I think I played for six months or a year and then non-gradually was sick of it and stopped altogether. I couldn't figure out the leap between the somewhat easy ones where I had some mental shorthand on how to solve them and the next level up where I actually felt like I had too little information (which I realize I didn't, but I didn't figure out what that next step was.)
Now I can't stop playing "Tiny Wings" on the phone. It is not fun. I can not stop.
It is not fun. I can not stop.
In related news, I am a master at Tetris for the iPhone.
I don't get sudoku. I used to do the crossword, but I could never finish Friday and Saturday without help from google.
Regarding O3, the difficulty seems to correspond to the size of the options you have to juggle before one can be eliminated. That is, easy puzzles have a lot of spaces you can fill on an individual basis, while harder ones require you to consider sets of spaces.
I started doing KenKen about a year ago, basically just because it's right next to my crossword. I do it every day, but if they stopped running it I wouldn't look for it elsewhere. I do Sudoku only in in-flight magazines.
What does "auto-pencil" mean?
Well, sometimes a mummy and a daddy love each other very much, but the mummy needs some help 'completing her Sudoku', and...
I've never tried Sudoku. The fact that it can be so easily solved algorithmically rubs me the wrong way, a bit. (I realize that lots of games can be solved algorithmically, but usually it's computationally pretty expensive.)
Back when I did the Washington Post's Sudoku, I did the very easy ones as well as the harder ones. There was a quality of my mind quieting as I focused on the mechanical solving process, which was kind of soothing and might be especially enjoyable for people who don't like to be alone with their thoughts.
I think #3 is right. I've seen applets solving puzzles the way people do, explaining at each step the logical method by which the decision is made.
The fact that it can be so easily solved algorithmically rubs me the wrong way, a bit.
Try turning off the auto-pencil.
I have never done Sudoku. I think I went, "Oh? Numbers?" and moved right along. Oudemia Barbie thinks, "Math is hard!"
It's not even about numbers as numbers, Barbemia.
12 is true. You could just as easily use shapes or letters. All you're checking is that the digits don't repeat themselves in a row, column, or box.
Could you use pictures of different types of dogs? Dogs are nice.
I did Sudoku for a while, and then got bored -- there was a hard line between "I can do this effortlessly, it's just tedious" and "I can't do this next one at all."
I think the appeal for easy Soduku in under four minutes, is because thats the level where you can be "in the zone." If you can just crank out Sudoku solutions, you can play for the enjoyment of watching your systems work, and collect the gratification of having everything fall into place neatly and quickly. Also important is that you can avoid those moments of frustration where Soduku makes you feel like an idiot.
So - rapid rewards, not sometimes feeling like an idiot, and less taxing overall. To me that sounds like a better gaming experience than spending 20 minutes on something I may not be able to finish. Less virtuous, I think, but a better gaming experience.
They have them for little kids with colored shapes instead of numbers. Whenever I see that I think "What kind of kid has the focus to sit down and figure that out?" Not mine, for sure, and both can even write numbers now (granted, some of the numbers come out backwards).
I've never been really into any kind of casual games. If I want to be using my brain, I want to be using it for some long-term purpose, even if it is just a game that requires a higher level of commitment. If I don't want to be using my brain, I don't want to be using my brain.
The easy kind of gaming is a "Make the interior monolog shut up" thing for me. If I'm scanning a column to see if there are any sevens in it, I'm not thinking about anything else.
If I did sudoku I'd be all too aware that I was competing unsuccessfully with a program written for an introductory-level programming class.
I completely understand not wanting to do the harder ones. I lose interest once the solutions get dependent on sets of several contingent numbers, such that you basically have to pick a possibility and then work it through to see if it's right (and go back to that point if you picked the wrong one).
I was always under the impression that the difficulty rating came from how many of those (annoying!) contingencies there are (what Eggplant says in 4). But then I read something like the OP and I start to wonder if there's some deep thing about Sudoku that I'm missing? But I'm pretty sure I understand it.
13: See, I didn't even know that much about it. I saw that there were numbers and that was enough. (That's pretty pathetic of me.)
The easy kind of gaming is a "Make the interior monolog shut up" thing for me.
Hello, Civ4. I usually play with war and espionage disabled, so it's just relatively mindless expansion and urban development. clickclickclickclickclickclickclick...
21: I think it's more fun if you're better at it. The sets of contingencies you're talking about aren't so annoying if you have the kind of memory that can do enough steps without notes -- I have more fun as they get harder until suddenly I can't do them at all without an absurd level of notetaking.
18 is me. I have hobbies that I pursue because they give me a certain mental satisfaction that I think a lot of people get from puzzles -- the 'shut up interior monologue' thing others have mentioned.. I play the guitar partly just because it's satisfying to do something that occupies one's mind and hands (and, music!). It's that sort of focused mindfulness, without stress, that I think a lot of people get from crosswords or sudoku. I take photos for much of the same reason -- it's a way of being attentive to the world, but which shuts or calms down the interior chatter.
But I have no interest in games or puzzles at all. I try them every now and again, and it's generally just a reminder that I don't like them. If in enforced boredom situations like train journeys, if I've finished my book, I'll do the crossword or sudoku, but otherwise, not.
You know what's a fun game? Take 100 numbers and arrange them in order of size! Quickly now!
It's like none of you people have heard of a little thing called focus minesweeper.
My parents play Sudoku daily if not more. I play it only when I'm at their place on vacation and don't feel like reading a book I brought with me. As time-killers go, it's as good any game that doesn't require batteries. I rarely do ones rated any harder than "easy", though, and I think even those take me 10 minutes.
Sudoku bores me. I don't see the appeal. Give me a crossword instead. Or Angry Birds.
If I get an iPad, whatever reasons I use to justify the purchase will be bullshit. I'm getting it to play Angry Birds without squinting.
It's like none of you people have heard of a little thing called focus minesweeper masturbation.
Regarding O3, the difficulty seems to correspond to the size of the options you have to juggle before one can be eliminated. That is, easy puzzles have a lot of spaces you can fill on an individual basis, while harder ones require you to consider sets of spaces.
This isn't right. This is the kind of thing I was trying to tease out - what is it about the sparsity of the entries that determines how difficult the puzzle is? It's not the sparsity, although that correlates. It's the degree of entanglement of the remaining possibilities.
Suppose you have four entries with a total of four digits, appearing multiple times. It could be that everything appears in pairs, or triples, or circuits of four, etc. I'm having trouble phrasing it, but it's the degree of scrambling of possibilities within the empty squares, not just the number or configuration of empty squares.
What does "auto-pencil" mean?
Auto-pencil means they fill in all the possibilities for you immediately - this square can only have a 1,3, or 5, because 2,4,6,7,8,9 appear either in the row, column, or 3x3 square.
24: Yeah, I'm not great at keeping that sort of thing in my head, and on top of that there's a discipline to it that I just can't muster for something as meaningless as Sudoku. Whereas for something like chess I can make myself focus more on multiple steps at a time (though I'm still not good at it).
34: Thanks. That would seem to make it much easier.
It's the degree of entanglement of the remaining possibilities.
This is what I took Eggplant to be talking about with "harder ones require you to consider sets of spaces."
Whenever I play chess, I always try to focus on four moves ahead of the current move. That way, I know that if I hadn't have left my queen exposed, I might have been able to win.
My method was not to make if-then chains, but to write all the possibles in a square and use process of elimination - a seven is ruled out everywhere but here, or eight and two are ruled out everywhere but these two squares so both of those squares can't be anything else, etc. This went well with my non-ownership of pencils, but got tiring.
34: Thanks. That would seem to make it much easier.
That's what I initially thought! But you can't start contemplating the interesting problems until you have this information in front of you. The game actually starts here.
This is what I took Eggplant to be talking about with "harder ones require you to consider sets of spaces."
I suppose, but I can't stress enough that you can't do the harder problems without the notes filled in.
I kept trying to figure out "Given a new problem, what is it about the board that determines it's difficulty?" And that's the wrong question - you can't look at a board and determine it's difficulty. Or at least that is a much more difficult problem than one would casually think.
Actually all of this is why I took up knitting. It's like Sudoku except a scarf pops out at the end.
Is knitting something in a different shape difficult enough that it takes away the mental soothing aspect of it?
There's kind of a range of soothingnesses to it from "I have just started this new thing and it's absorbing in a meditative way" to "I get this and can do it somewhat automatically and this is soothing" to "I have been doing this for nine kajillion rows and it's just boring" to "I've started something with new stuff I don't know how to do in it and it actually requires a lot of attention." Lace patterns (flickr feed!) require you to count and keep track of what row you're on, so the faintly meditative part can actually last you a long time but the bored part can hit pretty hard.
I have liked knitting when I dabbled with it, but I keep getting stuck on "I can't believe I'm spending all this time and energy on just making fabric. This is the slowest endeavor ever. You can just buy fabric and you've still got a lot of work to do."
Knitting is probably faster at making fabric than weaving with any kind of loom small enough to not block the TV.
"Given a new problem, what is it about the board that determines it's difficulty?" And that's the wrong question - you can't look at a board and determine it's difficulty. Or at least that is a much more difficult problem than one would casually think.
Here again I'm slightly confused and wondering if I just don't understand Sudoku, because the answer to this question seems very obvious to me: it's the number of spaces that are contingent on other spaces, and how many levels of contingency there are. I don't casually think it is directly equivalent to how many spaces are filled in on the board at the start. I don't have a way to instantly quanitfy the difficulty, but I feel like I understand pretty well what it is that makes one puzzle harder than another.
We're probably saying the same thing.
I'm really hung up on the fact that the game opened up for me once I tried autopencil. What I had thought was the game isn't, at all, and so I feel like evaluating the complexity has to incorporate this epiphany of mine.
44: I am making the most irritating scarf ever right now. A simple and repetitive pattern in very thin wool, so very slow going, but if you make a mistake it throws the whole thing off, and lots of slipped stitches making it hard to rip it out and pick it up successfully when you make a mistake. When it's done, it should be absolutely impossible to tell that there was any good reason for it to have been hard.
Yeah, I think that's right (that we're saying the same thing).
Funny, though, I pretty much only want to do the stuff that you have autopencil do. Count me in the 4-minute-only group.
