Author Archives: DMZ

Moen kitchen faucet low flow repair

(throwing on the cloud for future generations)

I have a single-handle Moen kitchen faucet (it’s a Moen 87787) with sprayer which began to choke up a while ago, with low water pressure in both faucet and sprayer.

Here’s the faucet (which may not have the soap dispenser there)

(part of a Moen diagram)

This is frequently a problem with the diverter, which is the part that controls flow between the faucet and the sprayer. It lives under the spout and not the handle. If your house has old pipes that occasionally flake a bit of rust into the water or hard water that results in mineral or calcium build ups, that’ll clog the diverter and you’ll get no pressure to one, the other, and so on.

(from the Moen exploded parts diagram)

Here’s how you fix it. If you can swing a wrench and don’t have any access problems using it under the sink, it might take an hour to do this. The harder it is to disconnect and reconnect stuff under the sink, the tougher this will be.

Repair instructions
1. Remove the spout. You can do this two ways:
– reverse the installation instructions, leaving the spout body in place
– disconnect the hoses, undo the fastener piece, and pull the whole spout out with assembly and spout body. Then pull the spout assembly off the spout body by unscrewing it.

The first one was a major pain in the ass for me, so I went with the second and it worked well. Then

2. Now within the spout body

You’ll see a small plastic piece, white within the brass spout body. It’ll look like it wants to take a giant hex key.

(I believe that’s a Moen part drawing)

3. Remove the diverter
If you don’t have a giant Allen wrench, you can also take a pair of needle-nose pliers, grab an edge carefully, and rotate it out.

4. Clean the blockage
Examine it and the spout body. If the diverter is the problem, you should pretty clearly see the bits of rust or buildup blocking the holes and water path. Wash out the spout body, then take the diverter and do your worst. If it’s a calcium buildup, you can use vinegar (or whatever your fancy is). You can use water softener if that’s the problem. For me, it was the rust bits, and I just had to brush the whole thing out and replace it.

You can, if want to spend the money, just buy a new diverter from Moen or whoever and have it in hand for easy drop-in replacement.

Then it’s easy.

5. Put the diverter back in the spout body
6. Put the spout assembly back on the spout body
7. (if you took the whole thing out, put it back)
8. Reconnect hoses and fasteners.

Ta da!

Now turn the water back on and test it out. If it was the issue (and you’ll know that at step 4) you should now get the same water pressure as you had before, and the sprayer should work great again.

If it’s not, well, sorry. It’s probably the cartridge. But that’s it for me. Hopefully this will help future generations of people and save them from having to spend a ton of money on kitchen sink repair. And ideally, that particular part wouldn’t be so easy to clog, but I won’t hold my breath for design improvements.

Oh, the pain

I can do plumbing, but it’s by far the least favorite home-improvement task. Wait… insulation… no. Plumbing combines all the worst elements: it’s often cold and wet, involves being sprayed in the face, awkward positions, there’s a lot of cuts and skinned knuckles, cramped working conditions, and a certain amount of incomprehensible results, where you can put together a beautiful set of connections and have it leak, take it apart, stare at them and see nothing wrong, and then put it all back together and have it not leak. Drive me batty.

I had the day off today (I have to work tomorrow) so I spent my time working on my kitchen faucet.

Digression: buying an entirely new faucet set is cheaper than calling a plumber to come out and see why your existing faucet doesn’t work unless you bought a really expensive faucet set. It’s almost cheaper to buy a new faucet set than it is to buy a replacement cartridge.

Anyway, so I get the whole thing apart again, figure out that the part I suspect is at fault is almost certainly at fault, and I decide to clean deposits off some of the parts by soaking them in a vinegar solution. Only to discover that in working under the sink, I had taken two cuts, one on the tip of my index finger and another on a knuckle… both of which I managed to briefly immerse in undiluted vinegar.

Fortunately I was the only one at home, so my cursing didn’t result in a citation for disturbing the peace. This is why you pay the plumber.

