12 January 2014
Bad Noiz
12/01/14 10:07
You know how some times you hear something and you just know instantly that it's not good. There’s just some sounds that you know immediately won’t end well. Squealing tires, a ringing phone at 2:00am, the rattle of a snake, your doctor saying "oops", nothing good ever came from these sounds. On Tuesday we started the dishwasher. It ran while we were eating dinner but after about 15 minutes it suddenly started rumbling. A deep tone like you'd get from the largest pipes in a church organ. The kind of deep throbbing rumble that makes the floor shake and your wallet clinch a bit tighter. I went in and pumped the water out, removed anything that might be catching on the rotors, even ran it with nothing inside and there was no change. The floors still vibrated and the cats got nervous. This was a bad sound and we knew that nothing good could come from it.
At this point we had a dilemma. We looked at the dishwasher and it's not new. It was here when we moved in a couple of years ago. From the looks of it, it was installed at least a few years before that. For the sake of argument let’s say it was a minimum of five years old. If we just went looking for a new one then we know it would be expensive. If we call a repair person it was probable that they would charge us $50 or $100 just to tell us it needed replacing. In all likelihood the part and installation would be a few hundred and we’d still have an old dishwasher that really never worked well. It was noisy. It was slow. The racks were obviously designed by someone who never actually put dishes in a dishwasher. I mean really, the row for bowls had a rod going along the centre so bowls would always fall to one side or the other. The clips to hold wine glass stems in place were too close to the pegs so either the glass was vertical and would fall over or they were almost horizontal and they took up two rows. After thinking about it for a few minutes, we decided to just bite the bullet and go directly to shopping for a replacement. It helped that January is a good time to shop for appliances as a fair number of stores are having winter appliance sales. I guess this is for everyone who's New Years resolution was to start washing their underwear.
Saturday morning, armed with a handful of flyers from the newspaper we set out in search of a new dishwasher. Our first stop was Sears. As it was raining and blowing, more about that later, I ran up to the door and waited for Marsha. As she walked up she was gesturing, and I waved back. In my defence there was a guy running a generator and a jackhammer near the door so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. When Marsha arrived her first words were “I said are they open?” I replied indignantly, “What do you mean are they open. It’s 9:00, of course they’re open. What a silly question, I mean…why’s the door locked?” It turns out that the Nanaimo Sears opens at 9:30. So rather than waiting next to the generator and the jackhammer, we decided to finish a few other errands and come back. We hit Target. It was a typical trip. We went in to get a bag of flour and left with $75 worth of other things. We dropped off some recyclables. Then we hit a few other stores and finally made it back to Sears. Along the way, we also settled once and for all who’s fault the earlier incident at Sears was. Mine.
We looked around the appliance section, the nice sales person told us about the various options and we settled on a model that will meet our needs. Apparently dishwashers have changed in the last few years. It used to be that they’d come with a disposal (or garburator as they were called in Canada) built in. It would shred bones, large food chunks, forks and glassware before flushing the slurry down the drain. Nowadays they don’t include them as much, both to save energy, and to reduce noise. As we seldom put a whole chicken in the dishwasher for disposal it seemed like a fair trade. Instead of the disposal it has a stainless steel screen that will catch these bits for disposal. If it is food they will go in the green bin, if they’re things like forks they can be saved for reuse. As the salesperson was describing this she pulled the screen and explained that the whole assembly was removable for cleaning. I asked the obvious question, if it was dishwasher safe, and she actually was in the middle of her answer when she realized how silly a question that was. SCORE!
We selected the model we were going with, in white, none of those nasty stainless steel appliances for us, and arranged for it to be delivered and installed. This proved to be more difficult than expected. Our dishwasher will be in Nanaimo next weekend. (Remember we’re on an island. Everything takes an extra day or three to get here.) Unfortunately the following week we’re booked solid with appointments, Marsha has training for her job, I have appointments and other things going on, it’s going to be a crazy week. Because of all this we had to bump installation to the week after that, two weeks from now. This leaves us with another question. Do we run the old dishwasher in the interim? It’s noisy and might break at any time but it still is working and we don’t really care if it’s damaging itself as it’s gone in two weeks anyway. On the other hand Marsha is worried it might shake itself apart and start leaking. The other option is to not use it. Then we will have to do dishes by hand the week we are crazy busy and don’t have time. I think this is what they call a First World Problem.
I mentioned earlier that the weather was bad when we got to Sears. Friday night we had a really nasty storm go through. As they say it was “Blowing a Hoolie”. OK I’ve never actually heard anyone using this term. Actually before this week I’d never even heard of it. But I came across it and I really like the term. It’s so poetic, so Irish, so picturesque that I want to use it as often as possible, despite the strange looks I might get. In any event it was Blowing a Hoolie Friday night. It dropped a couple inches of rain and had winds of 30 to 60 mph. It was a warm Pacific storm which kept the temps steady between 45 and 50 F so at least it wasn’t cold. All night though we could hear the rain rattling on the walls and windows and the roof. The cats kept looking around nervously because of the strange noises. By the next morning the back yard at Barbara’s place was a pond and rivers were running down the streets. But like most sharp intense Pacific storms it moved off as fast as it arrived. Saturday afternoon was sunny, the road rivers were gone, the backyard ponds had disappeared and no water had managed to get inside Barb’s place or ours. It was an exciting night though.