Consider the set of partially to fully completed sudoku puzzles generated by consistently filling in squares of a root puzzle. These form a directed, acyclic graph with nodes that can be ranked by the number of filled squares (only one node will have 81). Any given node of rank n either has no children, or it is covered by a set of nodes with rank n+1. This set of children can be partitioned by the square that was filled in (that is, one can construct subsets such as "the children created by filling in the lower left square"). A node has an "easy step" if one such subset has only one member. The easiest possible puzzle will be one with a path from root to solution consisting only of easy steps. One can also partition grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. in analogous manners, and harder puzzles will have "easy steps" only when considering these partitions.
Furthermore, I would guess that the difficulty scales directly with the size of the biggest jump, with the number of jumps of different sizes only breaking ties.
If I'm sitting down with a cup of tea to solve a puzzle, I want it to be a properly hard puzzle. If I'm taking a quick break at work, I want a four-minute puzzle. I basically never want potentially endless computer games, because 1.last.
Smearcase continues to be exactly right in all respects in 44.
The fact that it can be so easily solved algorithmically rubs me the wrong way, a bit.
Yeah, I did quite a lot of Sudoku for a while when it first took off in the UK, but after the initial thrill wore off, this was what drove me back to cryptic crosswords. They're just so much more satisfying to solve. Though, frankly, even those rote logic puzzles (with the set square shaped grid) or even Picross are more satisfying than Sudoku.
49: What's the stitch? That leafy one I made wasn't hard exactly but had a 16-line pattern I never quite memorized, and 8 places where you had to purl two stitches together through the back loop, which I find awkward.
the most irritating scarf ever
Made of fiberglass and poison oak.
Count me in the 4-minute-only group.
It doesn't matter so much for women.
59: It's just knit two, slip two with the yarn in front one row, and then purl two, slip two with the yarn in back on the next (so the slipped yarn is always on the front of the fabric). What makes it hard is that each row is offset one from the row before to make a kind of twill pattern with the slips.
Consider the set of partially to fully completed sudoku puzzles generated by consistently filling in squares of a root puzzle. These form a directed, acyclic graph with nodes that can be ranked by the number of filled squares (only one node will have 81).
I think I know what this is describing? Possible moves from any intermediate step of a puzzle?
Any given node of rank n either has no children, or it is covered by a set of nodes with rank n+1.
How could a node have no children, unless it is the final, solved problem? Or is that what you're saying?
This set of children can be partitioned by the square that was filled in (that is, one can construct subsets such as "the children created by filling in the lower left square").
Ok.
A node has an "easy step" if one such subset has only one member. The easiest possible puzzle will be one with a path from root to solution consisting only of easy steps. One can also partition grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. in analogous manners, and harder puzzles will have "easy steps" only when considering these partitions.
If I'm reading this correctly, this is merely counting the number of possible answers in a given square? This doesn't account for the degree of entanglement between possibilities of different squares.
Basically: Suppose you have 4 blank squares, each with two possibilities. If all the squares can be paired off: square A and B can only be "3"s or "5"s, while C and D can be "4"s or "2"s, then the situation is easy.
However, if A, B, C, D all involve "2", "3", "4", "5" in a configuration which is more entangled, even if each square only has two possibilities, then the situation is harder.
Ex: A can be 2 or 3,
B can be 3 or 4,
C can be 4 or 5,
D can be 5 or 2.
(In other words, there's permutation group stuff going on.)
How could a node have no children, unless it is the final, solved problem? Or is that what you're saying
It could have no children if it's a dead end -- the filled in squares aren't inconsistent in themselves, but there's no next step you can take that won't be inconsistent.
To generalize the "easy steps" from children to larger steps, one has to replace the rule of requiring a partition class to have a single member with the requirement that each member of a class have a non-trivial subset in common.
Shoot, work beckons so I can't clarify how I'm handling entanglement. 61 is correct, and 62 isn't exactly what I want.
61: Oh, true. An error has been made but it's not yet evident.
I don't think the graph in 51 is the best way to think about the problem.
But, when Eggplant's work recedes, I'd be interested in hearing it, because maybe I'm just not grasping what's going on.
Growing up, I used to go hunting for shark's teeth in the creeks all the time. It involves squatting for long stretches over rock beds and pebble beds, ankle deep in a creek, and staring at the rocks until the tell-tale color or angle or bit of gum line, etc, jumps out at you.
I really, really enjoy a kind of trance-like scanning for patterns. I kept sharks-tooth hunting through high school, on my own whenever I was stressed out and just wanted to clear my thoughts. I'd still do it if I lived in Florida.
Sudoku is tedious to me precisely because it's not really about numbers. Like Blandings, I prefer KenKen but, like heebie, I hate when it's too easy. I don't do either the NYT crossword or KenKen Monday-Wednesday.
I do like KenKen, although I haven't played it much. Maybe there's an awesome app out there for it.
There isn't an Android app for it, but I don't think I'd like doing it electronically anyway. The physical act of writing is part of the appeal for me.
This is the most attention I've ever payed to a game I've never played and never will. Am I bored? You figure it out.
Is no one else curious about which app heebie is using? I want names!
I find Sudoku is perfect for airplane rides: easy to pack, requires enough concentration that I can ignore the fact that I am cooped up somewhere uncomfortable with no option to leave (esp when there are delays), and yet also pleasantly soothing: just figure out the next step.
68.last: Try using only the down clues.
That's what I initially thought! But you can't start contemplating the interesting problems until you have this information in front of you.
But the interesting problems are kind of of the same sort, right? Like, this column needs a 1 and a 5, but one of the gaps is in a box that already has a 5, so that gap needs a 1, and the other gap needs the 5.
Rather there are finitely many techniques, which they've grouped according to difficulty, and then they decide the difficulty of the puzzle according to what the highest bin of tricks that it requires.
That's the easiest way to write an automatic grader. It works pretty well for the harder puzzles, but it doesn't do so well at distinguishing between puzzles at the easier end of the difficulty range, because it misses a crucial feature, which is the "width" of the puzzle: how many deductions are available at a given time. When there are lots of available deductions, it's usually straightforward to find one of them quickly. When there are few, it takes longer to find them and the puzzle seems difficult.
Hey, no fair having thought this through thoroughly and rigorously.
73 seconded. We used to spend our four-stop subway ride racing through the puzzles (one crossword, three sudoku) in the free commuter newspaper. So long as we only used the down clues on the crossword, there was just enough chance that we wouldn't finish in time that it was fun despite the puzzles' being utter crap.
Also, the man who invented sudoku is the world's most boring person. I got stuck hearing him give a talk once: forty-five minutes about deciding whether to call the puzzles "su doku" or "sudoku". FASCINATING. No, please, really, go on.
OT: does anyone here understand plumbing? Here's what happened today: a second-floor toilet got clogged this morning. (My kids tend to use WAY too much toilet paper.) Usually, this is easily fixable with a plunger. Today, I spent 10 minutes plunging and plunging and plunging and plunging and... nothing. The water in the bowl just sat there. It was overfull, but probably 2-3" below the level that would be overflowing. It didn't overflow at all in this process, and the tank had long since stopped running (and had already fully re-filled). I couldn't figure out why the clog was so stubborn, but I ran out of time, and had to get the kids to school, so I just left it, figuring I would try to deal with it more after work. I sent my wife an email warning her it was clogged and not to use it or try to flush it, but as sort of an extra precaution/reminder I left the plunger itself just sitting in the toilet bowl, where I'd been using it.
About five hours later my wife came home. She'd gotten my email, so she went to look at the toiler herself. The plunger was stuck down in the bottom of the bowl, as if someone had pressed it there like a suction cup (just like you would do when plunging a toilet, expect that IME the plungers don't usually get stuck like that). She casually pulled it out and then GALLONS AND GALLONS AND GALLONS AND GALLONS of water began flowing back out of the bowl (coming up out of the drain in the bowl, not into the bowl from the tank) and overflowing into our house. Eventually it stopped, but not before the second floor was flooded and the first floor ceilings were all dripping sewage water.
Eventually, I'm going to get home and I'm going to be very unhappy about the mess and the damage and the expense. But, for now, I'm just genuinely puzzled by: what the hell happened? What would cause that? It sort of defies everything I thought I knew about toilet physics.
(My kids tend to use WAY too much toilet paper.)
Way to shift the blame.
Do you have a third floor?
No. The second floor is the top floor.
Is the vent stack clear of obstructions?
The only two possibilities I can think of are (1) backpressure from sewers outside the house (but then why aren't all the drains in the house backing up) or (2) your wife is exaggerating how bad it is -- the overflow is the contents of the toilet tank, not gallons and gallons, and it didn't come back up out of the drain, but out of the tank.
Or, you know, witchcraft.
Oof. That's going to be a nightmare to come home to. My sympathies.
As far as I know? That's in the attic. I don't know what would be obstructing it.
83(2) is my hope, but she gave a graphic and fairly detailed account, which sounded like a hell of a lot more than a tankful.
83: That's why I was thinking about the vent. If the line was blocked further down, the work with the plunger might have caused water to hit the vent pipe and then flood out when the seal was broken.
88 sounds plausible, I think, if I'm understanding it correctly.
I'm trying to do something useful with the vent pipe -- is the weather weird? Very very strong wind? If there were some way for there to be strong suction applied at the top of the vent pipe, that would suck the plunger down as described, and then you'd have ten feet of pipe's worth of water above the toilet to come out the drain.
But that sounds ridiculous -- I can't imagine it actually happening.
Years ago I had a blockage way down in my drain pipe, and ALL the drains were backed up, and I filled up all the drain pipes all the way up the wall stack.
I think somehow you got water upstream in the drains upstream of your toilet bowl, and it drained when you opened the bowl. All I can imagine is there are drain pipes above your toilet bowl (possibly a sink drain above floor level?) that filled with water. That doesn't seem like it would be gallons and gallons of water, though.
One other tip for those with kids. If the bowl flushes, but not that great, and you find no plug, take the entire toilet off the floor and check the toilet trap. A tooth brush stuck in the toilet trap will cause those symptoms.
Oh, 88 sounds much more in the realm of possibility than my 91. Except it still sounds like not enough water somehow.