OB Beer

The OB stands for “Oriental Brewery”. Another fine beer I picked up shopping at the “International” grocery store near my house. Has a nice blue can:

Beer can

Beer can

The small text there reads, and this is exact:

Timeless enduring heritage, craftsmanship and new rice addition delivers refreshing smoothness and clean after taste, making OB the most drinkable beer

The can notes that Oriental Brewery’s been in business since 1933, so timeless… ummmm…

Anyway, it tastes like other rice beers. I’d have trouble picking it out from Bud in a lineup.

Speaking other languages, a quick reference

German in Germany
Fluency: long-broken college-level

There’s a comprehension line, where if they understood what I was saying, they’d just keep on going. If they didn’t, and they were young, they’d swap over to English. If they weren’t, and they didn’t, things got hairy. No one ever cared that I was speaking German either way.

Flemish in Belgium/Netherlands
Fluency: some traveler phrases, aided by knowledge of German

They were either delighted I tried or nice about figuring out what I meant. I frankly gave up, though, having already spent two weeks trying to speak German, after discovering that everyone spoke English.

French in France
Fluency: long, long-forgotten high school French, study

I was surprised at how nice Parisians were about French, to the point where they’d stop and talk to me about how to pronounce things. I felt like they were interested in having me speak French well.

…anyway.

Coffee, in Europe, beyond

Coffee in Europe has been pretty much crud so far. Bear with me for a second.

I agree with Coffee Geek in that there are two kinds of coffee: coffee-coffee and culinary coffee, for lack of better terms. One’s the sludgy, often drip, really bitter coffee many people like a cup of in the morning. I have a fondness for this myself. The other starts to include good beans, reasonably fresh roasts, and processes that do more for the flavor, like french press or espresso machines.

I think of this sometimes in terms of who sells what: 7-11’s pot of drip coffee is the coffee-coffee. Starbucks establishes the culinary coffee spectrum. People who want to pay 79c for a cup of joe don’t want what Starbucks is offering. People who want a decent latte don’t want to pay 79c for the other option.

In Germany and Belgium, it was all super-automatic machines. These are the beasts that have a hopper of beans on top and when the operator presses the button, they make a lot of noise and shake a little and a drink comes out the other end. They produce culinary coffee, of a sorts. On a scale where “1” is “awful” and “10” is “best I’ve ever had” the super-automatic machines, given decent beans, will consistently hit a 4, which is not bad at all. But getting beyond that requires better beans. And getting way beyond that requires better equipment, a lot more attention to the beans, a whole extra level of training and attention (and here I’m thinking of Cafe Vivace). But sometimes you get just wretched coffee and you have to be prepared for that — there’s a risk not present otherwise.

For most places, the super-auto is good enough. I had coffee a couple of times where it was pretty bad, but if you’re going to start serving espresso, a super-auto means almost no additional investment and you’re in business. But it’s not good culinary coffee, especially when they’re feeding it awful beans. It just means they’re checking off a box that says you offer lattes because you have x coffee with y steamed milk.

But when I got my first really good restaurant espresso here today, I wasn’t surprised when I checked it out and found they were using an old-school, semi-automatic machine. They’d have had to grind, tamp, and time the whole thing themselves. And the result was I got the first decent coffee in weeks.

Now this whole thing has an application to the Starbucks-McDonald’s thing, which I’ll get to soon.

Or not… Belgian beers are ridiculous.

Rise up

I’ll have a much longer account of this later, but I wanted to say this: I’m in Berlin, and I’ve been going through the layers of history: there’s a place I saw where Nazi basements were buried under the Berlin Wall, for instance.

Here’s my short point, though: I’ve read account after account about how the Nazis and then the Stasi harassed and tortured dissidents, and they’re things that the US currently employs. Against terrorism suspects, of course, but that was their justification too.

Germany, sixty years after the war, is still grappling with how to confront and acknowledge what happened during Nazi rule, and almost twenty years after East Germany essentially disintegrated, they’re openly stuggling with a set of much fresher wounds from a dictatorship of a different flavor.

We haven’t even stopped torturing people yet.

So, from Germany, I encourage everyone to go throw some money to stop this. Whatever your taste is: Amnesty International, Obama, whatever. This political season I’ve given until it hurts and every time I touch another memorial I feel like I didn’t give enough.

