Immersion Heater Issue

Due to another (as yet unresolved) issue the immersion heater for the hot water tank was needed during a recent heatwave (≥34^oC for a few days). However it had been previously noted as not working.

These are not complex pieces of equipment, with only marginally more parts than a kettle, consisting of a heating element and two temperature controlled switches (a thermostat and an overtemperature cut-out) bolted into the hot water tank and powered from the mains electricity. Generally they are used as back-up heating devices and therefore only sporadically.

Hot water tank diagram. The immersion heating element
is in red and the thermostat in grey - Source.

Our system is slightly different to that shown above in that we have an unvented cylinder with the immersion heater mounted on the side of the tank.

Baulky immersion heater

Immersion heaters are an industry standard item and ours is from an Italian company, Thermowatt. I couldn't find the exact item on their website, but given their generic nature I got close enough to get a circuit diagram.

Thermowatt circuit diagram for immersion heaters with
unipolar thermostat and safety disconnection.

The circuit diagram is pretty straightforward. So what is wrong with it? All I had from The Major is that 'it isn't working', so some general troubleshooting is required. As is commonly the case, YouTube came up with a good guide in the shape of John Ward of Flameport Electrical.

Immersion heater fault finding guide

Out with the multimeter for a bit of testing then; no issues with the fuse in the plug or the lead to the heater.

Internals of immersion heater. The thermostat control is in red and the
overtemperature cut-out is in the hole to the left of the lower brass screw.

If the unit is below its' set temperature the resistance across the live and neutral pins of the plug should be around 20 Ω, which it was,. So next, under the guise of checking that the thermostat was working correctly, I did the usual thing of twiddling the knobs and pressing the buttons and everything appeared to be working normally. Somewhat perplexed I put the cover back on and switched it back on. And lo and behold it was working.

Had it been working all the time? Had altering the thermostat set point or pressing the cut-out helped? No idea, but…

JOB DONE

Time taken: 20 minutes

Cost: £0.00

Unblocking the kitchen sink drain

Over the past month or two the kitchen sink has been draining more and more slowly, and it is now flirting with stopping altogether, making for an unsightly and unsanitary mess.

Blocked kitchen sink

Attacking it with the plunger didn't really improve the situation. So it was time to tackle the issue from both ends, so to speak.

I started first at the external drain, which had merged back into the undergrowth since the last adventure in that area.

Overgrowth regrowth

Out with the gardening gloves, shears and secateurs (I enrolled one of the tykes to do the hack and slash) and the drain hopper emerged again.

Not-so-clean drain hopper

It wasn't sparkling, but there weren't any signs that the drain was blocked (there is a grille over the drain). Pulling out the accumulated detritus and testing the drain with a bucket of water showed that everything was working OK at this end.

Cleared drain hopper

As the drain end was working, I turned to investigate from the plughole end. Once the cupboard under the sink was emptied out dropping off the U‑bend was straightforward, as this is also something I've tackled once before.

Checking the U-bend

Annoyingly it was pretty much clear, meaning that the blockage was somewhere in the permanently fixed part of the waste pipe. I gave it a bit of a hopeful rodding with a battered bottle brush that is only used for filthy jobs, but this didn't seem to make too much difference in terms how it felt to the touch. So I decided to re-attach the 90^o compression fitting on to the waste pipe but pointing upwards to use it as a funnel to pour in some drain unblocker I had to hand and left that to do its business for 30 mins.

Perhaps you are thinking that I could have just poured some drain cleaner into the sink in the first place? Possibly, but I would have had to completely fill the U‑bend with the stuff in order to get it back to the blockage further down the pipe; also the external drain hopper wouldn't have been cleared out.

After giving the unblocker some time to work I then put the piping back together, crossed my fingers, and ran some water through the system. Back to normal, thankfully. Now it just remained to clean everything back up and repack the cupboard.

JOB DONE

Time taken: 2 hours
Cost: £0.30 worth of drain cleaner

Dead maker pens

What’s this? Two dried out marker pens (can you tell that I'm working on clearing off my desk?).