My thinking is that if the clog was TP or a loose amalgam of shit and TP, it would eventually dissolve and the sewage would wash down the pipe. If there was no effective vent (or if the TP clog went down just far enough to block the vent), the sewage would create a vacuum. This could explain why the plunger was stuck to the bottom of the bowl so well. I lack the physics to estimate is how much pressure it would take to blow sewage out when you removed the plunger.
If the main drain was blocked, I don't see how sewage doesn't come out on a lower level as well. If you're lucky, Tripp will be right, but I don't see how that could make for gallons and gallons of water either.
One other thing, too. If the float was stuck so that the toilet bowl kept trying to refill, and the drain was plugged downstream, all that water is gonna just overflow the bowl. Also, if the tank holds a lot and someone flushes it while the bowl is full and plugged, all that tank water and more go onto the floor, because some of the refill water goes into the bowl as the tank is filling.
I bet someone flushed it to try to jar the clog loose, and all the flush water gushes onto the floor. That could be gallons.
94: I don't think that works -- that'd suck water and air from the bowl into the drain, not blow it out.
I was picturing with your 91 (and I can't quite make this work, but maybe there's some way) that you meant that the plunging somehow pumped water into the vent pipe above the toilet, that was blocked from draining by the clog in the drain and the plunger in the bowl. When the plunger came out, the water in the vent pipe drained.
But that still doesn't really sound possible.
Gawd, urple, that sounds totally unpleasant. I have no advice, but you have my sympathy.
I was thinking it would suck sewage/water from one end and air from the other, leading to a kind of megafrothing.
Admittedly, that doesn't seem very plausible, but I don't see how else you get the plunger sucked down into the bowl as Step 1.
But, your right. I did originally mean that maybe the vent got filled with sewage because of the plunging. That does seem more plausible. That couldn't explain the plunger being stuck down, but if urple had really plunged it down himself and his wife may have had trouble removing it just from that.
In any case, if I were Urple or Mrs. Urple, I'd be on the phone with a professional plumber, and perhaps a cleaning service.
This is not helpful, but funny. In my first house my main drain pipe plugged where it entered the septic tank. The entire stack filled up. I wanted to unplug the main pipe, and there was an access plug where the pipe left the basement, about face height. I hung a bucket under the access hatch, and opened the access plug just a crack to drain the pipe. That was the plan. In actuality, the pressure was so great that shit-water (complete with wet toilet paper) sprayed out of the crack and drenched my face and body and the basement with, well, shit-water and wet toilet paper. Talk about the poor monkey trying to put the plug back in.
To make matters worse, it was the winter, so I couldn't hose off outside, and I could not shower at home while the drain was plugged, so I had to drive to the health club to shower there. Ugh.
That sucks and sounds really shitty. (hee hee)
That couldn't explain the plunger being stuck down, but if urple had really plunged it down himself and his wife may have had trouble removing it just from that.
I left it sitting casually in the toilet bowl, leaning against the back of the tank, not plunged down in there in a pressured manner.
105: O.K. Then I'm going back to 94.
and perhaps a cleaning service
Eh, don't worry about it. It's just shit and sewage all over your home.
Not like dozens of living rodents inches from where you keep and prepare your food.
I'm getting more and more convinced that it's just a tankful. I hate to malign Mrs. Urple's abilities as a reporter, but a toilet overflow is so gross that a little exaggeration seems plausible.
Have fun working on your solutions, guys. You know after you've done all that work some professional plumber is going to waltz in here with the explanation.
One additional note: a plumber once told us that toilet wasn't vented correctly. I don't recall what exactly was wrong with it, though. And when he described the problem he was warning us about things like sewage smell coming into our house, not catastrophic overflows. We hadn't had any problem with sewage smells in the house, so I didn't think much of it at the time.
Don't make me relive that MH. The shakes and fear is coming back. Even the satisfaction of destroying those fuckers like an angry god in Ratpocalypse 2011 didn't come close to making up for the horror.
72: it's called ":) sudoku" by Jason Linehart. The free daily one.
Also Gareth's link in 75 is very satisfying to read.
111 -- I thought the venting was to deal with water pressure, and the trap/water in the tank dealt with the smells. If it wasn't vented properly, maybe you could somehow have caused a vacuum a la 94.
Or I guess I mean the air pressure created by flushing water through the pipe. Or something.
If it isn't vented properly, you get smells because air has to go somewhere. It gurgles through the trap.
111: Okay, now I have a theory -- roughly like Moby's.
There's a serious plug in the pipe (you knew that). There's no vent above the toilet (new fact). You blocked the drain with the plunger, and during the course of the day the plug dissolved some and slid down the drain some distance, creating a vacuum above it (which sucked the plunger into the bowl hard).
Coincidentally, there was sewer gas trapped below the plug, pushing up. Mrs Urple pulled up the plunger, sucking the loosened plug up through the bowl, and allowing the trapped sewer gas to force a whole bunch of water and debris up.
This still sounds like it should have been a nasty belch and a foul smell, not gallons and gallons of water, but it's something.
Being a plumber sounds like much more fun than lawyering.
It might, if there wasn't shit in the water.
does anyone here understand plumbing?
It's basically a series of tubes. Do you have a pump? Maybe your plunging shook the initial blockage loose, the plunger created a seal, and the pump burned itself out trying to create a vacuum. I'm still at a loss how the described effect could occur absent supertoilet water.
Don't we have a real live professional architect comment here every so often? Those people are supposed to know about pipes.
toilet overflow is so gross that a little exaggeration seems plausible
I really do hope 104 turns out to be the case. We'll see. Although, let's get one thing straight: that only happens if she attempted to unclog the toilet and flushed it, right? (And is too embarrassed to admit it, and made up the story about sewage monsters pressuring the plunger in order to flood our house.) Even if we were to stipulate that only a tankful of water was involved, a mysteriously pressurized plunger being pulled off of the drain wouldn't cause it to overflow, would it? An innocent exaggeration about the quantity of water isn't sufficient to explain away the whole thing.
does anyone here understand plumbing?
It's basically a series of tubes.
My toilet is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.
Anyway, air pressure can move a fantastic amount of water. And many gallons of water would be in the sewer pipe ready to be moved. The trick is to find an explanation that doesn't sound like a Warren Commission "magic clog."
Or hit the flush lever accidentally while getting the plunger loose. If that's the explanation, she has to be wrong about not having flushed, but she doesn't have to be covering up -- she could just be confused about what was happening (I am certainly capable of great feats of confusion when faced with an overflowing toilet.)
"pressuring the plunger" s/b "pressurizing the plunger"
(I am certainly capable of great feats of confusion when faced with an overflowing toilet.)
Even on the list of superpowers that only apply in an overflowing-toilet scenario, this is among the least awesome.
125: Yeah, the weak point in my 118 is that I need a whole lot of high pressure sewer gas seeking a vent.
Is there a toilet on the first floor hooked into the same drain, or are they separate down to the basement? The latter case would, I think, make it easier to build up more pressure below the clog, because it couldn't start bubbling out the downstairs toilet.
128: Sadly, all my superpowers are like that. Similarly, in the face of an upcoming litigation deadline, superhuman feats of blogcommenting come very easily to me.
This is a good time to bring up something I learned about shop vacs. The small ones tend to spit whatever liquids are there out the back vent. I didn't have this problem with the bigger one I used to have.
128: Fortunately, she has another. Uh, not precisely for that scenario, though.
I rate this Shitdoku puzzle as "expert".
About 80% of the people choose to defecate on a level that allows them to clear their sewer pipes in under four minutes.
Oh, and since she's too modest, it falls upon me to say heebie was right.
I was thinking it would suck sewage/water from one end and air from the other, leading to a kind of megafrothingSantorumming.
[Mumbles something about Standpipe]
Santoru is a shitty time-water.
Hedy Lamarr is back in the news.
I think I have a different Sudoku app to yours, but in mine they explain how they calculate difficulty - it's exactly the 'highest bin of tricks' rule you describe.
On the topic of Things Bosses Shouldn't Ask You to Do Without Any Idea of What They're Asking, all the secretaries in my office are tied up for the second day sending out 3,700 letters with 2 enclosures requested midday on Friday. I and other staff are helping when we can. That's 3,700 letters and enclosures that have to be photocopied, hand-collated, hand-folded, hand-stuffed, hand-labeled, hand-stamped, and hand-sealed. 3,700 labels that have to be printed, and 3,700 stamps that have to be printed page-by-page off one of those postage web sites. The boss thought it would all be finished by COB Friday. (Yes, it would have made more sense to send it out, but that wasn't an option.)
All managers in all offices should be required to work as receptionists, secretaries, and mailroom attendants before they're allowed to boss anyone around. (See also, everyone should be required to wait tables, work retail, answer customer service calls, and make fancy coffee drinks when there's a line out the door.)
If we count people going presidential, we have two commenters named after Chicago expressways.
143: They make paper foldering machines. They cost a fair bit, but still cheaper than labor.
They also make folding machines. That's probably closer to what you need.
Yeah, I know, but we don't do this often. Folderers are very cool to watch in action.
Once I had to send many, many letters. The mail room guy was upset until he realized that I just wanted to borrow his machine. I didn't expect him to stuff the envelopes. (We had a folder, not a folder-stuffer.)
143-147: Probably my worst job ever was in a junk mail ("direct mail") factory. There was a machine with an input slot on one end for letters printed on an unbroken roll of paper about four feet in diameter, and a smaller hopper around the middle for empty envelopes. My job was to keep the machine running: replace the rolls of letters, keep the hopper full of envelopes, get envelopes ready for the mail, clear jams in the machinery, etc.
With one of those machines, it wouldn't take all the secretaries in the office a week to do. I estimated I personally put together a million pieces of junk mail over that summer. Obviously, though, it's a specialized chunk of machinery that's not worth having unless it'll be in constant use.
I would also like to mention that the letter is a full, small-margined page of dense text that no one is going to read, encouraging people to fill out a form no one is going to fill out and then to send back the form using their own postage. So at least it's all worthwhile.
You don't need that kind of fancy machine. A small print shop would do it for much less than it would cost the pay the secretaries for their time. Planet middle-manager has budgeting rules that make things like this seem reasonable. Managers have just enough leeway to do something stupid but not enough to do something right.
149: The part about the unbroken roll of paper is fascinating. I never would have guessed, though it makes sense.
Rolls of paper is a theme of this thread.