This is not about wheelbuilding

I’ve been building wheels. I tend to torque the hell out of my bikes. As much as I’ve tried, my friend Joel will tell you I cause him pain when I push a high gear hard, because riding behind he has to listen to the metal drivetrain complain. Wheels are delicately balanced things: a hub has 32 spokes to the wheel, 16 to each side, and if the tension is uneven from spoke to spoke, it’ll wobble from side to side, rubbing on the brake pads and wasting energy. If the tension is uneven from side, so that the hub is off-center within the rim itself, the wheel goes up and down as it turns, which causes all kinds of problems of its own.

When considerable force is applied unevenly, like through a pedal stroke, that force is applied more to certain spokes, turning the wheel, and over time, the tension of those spokes changes, sending it out of true.

A good wheel will remain true for years if you don’t run into anything. I not only don’t manage that, I run into things. A couple weeks ago, the person I was riding behind stopped unexpectedly, and I ran my spinning wheel into the back of his bike, driving my set of spinning-at-twenty-miles-an-hour spokes into his rear bracket, bending them badly. Which means my wheels need truing more often than they should.

Here’s the condensed version of almost every instruction manual on wheelbuilding:
-Get the right length of spokes
-Thread carefully in this pattern, or this other pattern
-Spin the wheel
-Adjust to fix the left-to-right wobble
-When that looks good, adjust to fix the up-and-down wobble
-Repeat those last two steps until the wheel is so nearly perfect that you strain your eyes to see the wobble

There are many problems with this. Wheels are shipped imperfect, however slightly. Picking the right length of spoke turns out to involve online calculators, or databases, and sometimes I stop and look at the wheel and wonder whether I just threaded in the right direction or not. The best way to replace a rim bent from hitting a pothole is to get exactly the same rim and then, spoke by spoke, swap the old rim out, maintaining the same lacing pattern and everything. That’s not really wheelbuilding though. It feels cheap, like I’m copying someone else’s work without learning anything. Fortunately, I’ve been building wheels with enough differences that there’s nothing to trace.

The worst thing for me is that I can come out of it with a perfectly well-adjusted wheel where the spokes are wildly unevenly tensed. One might be extremely tight, then a quite loose one, just barely past hand-tight, followed by another extremely tight. I’ll sigh, try to get a more uniform tension by doing a series of complicated small balancing adjustments, and it’s rare that that doesn’t create a different, equally obvious shortcoming somewhere else.

It’s extremely frustrating. I’ve been trying to build a new set for the last few weeks, following the collision. Sometimes I’ll watch a Mariners game with the truing stand on my desk and go through making large adjustments, twenty four spokes one full turn tighter each, and finally down to tiny, one-eighth turns.

A truly good wheel-builder can do a wheel with a speed that boggles my mind. They thread the wheel without looking at an example wheel or a chart on a monitor, but by putting the rim in their lap and quickly pushing thirty-two spokes in, lacing them correctly, and then they go through a series of quick adjustments on the truing stand, check whether the hub is off-center, which it isn’t, and set it aside to build the next one.

There’s a moment where the wheel comes together, where it snaps into place, becoming one thing instead of a rub connected to a rim by a network of metal rods. Even imperfect, it’s a wheel. Sometimes, in going through my endless truing, I would pick it out of the stand and see that it wasn’t working, and resign myself to restarting. Or I’d realize that without knowing it, my brainstorm to tighten all the crossing spokes half a turn had brought the whole thing together, and that I could ride it right that moment if I had to.

Tonight I finished the replacement front wheel for the one destroyed. I’ve been riding back and forth to work on a front wheel I took off my training Cannondale, built out parts so old they don’t show up in Google searches. The new wheels are beautiful, quite nice, costly, as good bike parts are. I may have built it with incorrectly sized spokes, which isn’t my fault because I bought it as a set. But it turns out that spoke length calculation isn’t quite an exact science, and there’s always the chance they thought I was going to do a different pattern.