Now back to work. Does anyone know a rhyme for Hoolie?
At this point we had a dilemma. We looked at the dishwasher and it's not new. It was here when we moved in a couple of years ago. From the looks of it, it was installed at least a few years before that. For the sake of argument let’s say it was a minimum of five years old. If we just went looking for a new one then we know it would be expensive. If we call a repair person it was probable that they would charge us $50 or $100 just to tell us it needed replacing. In all likelihood the part and installation would be a few hundred and we’d still have an old dishwasher that really never worked well. It was noisy. It was slow. The racks were obviously designed by someone who never actually put dishes in a dishwasher. I mean really, the row for bowls had a rod going along the centre so bowls would always fall to one side or the other. The clips to hold wine glass stems in place were too close to the pegs so either the glass was vertical and would fall over or they were almost horizontal and they took up two rows. After thinking about it for a few minutes, we decided to just bite the bullet and go directly to shopping for a replacement. It helped that January is a good time to shop for appliances as a fair number of stores are having winter appliance sales. I guess this is for everyone who's New Years resolution was to start washing their underwear.
Saturday morning, armed with a handful of flyers from the newspaper we set out in search of a new dishwasher. Our first stop was Sears. As it was raining and blowing, more about that later, I ran up to the door and waited for Marsha. As she walked up she was gesturing, and I waved back. In my defence there was a guy running a generator and a jackhammer near the door so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. When Marsha arrived her first words were “I said are they open?” I replied indignantly, “What do you mean are they open. It’s 9:00, of course they’re open. What a silly question, I mean…why’s the door locked?” It turns out that the Nanaimo Sears opens at 9:30. So rather than waiting next to the generator and the jackhammer, we decided to finish a few other errands and come back. We hit Target. It was a typical trip. We went in to get a bag of flour and left with $75 worth of other things. We dropped off some recyclables. Then we hit a few other stores and finally made it back to Sears. Along the way, we also settled once and for all who’s fault the earlier incident at Sears was. Mine.
We looked around the appliance section, the nice sales person told us about the various options and we settled on a model that will meet our needs. Apparently dishwashers have changed in the last few years. It used to be that they’d come with a disposal (or garburator as they were called in Canada) built in. It would shred bones, large food chunks, forks and glassware before flushing the slurry down the drain. Nowadays they don’t include them as much, both to save energy, and to reduce noise. As we seldom put a whole chicken in the dishwasher for disposal it seemed like a fair trade. Instead of the disposal it has a stainless steel screen that will catch these bits for disposal. If it is food they will go in the green bin, if they’re things like forks they can be saved for reuse. As the salesperson was describing this she pulled the screen and explained that the whole assembly was removable for cleaning. I asked the obvious question, if it was dishwasher safe, and she actually was in the middle of her answer when she realized how silly a question that was. SCORE!
We selected the model we were going with, in white, none of those nasty stainless steel appliances for us, and arranged for it to be delivered and installed. This proved to be more difficult than expected. Our dishwasher will be in Nanaimo next weekend. (Remember we’re on an island. Everything takes an extra day or three to get here.) Unfortunately the following week we’re booked solid with appointments, Marsha has training for her job, I have appointments and other things going on, it’s going to be a crazy week. Because of all this we had to bump installation to the week after that, two weeks from now. This leaves us with another question. Do we run the old dishwasher in the interim? It’s noisy and might break at any time but it still is working and we don’t really care if it’s damaging itself as it’s gone in two weeks anyway. On the other hand Marsha is worried it might shake itself apart and start leaking. The other option is to not use it. Then we will have to do dishes by hand the week we are crazy busy and don’t have time. I think this is what they call a First World Problem.
I mentioned earlier that the weather was bad when we got to Sears. Friday night we had a really nasty storm go through. As they say it was “Blowing a Hoolie”. OK I’ve never actually heard anyone using this term. Actually before this week I’d never even heard of it. But I came across it and I really like the term. It’s so poetic, so Irish, so picturesque that I want to use it as often as possible, despite the strange looks I might get. In any event it was Blowing a Hoolie Friday night. It dropped a couple inches of rain and had winds of 30 to 60 mph. It was a warm Pacific storm which kept the temps steady between 45 and 50 F so at least it wasn’t cold. All night though we could hear the rain rattling on the walls and windows and the roof. The cats kept looking around nervously because of the strange noises. By the next morning the back yard at Barbara’s place was a pond and rivers were running down the streets. But like most sharp intense Pacific storms it moved off as fast as it arrived. Saturday afternoon was sunny, the road rivers were gone, the backyard ponds had disappeared and no water had managed to get inside Barb’s place or ours. It was an exciting night though.
Now back to work. Does anyone know a rhyme for Hoolie?