152: The part about the unbroken roll of paper is fascinating
L. Ron Hubbard had a typewriter set up to use a continuous feed of paper.
Ugh, I once temped in an envelope-stuffing position. It was dire; people could request any subset of something like 20 different enclosures. Each enclosure was in a lettered stack, and we had our own stacks of little cards that read something like this:
10 A B L
3 A C D R
1 A C F
24 A C Z
2 A D
1 A D F L
1 A D F L M
14 A D G
each of which was attached to a sheet of labels. From these we had to assemble the mailings. There was no way to sit down while you were doing it, because you couldn't possibly reach all the stacks of enclosures from your seat, and of course the setup was the exact opposite of ergonomic in any way. It was horrid.
Stuffing envelopes is the task that the Democrats give to volunteers. That, telephoning, and door-to-door. All very important, and all completely horrible. Politics involves incredible sacrifice.
155: That's not writing. That's just typing.
157: I would rather stuff 8 million envelopes than talk to a single human being. (Leaving door knockers I don't mind.)
My experience is that door-to-door is most painful if you're expected to talk to people, phoning is endurable while you're doing it, but you never come to like it, and envelope stuffing is painless and can be quite jolly if it's group work.
Via Slashdot, a 9x9 Sudoku needs at least 17 clues filled in to have a unique solution. (Done by computed examination, not logic.)
urple's plumbing: fascinating, from a comfortable distance.
Heheheh "Knockers," "stuff," envelope," "8 million," "door, " human being."
urple's plumbing: fascinating, from a comfortable distance.
That's what Mrs. Urple says.
I'd rather clean urple's bathroom than knock on doors.
Urple's plumbing troubles are making me freshly nervous about our plans to buy a house this spring/summer. We just got ourselves a real estate agent, making it all feel a lot realler. And I don't know how to own a house! I don't have the foggiest notion what a vent stack is.
"Vent stack" was my error. There is just a vent. The stack is a combo of all the sewer piping.
I don't have the foggiest notion what a vent stack is.
It is obviously a stack of vents of some kind.
(Fascinatedly horrified sympathies to urple, btw.)
The vent is the thing a fish excretes through. I don't know how they'd be stacked, I'm not a fish. Probably during mating season vents get stacked in the lek somehow.
I didn't know the term "lek" before looking it up on Wikipedia just now. So what activities/institutions are human leks?
Without a vent, and with a clog, you could have methane generated within the system cause pressure and back up all six ways to hell. Oorg.
Door to door is ok. You get a nice walk, you don't actually have to talk to that many people per hour, and sometimes you get free food and drink. Phone canvassing sucks. And with those automatic dialers it's even worse. I don't remember much in the way of envelope stuffing. I was told it used to be a big thing but not any more. The closest was prepping canvassing packs for the weekend volunteers.
Best part of being a full time vol - the booze comes out at around 9 PM. It makes the daily 10-midnight schedule almost bearable. (but you get to come in at 1 on Sundays!)
I think even the most low-budget campaign now gets mail done by direct mail companies, so volunteer envelope stuffing's mostly gone the way of the Dodo.
Also, home ownership isn't difficult, just more expensive. Instead of just calling the landlord to fix things there's an intermediate step where you wonder if you can fix something, realize that you can't, and then pay someone to fix it for you.
You have leks and mating balls, which are quite different, though to R. Santorum I'm sure they seem exactly the same.
Also, home ownership isn't difficult, just more expensive. Instead of just calling the landlord to fix things there's an intermediate step where you wonder if you can fix something, realize that you can't, and then pay someone to fix it for you.
That sounds exactly true, yes.
Although I hear there is also this stuff called maintenance you are supposed to do before things actually go so far as to need fixing, so that all your nice old wood bits and walls and things that make your house not a decrepit pit stay that way.
For skillful players, the intermediate step can at times be measured in years.
176: This leaves out the step between wondering and realizing, where you try to fix it and regret your decision.
178 makes a good point. If you really want to, you can just decide to say fuck it. Like when I decided to take on mowing the lawn myself, then didn't do it, and then 3 months later my house was picked by a location scout to fill in for an abandoned home in Detroit.
177: I've owned two houses. I was spoiled by the first in which the previous owner who had lived there 30+ years had done things like replace all faucet washers on a schedule. He kept records and gave them to me. The next house, not so much. Plus I've now lived in it for 25 years (almost to the day). In the first week, I learned that if you pay someone enough money they will come dig a new gas line in a snowstorm.
I am finding Halford's remarks on this subject cheering in light of the fact that I have seen his house and it is fucking gorgeous and to all appearances completely functional.
I was spoiled by the first in which the previous owner who had lived there 30+ years had done things like replace all faucet washers on a schedule. He kept records and gave them to me.
Yes, any poor house we own is going to suffer mightily from a complete lack of this sort of behavior on our parts.
Maintenance is one of the hidden costs of home-ownership. Even if you keep track of the money out and include it in your accounting, the time you spend is time lost (unless you enjoy that kind of thing) and worrying about problems causes psychic wear and tear.
Owning a home has made me really, really miss having a landlord. I'm terrible at all the sorts of maintenance tasks that help avoid gigantic repair bills.
Instead of just calling the landlord to fix things there's an intermediate step where you wonder if you can fix something, realize that you can't, and then pay someone to fix it for you.
I've never actually owned a house, but living with Magpie in the house she owned made one thing absolutely crystal-clear to me: You know that sense of pride people get in having fixed something themselves? I don't get that at all; I'd much rather just pay someone else to make the problem go away.
(Coincidence that my anxiety got much worse when living in a house rather than an apartment building where I could just call the landlord to fix problems? You decide!)
I wonder if Urple will tell us what happened. (I do not fix things. I call Tony, the hereditary super, to fix things.)
I can shit on a toilet that I installed with my own two hands while my feet rest on tile that were installed by somebody kind of competent because that was beyond me.
Most of us try to avoid shitting on, rather than in, the toilet, regardless of who installed it. Have you tried lifting the lid?
I don't have a landlord to tell me where I can and can't defecate.
Cooking a delicious meal you've cooked yourself may well be an exquisite pleasure, though I'm not one who would know something like that. Even for me, though it's hard to believe that defecating in a toilet you've installed yourself can match that pleasure.
I am lucky in that my better half can do just about everything except serious plumbing and wiring, but the advice I received was just to accept serenely that the first few years will be a money drain.
192: The old one wasn't level and the tank wobbled on the bowl.
I installed tile once. It did not keep my parents from getting divorced.
Plus, the new toilet is smaller, meaning I have more room for my legs to move without hitting the wall.
Some information is too much, Moby.
195: Did you use the right underlayment?
Shut up! I'll do whatever I want! I hate you! [Slams door, sets garage on fire.]
196: meaning I have more room for my legs to move without hitting the wall.
Are you doing elementary backstroke?
the first few years will be a money drain
Few being ~30.
flippanter, stop making me laugh so much, the people in the neuroscience center are looking weird at me. what kind of tile was it?
If memory serves, kitchen floor tile in a sort of cream/light khaki.
182 -- thanks, RFTS, but did I mention the rats [not there when you visited, fortunately] and the decrepit lawn? I also don't think I ever mentioned the former owner's awesome plan of "do not properly connect the sewer line to the main city sewer but have it just kinda drain out into the abandoned alley in the back."
Actually I honestly love my house and owning it, but describing it as "expensive" and an "incredibly bad financial investment" is like calling water wet. I soothe myself for the expense by noting that since I can never leave the place, it might as well be made sort of nice.
So the turds just floated into the alley? Or into the storm sewer?
Both, really. It was supposed to go into the storm sewer.
For certain values of "supposed to".
"Storm sewer" implies all sorts of unpleasantness.
Also, I guess, a mythological seamstress of the forces of nature, as recorded in the carvings and few precious household artifacts of the mumble mumble people of the mumble mumble basin.
196: SEE, LOTS OF PEOPLE DO TOO PREFER A WIDE STANCE!
I still have no fucking clue what happened, but I can confirm that this was very obviously a hell of a lot more than a tank full of water.
Although, on the bright side, whatever was clogging the toilet seems to have cleared itself. The toilet now flushes normally.
Life is like a storm sewer... what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
211: Was it water that just flowed over the bowl or is there evidence that it was thrown into the air?
211: Unless you have no other toilets, I'd still avoid using it until a plumber came by.
Setup a Paypal account and I'll help contribute to the cost of the plumber as long as he gives a definitive explanation.
215: Naughty child. Cherry bomb. That'll be $500.
Must every thread become a plumbing thread?
I have the tape and the screws, but no compound and very little drywall that isn't currently attached to one of my walls.
I've just realised that urple presumably has the Stack O' Vents Blues.
I'm trying to decide if the great toilet disaster should be part of the Life of Urple text-based adventure game (more challenging than the BEAN THING puzzle), or if it's too gross.
I'm feeling less soothed about this decision all the time.
Also, I sympathize, since I'm still waiting for my apartment to be liveable after an upstairs plumbing disaster dumped water all over my living room.
223: I was thinking about that when you mentioned you have no dvr. Are you staying there? Do you need taller furniture?
I'm in a hotel at the moment. For the next week, I'm traveling. The super claims I should be able to move back in around the time I get back to town, but I'm growing skeptical.
I just got used to "chronic" and now the kids are calling it "skeptical"?
The bright side is that relatively little of my stuff was damaged. A rug and a sofa, mostly. Only lost four or five books.
Unless any electronics were shorted out, which I don't actually know yet, I suppose.
Anyway, here's hoping urple has good insurance.
Or bad insurance but a wining lottery ticket that will cover the clean-up, repairs, and a memory-repressing Vegas trip.
It's only the stuff that happens in Vegas that stays there.
We had a blocked toilet drain once, and the whole thing was very stressful, mostly because I couldn't get anyone to actually fix it - people would come, say they didn't know what was wrong and go away again. Eventually C pulled some strings and I ended up with the boss of the project management company that the university use for their multimillion pound stuff like redoing the New Bodleian in my garden looking at my pipes. He sent me a hot plumber to set up a work-around, and then two more men to sort it out. And then offered to lose the invoice ... anyway, the water company ended up paying it because it was on their bit of pipe. And finally a competent drain man came and fixed a second problem (there were two, which was why the previous people had got so confused) and all was well again.