It was ten, and I’d finished up my second restart build happily, using my own set of instructions, which essentially came down to:
-Thread spokes in a two-cross pattern
-Tighten the spokes enough that no spoke’s floppy
-Spin the wheel
-Adjust to fix the left-to-right wobble
-When that looks good, adjust to fix the up-and-down wobble
-Repeat those two steps
-Consider the wheel and how I feel about it
-Adjust the sections I don’t feel good about

I went through this while watching an interview and paying a lot more attention to the interview than my own inadequacies as a wheelbuilder. I spun it with the tolerance so tight that when the wheel rubbed left-to-right I couldn’t tell which side it was on without touching the calipers to feel the vibration when they touched the spinning rim.

I put it on the bike and in my bare feet rode it out on the street in front of my house in the full moon. New wheels sound notes that first time, stressed differently with an inflated tire around the circumference and a rider’s weight squishing them. They twang as they re-sort their positions at each junction in the lacing. It’s like metal strings being plucked, and it always makes me smile. As I pulled back in, walking the bike, I saw that the brake pads rubbed. The wheel would need a little more adjustment, so I pulled it off, deflated the tire, and headed back to the truing stand.

Tomorrow I’ll ride my new wheel to work, and I don’t know how it’ll go.

Coffee is weird

I made a clearly bad shot today, but before I tossed it in the sink before cleaning up to make a second, I tasted it. And for a second, I could taste all the subtle flavors culinary coffee people talk about: there was chocolate, a distinct berry taste, and a sweetness — then like I’d run into a wall, nothing but the most intense bitterness, enough that I spit into a sink and washed immediately.

My second shot was good, but I was thinking of that first taste of the first shot.

How eMusic rips everyone off for 1.4% but actually more

First, despite my complaining about their still-broken login page, I really do like eMusic. They’ve got a ton of stuff that I can’t find normally, and they way in front, selling DRM-free MP3s long before the big guys. But they really are acting badly here, and I want to call them out.

Here’s how this works: you sign up for a monthly plan.

Monthly, of course, means “calendar month” right? If I say “once a month” you know what that means. If I set up a monthly reminder — for something like, say, downloading my eMusic quota — that means once a month on, say, the 5th, I get a note to go make sure I get my music.

If you surveyed 100 people about what monthly means, all 100 would say a calendar month.


Not at eMusic.

Q: How does the eMusic subscription work?
A: Our subscription program is simple. For each 30 day period you receive a fixed number of downloads for one low price. Every 30 days your account is refreshed with the appropriate number of downloads. Downloads do not rollover from one period to the next.

30-day period. That’s… odd. Can that be right? It is:

Q: When will my downloads refresh?
A: Your downloads refresh every thirty days at the same time of day that you signed up. This means that your downloads may refresh on a different day each month. To find out when your downloads will refresh go to the Your Account page and look in the Download Summary area.

What happens here is that… say your subscription starts on Jan 1. You’ve got 30 days. Jan 31, your next period starts…. and expires in March. Through the course of the year, it’ll slip back and forth a little, and there’s no notification that your account’s refreshed its quota or that your downloads are about to expire.

eMusic profits in two ways: first and most obviously, instead of 12 monthly fees, they get thirteen in on a calendar year: 12 and the fractional. Or you can say they’re charging you overall for 5 days they shouldn’t — which amounts to a 1.4% hidden charge from the expectation they set in the signup and plan material and the actual implementation.

But moreover, by varying the dates, they get to catch late customers, like me, flat-footed and get a month of revenue where I don’t download anything because I logged in on the 5th to find out my 30d expired the month before. That’s 100% profit and one frustrated customer. That’s crazy! I wonder how many free months they manage to net over a year that way — it’s got to be substantial.

The obvious fix there is to either set up a recurring 30-day reminder, which is annoying and counter to the definition of the plan, or to make sure I check during the middle of the cycle, every cycle, to make sure the date variation doesn’t change up on me.

More than that, though, I’m really disappointed in them. Wasn’t there anyone there who said “hey, we’re setting customers up for frustration and confusion, we should really simplify this one way or the other” or “doesn’t monthly mean something different here?” It’s the revelation of a sudden disconnect between my like for eMusic, with editors I read and all the bands I like, and eMusic the business, which lifted a twenty off me because it could. That sucks.