Sink problems.

[swestrup]

So, I'm awake again. taxlady isn't, but I suspect she'll be getting up in an hour or so too. Then I think I'm gonna try and convince her to take a trip with me to the nearest hardware store, despite the -40C temperatures we've been having. We now have a huge backlog of dirty dishes, because I'm missing a pair of 20 cent washers that prevent water spurting everywhere when I do a load of dishes. And, of course, because of the weather, and the fact that the plumber who installed the kitchen sink was a moron, the drain pipe has frozen solid (It should never have been placed uninsulated against an outside cinder-block wall...)

Normally, we fix that by bailing out the sink and pouring hot water down it. Repeat two or three times and the sink eventually thaws. Draino also works, but I fear what it does to PVC pipes.

In the meantime I'm going to go back to struggling with Apache's mod_rewrite engine. Its doing things <i>wrong</i> and I can't seem to get enough diagnostics running to find out WHY. (Stupidly of me, all of this is merely so that Apache can correctly support multiple sub-domains under one IP address, for the occasional first-draft http 1.0 browser out there. We're talking Netscape 1.0 and earlier)

But first, I think, there shall be coffee (or tea -- the teas already made, but cold, but could be nuked...) and a shower and then probably some brekkies...

Comments

Re: chemistry geek to the rescue!

[swestrup]

This is what I originally suspected, but now every time I use the draino, little pipe-colored specs float up out of the drain...

Re: chemistry geek to the rescue!

[kalkuly.livejournal.com]

if anything i would suspect that that is some sort of deposit - could be carbonate salts from the hard water we have here. This might dissolve in the draino.
Will have to look up the active ingredients in the stuff too.

Re: chemistry geek to the rescue!

[sps.livejournal.com]

Drano is not a single thing. Witness the fact that when we first came to Canada my Dad (a chemist by training, now a priest) opened a can, took a look inside, and said, and I quote, "SHIT! Well, I guess that would work...!"

That was the soapy pellets and metallic shavings kind. I don't think you'd have been allowed to sell it in England, even then. But last time I looked at some, it was a liquid....