There're so many little things wrong with this house though. I can make myself quite miserable thinking about it.
but I bet it's all quaint and stuff. don't destroy our illusions, asilon!
So, given that I'm finally in a position where saving for a downpayment is a somewhat realistic prospect, enlighten me. Are hideous maintenance/repair liabilities more likely on older properties or new-build? On the one hand, older properties are more likely to have archaic infrastructure and a backlog of maintenance. On the other, I've lived in new build flats that were pretty shoddily put together. At least an older flat would probably have had the most egregious teething problems worked out by the previous owners.
234. You have actually answered your own question correctly. Older properties have had most of the worst issues addressed, but they have drawbacks such as they're unlikely to have efficient double glasing. They need, IME, maintenance; new (i.e. less than 40 years old houses, weren't built to last and the possibility of catastrophic failure is higher (usually something to do with the roof).
Our strategy has been, where possible, to buy older houses that have been lived in by owner occupiers - that is, not let out, and not bought by a builder to do up and sell. That way the maintenance is more or less up to date and the ongoing costs are manageable and predictable.
222: I'm feeling less soothed about this decision all the time.
Don't mind us, I'm sure it will be different for you.
As long as we're asking for toilet advice, I've got a toilet that's getting backed up maybe twice a week. I've snaked it three times in as many months. So finally I say to the landlord there must be something wrong deeper down in the pipes. He sends a guy and the guy says "beats me, let's replace the toilet."
I don't understand how this could possibly be the toilet's fault. Except maybe you need to yank the toilet out, completely clean out the trap and reinstall it.
118: There's a serious plug in the pipe (you knew that). There's no vent above the toilet (new fact). You blocked the drain with the plunger, and during the course of the day the plug dissolved some and slid down the drain some distance, creating a vacuum above it (which sucked the plunger into the bowl hard).
Almost there. There's a serious plug. Urple does his plunger wanking routine but only pushes the plug a bit further down the pipe. (I use the word wanking because from urple's description I kind of pictured him in there, having worked out the kid-caused toilet plug routine, just jogging the plunger up and down for 20 minutes every couple of mornings. Presumably while humming 'Rule Britannia'.) So the toilet bowl is full of water and the plunger and urple leaves. The clog shifts, and the plunger is sucked down the bottom of the bowl, plugging it so the water doesn't empty out of the bowl. Ms. Urple comes home, sees the sucked down plunger, pulls it out, the water drains out, filling up the excess space from the clog migrating, and assumes the clog is gone. So she flushes the toilet. Not a problem, because even though the bowl will fill up again since the clog isn't gone, a full toilet tank won't fill the bowl completely. Unfortunately, this time, (as happens often with old toilets), the tank plunger doesn't close, so the water keeps running. If the pipe wasn't clogged, the water would keep draining away, so not a problem, but it is clogged, so the bowl fills up and water starts running everywhere, because the tank keeps trying to fill up. Mrs. Urple then reenacts an unfilmed episode of I love Lucy. She *doesn't* jiggle the handle because she thinks that will just flush the toilet again (which would be the right idea if the tank plunger was seated properly), so she is stuck helplessly watching the water overflow the bowl until in desperation she jiggles the handle and the plunger seats. Eventually the tank fills and the water stops running.
Something like that started to happen to me once while trying to clear a clog, but I reached over and killed the pressure at the cutoff valve before the bowl overflowed. So, thinking about it, unless Mrs. Urple is really excitable, I kind of doubt that's it.
The flooded vent pipe idea is workable. I'd just imagine trying to blow a cork down a clear acrylic air tubing. So the clog exits the toilet, reaches the tee where the vent joins the horizontal section of the sewer pipe, and sticks. Somehow during the industrious plunging the water is being pushed up the vent pipe (to a three or four foot height) but isn't leaking out. Urple leaves, and even the clog migrates past the tee and then sticks again, and all the water in vent pipe blows back out the toilet (since the water column is higher than the toilet and has no where to go). But that doesn't work because no suction would develop to pull the plunger into the bottom of the bowl. Instead, the water would come blowing back out whenever the clog shifted whether Mrs. Urple was home yet or not.
That idea would work if there was a clog at the tee where the first floor sewage pipe joined the vertical downpipe. Then people could keep flushing the second floor toilet and a big water column might stack up above the clog. Then when the clog shifted a bit, water would come blowing out. But it would come blowing out the first floor toilet and not the second floor toilet.
Sewer gas buildup doesn't work because the gas would be filling a downpipe that has to be at least 15 feet tall. For the pressure to rise high enough to move lots of water, the pressure would have to have already been high enough to start blowing water out the first floor toilet.
So, I expect that the guy urple talked to is correct, and the designer/installer really screwed up the second floor sewage piping with some Rube Goldberg scheme (I have seen that sort of thing a lot). Thus there's no way to tell WTF happened because the whole installation is seriously non-standard. Since it's hard to clog a standard sewer line with toilet paper unless you jam an entire roll of toilet paper down the bowl exit (but clogs are easy with tampons, diapers and paper towels), the regular clogging is suggestive of a screwy layout.
max
['Should probably get someone to fix that.']
238.1 is great, regardless of accuracy.
But it would come blowing out the first floor toilet and not the second floor toilet.
I thought about this -- it seems unlikely as a matter of plumbing, but this is Urple's life we're talking about. If the first floor toilet isn't in a stack with the second floor toilet, and they connect separately to the main sewer line in the basement, could you get the kind of pressure necessary without it affecting the first floor toilet? I don't know why you'd build a house like that, but again, this is Urple's life.
Having just bought a flat, I live in terror of having to learn about stuff like this.
As a friend of mine said ruefully once "Before I bought a Triumph Spitfire, I never had to know what a crankshaft was."
237: You can clean the trap more completely once you remove the toilet. Also, if you've already snaked it, it isn't very likely that there are problems past where the snake could have reached. (Unless you have other problems with your drains or used a very short snake.)
I've never been involved with hobby plumbers before.
I don't know why you'd build a house like that, but again, this is Urple's life.
Why you'd build a house like that would be so you can access the junctions with the main sewer line independently and out of the way. We have three toilets, which all join the main sewer separately and externally. They vent from the external soil pipes too. It saves having all that shit inside the house.
I don't know why you'd build a house like that, but again, this is Urple's life.
Was urple the contractor? I can only think of two reasons to build anything like that. If the 2nd floor toilet was original to the house, you might get funny plumbing if it is far from the main stack. The other possible reason is that the toilet was a later addition to the house. Added bathrooms get all kinds of funny plumbing.
244: I'm not sure I understand that. Does "main sewer" mean the public pipe under the road?
246: I'm using "main sewer line" to mean the main pipe draining into the public pipe, because I understood that was how LB was using it. Normally I'd call the public pipe a sewer, and the big private pipe I'm actually discussing the "main pipe" or something like that. I don't think there's a ubiquitous term for it; I'll ask my BiL, who's a plumber.
O.K. Then what does "externally" mean? Outside the house?
If the plumbers union blog links to us I'm sure that they'll think it's hysterical.
rfts, one thing we've done to mitigate that sort of fear is buy one of those home warranty policies. It came with the last house when Lee bought it and she just kept it up, which I think may have been a waste of money but ended up coming out about even when we actually ran the math and would have been a huge plus if it had paid to replace any appliances, which luckily we never needed.
We did the same as chris y, just bought an old (almost 110 years) house that's been in the same family for 30+ years. They didn't keep it maintained as well as they had in the early years, but it was livable and not in bad shape and the non-stylish decor and lack of superficial fixes is why we were able to get it cheap. It's such a great house and we're so happy to be in it.
I don't know a thing about plumbing other than "Water flows downhill in the absence of something pushing it up," so I'm sure I'm using most of the words wrong. But Chris is right about what I meant by "main sewer line".
They must be in here somewhere.
These all seem to be general public oriented, not for plumbers themselves to shoot the shit on. (HA).
247 cont'd. We have a big underground pipe running to one side of the house, which joins the municipal sewage system under the sidewalk in front of it. Access hatches front and back of the house. The soil pipes from the toilets run down the external walls and underground to join it at various points depending on the location of the toilets, with access at the junction point in the case of the ones where that isn't inside the pre-existing inspection points. Is that clearer?
It is. Now somebody explain why I'm still interested in this.
I've never seen anything like that in the U.S., but I haven't actually made a study of it.
Possibly it is too cold for that kind of thing in the places I've lived. If you weren't constantly shitting, you'd run the risk of getting ice in any spot where the drain slowed down.
Interesting demographic issue there. If we had a lurking plumber, they'd have piped up (heh) by now, which indicates that we don't. I suppose it's not surprising, but kind of disappointing.
254: It's a logic puzzle. I'm fascinated, because I want to know what made water run uphill. I can puzzle over this sort of thing in the absence of any actual knowledge for weeks.
259: I have a critical task that requires tedious attention to detail and that I can't foist on anybody else.
I can pretty much always say that. It continually amazes me that I actually get my stuff done without obvious malpractice or pissing off my supervisor.
I have a guy I foist things on, but he took an extended vacation for reasons that I assume are unrelated to foisting.
221: I'm trying to decide if the great toilet disaster should be part of the Life of Urple text-based adventure game ... or if it's too gross
Surely you jest. I'm sure all will join me in eschewing the Hollywoodification of the gritty reality of living the life unfogged.
>inventory
You have:
a dressing gown
a toilet plunger
an iPad
no tea
dubious cheese
some kind of vegetable, possibly a squash
>cook casserole
242: Sure, you remove the toilet to clean out the trap. Then you reinstall the toilet. What does a brand new toilet add to the mix? Maybe it's sensible to have a new toilet on deck so you don't remove the old toilet, realize it's made out of yarn and gum wrappers, then end up toilet-less for a week...
If it keeps backing-up and there is no blockage, your toilet may be underpowered. The early models of the low-flo era were not very good.
Fuel injection and a supercharger can bring any old toilet up to speed.
I didn't think it was possible to love ajay more, but 264 proves me wrong.
While researching what toilet to buy for the bathroom we remodeled last year, I learned that 266 is true, and that the standard technique for measuring this involves flushing calibrated blobs of miso paste (wrapped in condoms for reusability), and figuring out the largest number of blobs such that the toilet flushes all of them 85% of the time.
