters to be quickly connected in series with a load 
under test. I use mine all the time, and it's extremely handy. 

Anyway, getting back to GFI's, when these devices came on 
the scene, my whole family snickered. I mean, why would 
anyone need such high tech protection from just 120 volts? 
What wimps!

My electrician brother and I used to have contests to see 
what wattage bulb we could screw into that test board and 
still 'hang on' to (He always won - might explain that twitch...)

Throughout my career as an appliance technician, I've dealt 
with far too many 'nuisance trips' of GFI's. Especially 
memorable are those dead food freezers whose contents 
spoiled several days before anyone knew the blasted GFI 
had tripped off. Those experiences further 'soured' my 
opinion of this 'unnecessary complication'. 

But I say all that to say this (thank goodness - he *does* 
have a point!): There's a place for these devices, and it's in 
an application I never used to recommend: connected to an 
appliance with a motor. 

The 'fatal' dishwasher failure I see most often, at least on 
the most common vertical shaft models, is motor failure due 
to water leaks through the pump seal, located  just above the 
motor on this design. In the online version of this newsletter, 
I've included a picture of a motor that wasn't caught early 
enough to save: 

http://www.DavesRepair.com/DRSN/current.htm

Trouble is, the leak often develops so slowly, by the time 
it's noticed, the motor's been damaged beyond repair. The 
secret to preventing this damage is discovering that slow 
leak as early as possible. 

I've a colleague out West who's invented a clever little tray 
that fits on the floor under dishwashers. It's designed to divert 
any water leaks out the front, where they're quickly noticed. 
It's a great idea, and I plan on getting some of those in the 
near future.

But another 'ounce of prevention' is to wire the dishwasher to 
a GFI circuit. This is done in some newer homes, but around 
here, I seldom see it.

In the past 6 months, I've been able to 'save' two really nice 
dishwashers from the usually fatal leak due to GFI's. In the 
same time period, though, I've also 'DOA'd' and scrapped  3 
or 4 with water-ruined motors in machines that no one knew 
had been leaking. 

So I've begun recommending that dishwashers be connected 
to a GFI circuit whenever possible. I'm pretty sure that's already 
required in many parts of the US, but evidently it's not here in 
our area yet. 

The reason this works so well is simple. When a failed pump 
seal allows water to find its way into the motor windings, the 
resultant electrical leakage to ground trips the DW's GFI circuit 
breaker or GFI receptacle, the machine goes dead, and I get 
a call. 

After replacing the seal kit, the machine's back up and running 
in under an hour, and for well under half the price of a new one.

So maybe I'm getting 'soft' as I age, but I guess GFI's do have 
their place. (How about it, brother? 100 watts, no GFI? [twitch])

2)  Way back in the August/September 2002 issue of this little 
ramble, we talked about that handiest of handy tools, the mighty 
wet-vac. I believe we came up with some 15 uses for the critter 
back then, plus a few we were too shy to include <grin>. 

Well, I found another use for one this summer, and thought I'd 
pass it along. 

We had an extremely hot summer here, one of the hottest on 
record, if not the record breaker. Yellow Jackets, the one species 
of bee I truly despise, apparently loved this weather, because 
they've had a very, very good year, and it seems they're everywhere. 

Anyway, by the time we noticed the buzzing up inside our house 
wall, their numbers had grown huge (kind of like a gradual 
dishwasher seal leak <grin>). 

I tried everything I could think of to get spray up into that nest, 
short of tearing the wall apart, with no success at all. When a 
friend mentioned that he watched a local beekeeper use a type 
of low air velocity (?) vacuum cleaner type device to harvest a 
renegade honeybee swarm, the lights went on! 

I promptly duct-taped a piece of downspout to a 2-1/2'' vac hose 
and drug out one of the many vacs around here. Plugged it into 
a timer (through a GFI <grin>) to come on at daybreak and run 
for a couple of hours. After it ran a while and I enjoyed watching 
the miserable critters disappear into the hose, I sprayed just a 
bit of wasp/hornet spray into the business end with the vac still 
running, then shut it down. 

Wow! Several thousand were collected that first time. After 
repeating this little exercise several times and collecting an 
estimated thousand each run, all is quiet, and I can recommend 
this as yet another 'official' use for old Clyde the wet-vac, and 
have added it to the list, located here: 

http://www.DavesRepair.com/DIYhelp/DIYwetvacuses.htm

PS - If you've found any other handy and/or unusual uses for 
the wet-vac, please let me know and we'll add them to 'the list'. 

***

Thanks again, Homeclinic'ers, for inviting me into your inbox! 

As always, if you have other any topics you?d like to see 
discussed here or covered in an online article, let me know 
and I?ll do my best to oblige. And don't forget those testimonials! 

Many thanks if you've already sent yours in! I'm posting them 
just as fast as I can! 

God bless,
 
Dave Harnish
Dave?s Repair Service
New Albany, PA
drs@xxxxxxxxxx
www.DavesRepair.com
(570) 363-2404

Amos 4:13

''The happiest people don't necessarily have the best of 
everything; they just make the best of everything they have.'' 
http://your.FinancialFreedomSociety.com/26556

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