I still have no idea what happened, but since LB seems interested: yes, there are separate connections to the main sewer line. The upstairs bathroom is the only one that's original to the house. As I said, a plumber told us it wasn't vented correctly, but I don't recall exactly how or why. The first floor bathroom was added as part of an early 1980s renovation, poorly done, clearly amateur. (In every way that I'm competent to evaluate--the plumbing may actually be fine but i sort of doubt it. There is also a bizarre original working toilet in the completely open and completely unfinished basement, just sitting there all by it's lonesome. I think that one flooded too, but it's literally right next to a floor drain, and again, totally unfinished, so no problem: it just drained away.
There is also a bizarre original working toilet in the completely open and completely unfinished basement, just sitting there all by it's lonesome. I think that one flooded too, but it's literally right next to a floor drain
The plot thickens!
271.last: Ah, a Pittsburgh Toilet.
You could help wikipedia by expanding that stub.
The urple I have constructed in my head would encourage his children to play in the sewage-soiled house in hopes that they will become Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
JRoth was the one who told me it was even a "thing"; I defer to his expertise and would expect him to update Wikipedia. I can see in my basement where there had been one.
I've actually managed to only have shit come up in an interesting/fugly sub-basement* (but it took a couple of weeks to discover that that was where it was going--as I was searching for a shutoff valve after a pipe froze**).
*Dug out lower than the basement beneath what was a porch and is now my kitchen. The story (and there is good supporting evidence) is that it was dug for moonshining purposes.
**None of this will happen to you rtfs.
And now I'm wondering exactly how long
I don't have a toilet in my basement. I have to pee in the floor drain.
We had a toilet like that, too, and probably a shower. There's still a little bathroom built out of boards, but the plumbing has all been removed except the hot and cold water valves for the shower, which I guess was sort of open-air. Eek. Our old house had a shower in the unfinished partial-dirt-floor basement and the previous owners insisted on considering it a half-bath when listing the home, which we didn't do.
Before 279 this whole affair was exciting, but a bit prosaic. Now it's beautiful.
I'm just hoping the intended end of 279 wasn't "I can hold my breath without passing out."
I was thinking the sewage beasts got him.
re: sewers
In our previous house we had the external drain outside our house flooding the driveway with shit and washing suds every so often. The landlord had cunningly moved hundreds of miles away, so I decided to fix it. So I told our downstairs neighbour that I was going to lift the drain cover, and try to unblock and not to use the plumbing/toilet for a while.
She fucking flushed it while I was lying prone on the ground with my body up to my shoulders _in_ the drain, working the blockage free. It's a miracle she lived.
Urple, at our previous residence we had tree roots that would grow into the pipes. Then clogs would form. When this happened, one would hear a warning 'gloop' from the sink or the bathtub or the toilet when one ran water down the drain. Run water in the sink, hear the toilet gloop, know that the next flush would overflow the place.* So if this is happening often and you're in an area with trees that like to eat pipes, you might want to look at that.
Our house had a basement toilet and sink in the middle of the laundry room. Our first major project was to put up walls and lay tile and paint it. Poof, half-bath!
*On one occasion, the story went like this: Philosopher sees that the toilet is going to overflow and turns the cutoff valve. Philosopher calls maintenance. Maintenance sends the plumber who listesn carefully to the explanation that this has happened before, and if the valve is turned open and the toilet flushed, it will overflow. Maintenance nods, opens valve, flushes toilet, toilet overflows. Maintenance explains that he didn't think it would do that.
It's all a set up. I'm pretty sure that Urple is a 22 year old girl in Nicaragua who has been playing us all for years.
285 A young Polish college student neighbour? My mom once got an unfortunate bout of food poisoning on a Bulgarian beach vacation in the early/mid sixties. The hall bathroom said closed, but it looked fine, and sometimes you really need to go. Relief was _immediately_ followed by a loud string of screams and curses.
If you can't trust the food handling at a Bulgarian beach resort, you may as well eat at home.
I assume Urple is off measuring.
re: 289
Heh, no. English operating system nurse. I think her brain hadn't somehow connected me telling her not to use the toilet, with me being in the drain outside.
re: 289
But if I'd been a Bulgarian plumber in the mid-60s ...
292: In Germany, she would have sent you a bill.
291: It's taking a long time. The measuring probably turned into something else....
My understanding is that she has not, and is not expected to.
So, when the shower in that bathroom was turned on tonight (for the first time since the Ghoulies came up out of the toilet yesterday), the showerhead blew off the wall of the shower in a violent explosion of water pressure.
We were able to get it turned off, but I'm thinking we may need to get a professional in here to explain what the hell is going on.
Kobe may know why bad things happen to good people, but (TMI!!!) while our plumbing seems to be working fine I still had to clean up outrageous amounts of pre-sewage that didn't make it to the toilet. On the plus side, now I've cleaned the rug, the tub, and the toilet, plus my hands many times over.
299: Promise me that if "Get Out" appears on the wall written in blood, you'll at least send the kids away for a couple of hours.
299: Yes. Yes, I think you need a professional, possibly with minions.
People are often slow to respond to occult, undead, or Satanic threats to their plumbing. I blame PC.
Your RPG playing friends should be able to come up with a properly balanced party to deal with this menace.
On the bright side, maybe most of the flood from before was clean water and only one bowl of sewage.
How does one get minions? I've always wanted some.
Parking lot of a suburban Home Depot.
299: I'd continue to rely on the Mineshaft.
307: No one cares about your suggestions for D&D Fifth Edition, Moby.
The old low-flows do indeed back up at the drop of a hat. Know what's awesome? The guy who designed the HVAC system for our house put a vent in the floor of our bathroom a foot from the toilet. So when the toilet overflows, shit etc. all goes down into the vent. The vent drops 3 feet down before turning horizontal, making it impossible to clean out. I'm assuming there's some rusted out hole draining to under the house, because there's surprisingly little reek given how often I've backed up the damn thing.
Even better: Our house is identical to hundreds in the area, so this is happening to hundreds of homeowners. Usually sins of architecture are only aesthetic. This one might require summary execution.
299: Yeah, that sounds like you want a real plumber.
310: Don't wear a hat into the bathroom.
If you want a serious suggestion, a new toilet and wax ring 'o turd containment are less than a hundred bucks combined. A nice toilet is under $250. Even if you don't do that type of work often, it will still take less than two hours (unless you break something or find a bigger problem). Just go ahead and buy the wax ring that comes with the bolts.
Yes, I think you need a professional, possibly within minionutes.
Fixed that.
299 is great, because I had read 238 and thought (as others had) "ah ha, I sort of understand that, it makes sense, clearly max knows his onions, I know what's gone wrong now". Then you read 299 and you realise that max is as lost as the rest of us, helplessly trying to apply his inappropriate tools of "knowledge" and "logic" in the face of the weird non-Cartesian continuum that is the World of Urple.
311: 299: Yeah, that sounds like you want a real plumber.
Gee, do ya think, maybe? You know, unlike before.
Sorry, there was a typo in 311. I meant "Sounds like you need an exorcist."
Seriously, where would the water pressure to blow a showerhead off the wall come from? I understand that in a tall building where the water's coming down from a ceiling tank 200 feet up -- you need something inbetween to bring the pressure down, and if that thing breaks you can get crazy high pressure. In a single-family house on the top floor? We're talking some kind of dimensional rift or elder gods or something.
Seriously, where would the water pressure to blow a showerhead off the wall come from?
There's obviously an air compressor hooked to the plumbing system.
It was as close as they could come to a house-sized seltzer bottle.
That's what happens when you build a house over an ancient clown burial ground.
I'm not explicitly rooting for the clowns.
I'm asking for them to be sent in, but nothing more.
Plumber thinks the the prior homeowners rather incorrectly installed a lot of things, including the dehumidifer drain pump and the dryer exhaust being connected to the plumbing system (in ways they shouldn't be), the plumbing not being correctly vented and just generally improperly plumbed. I wouldn't think either the dehumidifer pump or the dryer exhaust could create enough pressure to cause any issue, but he seemed unsure. He hasn't actually determined what precisely caused our problems, because he's still trying to get a handle on how exactly things are set up. But he thinks those general problems combined with the fact that what venting we had somehow became clogged, and a lot of vigorous plunging on the toilet, all created a bad situation. It's possible the showerhead wasn't connected very well in the first place, and was just waiting for an excuse to fall off. Anyway, he cut off the main line and drained everything. Now he's got to figure out what exactly he needs to do to reconnect things more correctly. Apparently there are ways you could do something similar to what was done and sort of make it work (although it wouldn't be to code), if it was done correctly, but it wasn't. The plumber also thinks our home inspector should maybe have mentioned some of this when we bought the house.
dryer exhaust being connected to the plumbing system
!
318: I understand that in a tall building where the water's coming down from a ceiling tank 200 feet up
The pressure in many municipal water systems can be unacceptably high as well (tanks/reservoirs often up on the highest hill, for instance). Most homes will have a water pressure regulator where the water line comes in. I suspect that a failed regulator is one element amongst the weaponry urple's plumbing has deployed against him.
325: The doctrine of double effect, then, Steve?
327 was my reaction, but I thought maybe this was some crazy home-ownership thing that I didn't understand.
Creative plumbers never seem to get any appreciation. People always just demand the same old boring philistine plumbing.
It's an older home, so these things add character.
in ways they shouldn't be
The correct way the dryer exhaust should be connected to the plumbing is the same way that Newt Gingrich should be connected to the government. Not at all.
Are you sure he wasn't talking about the washer drain hose?
331: If the Impressionists had been dentists.
334: Between my wife and I this is known as "the charm of an older house". Deploying this phrase at the wrong moment can lead to assualt and battery.
Urple lives in the House of Representatives.
No, definitely the dryer exhaust, and also the bathroom exhaust fan, although we don't typically use the exhaust fan so I don't think that could have contributed to the problem. Although I did accidentally run it for a while the other day, now that I think about it.
I suppose they hooked the dryer exhaust and bathroom exhaust to the vent for the plumbing. That seems to take half-assedness to a new level, but I could see it happening.
And then if the vent was blocked, you'd get a pressure buildup. That could explain the toilet, but how would it connect to the showerhead?
And if the dryer's in the basement, wouldn't there be a horrible risk of backflow into the dryer?
I think JP must be right about the showerhead (or else urple when he said it may not have been installed right).
And then if the vent was blocked, you'd get a pressure buildup.
I understand the theory but I am skeptical. If I understand dryers correctly, it's really just an exhaust tube, not any sort of forced air flow. The bathroom exahust is different, but that motor's probably not very strong.
Plumber thinks the the prior homeowners rather incorrectly installed a lot of things
No shit, Sherlock. Do you have an action against your surveyor?
I suppose that's right. Looking for one common cause, rather than a concatenation of unrelated problems, is probably a mistake.
And then if the vent was blocked, you'd get a pressure buildup.
Those fans aren't strong enough to build pressure like that. That would just be a symptom of a plumbing system installed by an asshole.
344: Depends on where the dryer is. If it's two floors below the toilet, and so you've got a clog above where the dryer vent goes into the sewer pipe, and you build up a big air bubble below the clog... but I can't imagine anyone building anything like that. It's nuts.
No, definitely the dryer exhaust, and also the bathroom exhaust fan
The bathroom exhaust fan was connected to the plumbing?? I am definitely edging towards the "evil clown" hypothesis.
My mother-in-law gassed a squirrel in the dryer vent. Poor, linty little guy.
340: Ah, the vent. Vents Ducts? Why is it always ducts?
Precision and Soul: The protagonist of Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich, works for a time in an engineering office. But he soon quits in disillusionment when he discovers that the engineers do not carry the spirit of precision into their personal lives, and they even wear tie-tacks with little horse's heads on them. Musil (1880-1942) argues that Western culture took a "wrong turn" long ago in its understanding of the mystical, associating it with fuzzy thinking instead of lucid rationality, and he lamented that scientists and engineers do not more often have mystical experiences in doing their work.
On rereading, 349 makes no sense. Ignore.
Do you have an action against your surveyor?
Is that what you call a housing inspector or a real estate agent?
My mother-in-law gassed a squirrel in the dryer vent.
Poor, linty little guy.
Now every time she hears that bathroom exhaust fan
She hangs her head and cries.
354: not quite. Before you buy a house you pay a surveyor to go over it and write a report that mentions "possible damp in the spare bedroom" or "low water pressure in bathroom" or "secret passageway in the cellar". If he missed something critical like "plumbing installed by W. Heath Robinson's evil twin" then he might be open to action.
356: The home inspector is what we'd call that. Of course, the old owner can be sued for mispresentation. My neighbor is doing that right now.
357: oh, right. I thought the home inspector was a government official who decided whether or not somewhere was fit for human habitation.
I took it that "housing inspector" was American for "surveyor" in this context.
358: That's the building inspector. I think I may be the only one who says 'housing inspector' instead of 'home inspector.' Real estate people use "home" as a way to get you to think of something besides the physical building you are looking to buy. I got annoyed.
359: Surveyor is the person who worries about the boundaries of the lot.
I took it that "housing inspector" was American for "surveyor" in this context.
In America "surveyor" is a mysterious job performed by men who stand outside all day with giant compasses and giant levels and giant calipers and long tape measures and weird binoculars on tripods.
361. We have that kind of surveyor too. Basically, in Brit English anybody who surveys anything is a surveyor.
Anymore, they probably have GPS and laser measuring dohickeys.
Real estate people use "home" as a way to get you to think of something besides the physical building you are looking to buy.
In Willa Cather's My Antonia, set around, speaking of your home instead of your house was regarded as a genteel affectation.
Anymore, they probably have GPS and laser measuring dohickeys.
Almost certainly. The housing surveyors who draw plans with the location of the dry rot on them certainly do.
365: You need to tell the builders where to put the dry rot with great precision.
364: Willa Cather has been following me my whole life. We had to study her in high school because there were apparently no other writers of note born in the state. Then I had to live in a dorm named after her. Then, I move hundreds of miles away and find out she lived here also.
Claims against home inspectors are pretty limited. If any of this plumbing was behind walls, say, then the inspector isn't going to go knocking them down to check that they're OK. Our inspector was very good at pointing out these areas, when he couldn't tell if things were OK or not, but a mistake would have to be really egregious before they had any real liability.
(Modern surveyors have all sorts of toys. I don't think GPS is involved that much, since their reference points tend to predate GPS, but we now have lots of little spray-painted spikes and colored flags around our 0.09 acre plot, so we can see where the fences can properly be located.)
369.2: Same here, actually two sets of colored flags as I am in dueling survey (and other things) mode* with a neighbor. I must say the new one produced a much nicer map compared to the one when I bought the house.
*Don't worry, I'm sure this would never happen to you, rfts.
That could explain the toilet, but how would it connect to the showerhead?
Ooh, I know this! It's the thighbone, isn't it?
In my neighborhood, we've never fought over the surveying. We fight over who parks like an asshole.
(Answer: Everybody but me and that old guy with a huge driveway.)
"Fuck you! It's my turn to park like an asshole!"
Several of the starting reference points were inconsistently located in the past in my neighborhood, so there is a disturbing lack of ground truth in the precise location of folk's property. Just a few feet, so does not matter most of the time, but it comes up.
Some stranger once blocked my driveway and her car died. She said, "If this is the worst thing that happens to you today, you should be happy" and expected me to wait for a tow truck to move her car. I made her get in and steer while I pushed her into a completely legal that wasn't in anybody's way and was almost certainly free when she decided to block my driveway.
"If this is the worst thing that happens to you today, you should be happy"
"Nice little day you're having here, be a shame if something happened to it."
Anyone else picturing urple's plumbing being installed along these lines? It's going to turn out that these problems were caused when he forgot to reposition his bowling ball.
235 seems like an excellent summary. It's a lot like appliances: old houses were built to be maintained/repaired and thus to last indefinitely; new houses are built to be used up and thrown away.
An old fashioned, counter-balanced window (with sash cord or chain and lead weights behind the jambs) can be easily (and satisfyingly!) repaired in short order. A modern, spring-balanced window is either a difficult repair (if it's a good window) or not a worthwhile repair (if it's a "replacement" window - vinyl junk).
For this reason, old houses are also more likely to have binary problems - either it works, or it needs repair, after which it will work. New houses wear down - you can't "fix" a sticky window, you just replace it (or a major component of it that's not really designed to be user-maintained). Hell, a $20 faucet from Home Depot isn't really meant to be fixed, either. Just put in a new one.
Also, I'm wary of saying this with 140 comments yet to be read, but 238 includes some pretty plausible explanation. Trouble is, it's a bit hard to figure without knowing in precisely which ways your plumbing was misinstalled.
Hooking up air exhaust to plumbing vents is insanely inappropriate. I'm gobsmacked.
And yet I agree that it doesn't seem related to the pressure explosion. Bathroom exhausts in particular would just let the air flow back out into the room - they may have airflow restrictors, but nothing that could sustain a lot of backpressure.
BTW, the whole reason I came by was to let you know that it appears that John Gruber of Daring Fireball may be a lurker:
Yeah, we're talking about Star Wars and content management systems. Ladies.
An old fashioned, counter-balanced window (with sash cord or chain and lead weights behind the jambs) can be easily (and satisfyingly!) repaired in short order.
It also makes an ungodly racket whenever it's windy. I miss double glazing.
384: It really shouldn't. The old-fashioned locks (the ones with a lever that turn a sort of screw-shaped hub into the hook on the other sash) are designed to create a fairly solid unit with pressure pulling the sashes together and pushing them against the frame.
The other thread is about grinding.
The place I stay at in Portland is an old place with a cage elevator, a huge clawfoot bathtub, sash windows, and a ventilating shaft up the middle of the building. It's well maintained and they should be marketing it for nostalgia or retro or something. I'd never seen functioning sash windows before, just wrecked ones.
387: Really? We certainly have a few (out of many, many windows) with broken sashes and a couple (notably the one above the bathtub) are going to need some fixes to the wood eventually, but almost all our sash windows are in good shape plus pretty cool. I need to start a house blog or something, in all my copious spare time I suppose.
Sash windows seem sort of East Coast, and maybe there still are enough of them out there that people know how to maintain them.
In the Old West, cowboys were often getting tossed through windows, so much so that it was prohibitively expensive to keep replacing sash windows.
very good observations by you.
The spambot has your back, Stanley.
I can't imagine any place being more polarized than Pittsburgh in terms of apartments (generally built somewhere between 1890 and 1930) versus condos (generally built [or retrofitted from gutted historic warehouses] in the 21st century).
2 of the 4 places I rented had sash windows. The other 2 were equally old but had had the windows replaced with modern ones that wobbled back and forth and had malfunctioning vinyl seals that negated their double-glazedness.
It's about time the 'bot showed up. Been supporting me in email for years.
Nevermind all of this morning's updates, which seem to have been nothing more than an epic miscommunication between my wife and I. Blame IM, I guess. There was no plumber at my house after all. It was my father-in-law (who is not a plumber), diagnosing the problem from 800 miles away. "He cut off the main line and drained everything" s/b "His suggestion is to..."
So I don't think I know anything more than I did last night.
What an edge-of-my-seat thrill-ride!
(who is not a plumber), diagnosing the problem from 800 miles away
OK, so his plumbing's not great, but how's his eyesight?
I don't think GPS is involved that much
The woman who taught my recent surveying class is the head surveyor for City of Sac. She showed considerable contempt for GPS, which can be off by inches. A GPS will get you to the site, I suppose, if you didn't already know where it is.
So, wait, the whole "dryer vent and bathroom fan are hooked into the plumbing" thing was speculation? What is your FIL like that that's where his mind goes? Is there any chance that's he's an evil clown plumber?
But the showerhead really did blow off the wall, right?
Plat descriptions are a fascinating species of literature. "The property line continues at an 80.3 degree angle from this point for 104 feet to the northeast corner of Jones Rd. and plat number 1138 found in plat book 788" etc.
399: Yes. the bathroom fan is in fact (incorrectly) hooked up to the dryer exhaust, which I've known, so apparently in his mind it was plausible to speculate that both might be (incorrectly) connected to the plumbing vent. After all, once you're doing things incorrectly, why not go whole hog?
Anyway, I'm back to having no damn clue what's actually the issue.
400: yes, although I continue to think that's got to be an issue with incorrect installation. There really does seem to have been a period 25-odd years ago where a prior homeowner took a fundamentally well-contructed house and did every imaginable thing himself* in a makeshift and half-assed way, and that showerhead likely dates from that period (when that bathroom was converted from an old claw-foot to the current built-in.) I'm wondering if it falling off the day after the toilet monster vomited may just have been a freak cooincidence? (That's my working thesis, at least until a plausible mechanism for their being related is explained to me.)
*Somehow I'm sure it was a him.
403 is a fair point, but this morning at least I felt like I was getting somewhere. (Or, more accurately, that someone else was getting somewhere, and would soon explain it to me.)
OK, so his plumbing's not great, but how's his eyesight?
If he can see round the curvature of the earth, it's pretty good.
Awhile back in Portland there was a house fire, and the investigators concluded that it started from a place where the wiring had been improperly installed 70 years earlier. They looked in the archives and were able to find thenames of the original owner, the contractor, and the electrician himself, all of whom had died by then. As near as they could tell the electrician had taken a lunch break meaning to come back and wrap things up, but forgot and went on to the next task without finishing. No mystery whatsoever any more.
where a prior homeowner took a fundamentally well-contructed house and did every imaginable thing himself* in a makeshift and half-assed way
This was partially true of my home, but at least I caught most of it during a big renovation right before I moved in (see sewer line story mentioned above). In that sense the fact that the prior owner was an elderly alcoholic who had let things go to seed enough to make a renovation necessary was helpful.
On the general topic of old vs. new houses, I am constantly amazed at how well built my old (ancient for LA, built in 1913) house is. It was built from a kit by a nonprofessional, and yet is full of gorgeous wood and incredibly structurally sound. The windows, both the sash windows and casements, were easy to fix, and even the plumbing fixtures work great as long as you can find the right parts for them (not always easy). Almost all of the actual repair problems I've had,* as opposed to minor fixes, arise from an addition an owner put in during the 1960s, with typically cheap for the time construction. The difference between pre-WWII and post-WWII construction is pretty amazing.
*I did put in new electrical, the old electrical system was the original one in the house and had been functioning since 1913. And a new shower, but that was easy enough to rig into the existing plumbing system.
Yep. I've got a 1915 kit house that still seems solid.
no damn clue what's actually the issue
Voodoo, probably.
(Just because everyone needs to know this, the dancing thread has gotten too hot for my netnanny. Everytime that happens, I check when I get home, and I can't figure out the trigger.)
Yep, my netnanny locked me out of that thread about an hour ago. Y'all are perverts.
The featherbedding civil-servants' world is a cold and sexless one.
So does everybody think that "sash window" means the kind that slide up and down? Because it doesn't. Windows that slide up and down are "single hung" (only the bottom goes up) or "double hung" (both sashes can go up and down)*. But all operable windows have sashes - the sash is the part that holds the glass and moves. Indeed, some fixed glass has sash, because it consists of a frame (attached to the wall) in which rests a piece of glass that is, itself, within a wood frame (thus comprising a sash). A lot of stained glass is like this - they ship a sash to the site, where it's nailed into a frame.
I'm sorry to be so exhaustively pedantic. I really am.
* this low-hanging fruit provided to you by the Window Manufacturers Assoc. of America
417: OK. So when someone describes a window type as "Sash", they are being completely unhelpful?
Wait, this seems to disagree. I don't think I'd call my casement windows sashes but on your theory is the wood frame (that opens out, and that contains the glass) in a casement window a sash?
So, is there a better word for the distinction people are making between oldfashioned sash windows and modern casement windows? I actually don't quite get the difference people are pointing to.
I think that people just mean the ones with counterweights. The ones without counterweights I just call "windows"
I have never thought consciously about sash windows. Therefore my subconscious brain connected sash=piece of ribbon, and thought that it was the pullcord on the end of the retractable shade of the window. With the little circle on the end.
I'll inform myself that I was wrong, now.
I thought Casement windows were just sash windows renamed to honor Sir Roger's ups and downs (humanitarians and to patron of underage prostitutes).
I would (and do) refer to the operable part of a casement as "sash". I understood what you all meant, but, in the industry, no one includes "sash" in the name of windows - they're double hung, casement, awning, etc. If everyone outside the industry uses "sash" the way you all seem to, then I guess it's helpful.
This is all top of mind because I've been spending a lot of time on windows for a project.
So, is there a better word for the distinction people are making between oldfashioned sash windows and modern casement windows? I actually don't quite get the difference people are pointing to.
Just say "double hung" or "casement". The fact that single hung exist is almost entirely irrelevant.
After googling, casement means "hinged at the side so it opens like a door"?
417: I said "sash" when I meant "rope" or whatever I'd normally have said if I hadn't seen sash on this thread already. Weird.
But yeah, our house is full of single-hung single-pane windows that are old and have counterweights and you don't necessarily know which ones work until you push them up and see if they smash down again or, if things are going to be really exciting, the top not-supposed-to-move part falls.
I've been installing screens so have been thinking about windows a bit. I guess I've just been using the terms "double hung" and "casement" with the people I've been talking to.
But somehow I had an image of a sash window as a particular kind of double or single hung with a very obvious pulley/counterweight system and older houses in my mind, I guess wrongly.
428: You can fix that problem with a stick. The old windows were so well made that the repair takes only minutes.
My yarn/book/guest room on the top floor has a casement window, two panels that crank open and let in fantastic breezes in the summer. The wood is a little warped and it's not closing all the way, but I've got the storm window up for winter and will maybe fix it in the spring.
430: I find that a wooden box works better so that you can keep the window open to different heights as the weather requires, but I'm probably not as elegantly simplistic as you.
I was thinking that the wikipedia article linked in 419 seemed suspiciously Brit-centric, and this confirms it:
units are generally single glazed; although double-glazed sashes are available it is more common for single-glazed sash windows to be replaced with top-hung casements when double glazing is retro-fitted.This is just laughably not descriptive of actual practice in the USA. Indeed, "top-hung casements" - that is, awning windows - are not even generally available in that sort of tall proportion* here.
* Pre-1890 double-hungs were typically 2:1 or taller. Colonial Revival styles trended more horizontal, culminating in the post-WW2 era when most double-hungs were 3:2 or broader
A subtler fix to sash that won't stay up is a shim (or other wedge) between the sash and the frame. Works at any height.
Back in the day, counterweights weren't ubiquitous, and windows were actually made with peg holes so you could hold it open at varying heights. Indeed, I replaced one of these, made in 1945, in Saltsburg, PA (mentioned in the Olive Garden thread).
Indeed, casements in general strike me as vaguely european, at least in modern construction. I remember my dorm in CH had a huge single casement that opened out with a crank and it struck me as distinctly foreign.
I've been spending a lot of time on windows for a project
Huh. I figured most of the design work was done on a Mac.
You can fix that problem with a stick.
Any problem, Moby. You can fix any problem with a stick.
Could summarize the correct terminology? It looks like everything is wrong.
I made a mistake by saying "sash window". I meant the ones with the counterweights.
But yes, it was always my understanding that a window that slides up and down is a sash. We use that word in the lab too, for the glass shield in front of the fume hood, that you slide down when you stop using it.
440 is interesting. It may be that the construction industry, needing greater precision, retconned it onto sash windows.
You see similar confusion with mullions and muntins. The former are structural, and separate (or, more precisely, join) window units - e.g., 2 casement windows with a vertical support between them are mulled together. Whereas the little bits of wood separating window panes are muntins. But most laymen have never heard of muntins, and call those things mullions. For all I know, this is historically correct usage, but the modern (American) window industry is united in the usage I describe.
435: If you want to step up from a stick or a shim, you can use these.
Mullions! I'm rich! I hate those haircuts!
I would guess that most laymen don't know what a mullion is either. At least I didn't and I've purchased windows on two separate occasions.
I've been pwned by many windows that needed replacing.
There's a province in Canada's exterior whose border crossings with the US have large portals, with huge panels of glass that slide up and down to accommodate the passing vehicle, moose, and foot traffic. You've probably heard of the place, but few realize the origins of the name. Of course, I'm talking about Sashkatchewan.
Alberta mullion dollars that this is not the last architectural/Canadian province pun in this thread.
Lord Mullion had a secret. But I didn't think it was to do with windows.
I can't remember in detail, but knowing Innes I bet there's a Viscount Casement or similar in there somewhere. Innes is great, but has a weakness for the Stanley-esque joke. (There's a bit in one of the art-world books where a murder is committed in an apartment above a sculptor's studio. Blood drips through the ceiling and onto a work in progress, which is a problem because "You simply can't get blood out of a stone." Rimshot.)
Terrible. May a sash catch you one day.
Bannister and ballistrade.
But what is the short name for a sash window with counterweights?
As a part of our exterior re-do we just had our new windows put in a few weeks ago (nothing fancy, just a dozen horizontal sliding). After doing a bunch of reading on materials we ponied up the extra for fiberglass frames. They look damn near indestructible.
451: Double hung windows.
453: I'm a big fan of fiberglass in theory, have not actually had them installed anywhere yet.
I'm a big fan of fiberglass in theory, have not actually had them installed anywhere yet.
We went with Milgards as they've had them out for about 20 years now and in theory they've worked out the kinks with the product. Talked to several installers around here and all of them were big fans of fiberglass.
I was into fiberglass back when it was underground.
451: Double hung windows.
Wow, that's the least intuitive name possible. Double-hung, not double-glazed! Oh wait, I meant double-glazed.
If everyone outside the industry uses "sash" the way you all seem to, then I guess it's helpful.
Everyone in this country who sells windows seems to use "sash window" to mean the slidey up and down ones talked about here. I did find a mention of "slidling sash windows".
Yeah, seems to be the norm in Britain. Maybe I should go into Home Depot and see what they say there.
I had thought Home Despot did something objectionable politically recently, but it turns out I was thinking about Lowe's.
So Ron Jeremy has a second career ahead of him selling windows.
This thread is really full of delights.
Or window accessories. Imagine the RJ-brand Silldo™.
Yukon't always get what you want, Moby.
462: Given your concerns above, I'm not sure how to interpret "delights". But let me reiterate, if you buy a house none of this stuff will happen to you. Other stuff will It will be fiiiine!
Because I griped about Sudoku being so easily algorithmically solvable above, the universe has now supplied me with an NP-Hard puzzle game. Dammit, universe!