Dead Staedtler Lumocolour Pens

These are Staedtler Lumocolour pens, non-permanent 316 fine point in this case. Marker pens are generally fire-and-forget items but these are marked as refillable, not something I have seen before. Ordinarily they would just get junked and replaced by new ones, but Staedtler make excellent markers, so let’s investigate.

Got a part number from the Staedtler catalogue for the refills package, which appears to be a small pot of ink that you stand the pen up in while it wicks the ink back up through the nib. The whole thing is quite neat.

Staedtler Ink Refill Station

At £8.50 on Amazon the price is OK as the pens are £1.30 a pop new (so not cheap but not too dear either). As a pot should refill 10 pens it will take 6.5 refills before buying the ink is cheaper than buying new pens, which is equivalent to buy 2 get 1 free. Although it is a reasonable deal, the downside is that I would have to buy 2 different colours and I don’t get through enough maker pens for me to feel confident that I will get 10 pens out of a refill pot before the ink goes dry. It might take 5 years to get through 5 red pens.

What to do?

I think I will sit on this one and just chuck them into the pens parts bin in case a use case for large amounts of non-permanent markers crops up.

JOB DONE

Time taken: About an hour of research
Cost: nil

Resurrection of Dead Ballpoint Pens

What is this? A couple of ballpoint pens, both not working.

No need for photos, we all know what a ballpoint pen looks like. In this case one was a freebie from Barclays Bank and the other is marked The Inn At Penn (no idea how this arrived). I know they are disposable, what isn't these days? But it's still not very environmentally friendly to chuck stuff out if it can be repaired. However in this case the amount of time I'm willing to spend on resurrecting them is very limited. WikiHow has an in depth article on what to try basically heat, pressure, solvent, or combinations thereof.

Parts of a ballpoint ink pen

The Barlcays pen first. On opening it and holding the white ink chamber up to a light bulb it appears most of the ink has gone (not that it would have had much in it in the first place). I tried scribbling furiously to get some heat into the nib in order to make the ink flow and that gave a few streaks of colour, then I tried bending over the ink chamber in order to pump the ink down towards the nib, no effect. Finally I pulled off the nib and dipped the end of the ink chamber in some acetone to get the ink moving. Still nothing, so into the pens parts bin for that one.

Next was the Inn at Penn pen. More ink was visible in this one, in fact it looked almost full. Scribbling did nothing, but bending the ink chamber over did the trick. Result.

OK 50% success rate, not too bad.

JOB DONE

Time taken: 5 mins
Cost: nil

Dead alkaline batteries

What is this? A small collection of dead alkaline batteries.

Collection of dead alkaline batteries

Although presented to me as dead they weren't all in that state, as their measured outputs ranged from 0.05 to 1.55 V (after I looked at them again I noticed that one was a rechargeable, doh!).

Measuring voltage of unloaded batteries

The C and AAAA cells can be put back to general use as OK(ish). The rest would usually be put out for recycling but I got to thinking… is there another use for them?

So, what is an alkaline battery made from?

Diagram of the internal parts of an alkaline battery

A variety of things it appears. The chemicals inside are Zn/ZnO and Mn(III) and Mn(IV) species plus some KOH wrapped up in a stainless steel can with a brass current collector. Nothing I really need to play around with at the moment, and it's not like dead batteries are hard to come by. So that's a pass on the raw materials.

When I measured the voltage of the remaining 3 AA cells they were 0.05, 0.55 and 1.12 V, indicating that they are all pretty dead, ie there was not even any juice to be recovered by using them in a less demanding item. It is possible to charge alkaline cells another couple of times with a special charger (such as this one), but generally they are pricey for what they are and are not recommended. Making one would be a nice scratch build, but that is a project for another day.

Chart to assess the remaining charge of an alkaline battery

So the answer to the question of 'is there anything else I can do with them?' is, not really. Off to the recycling bin it is then.

JOB DONE

Time taken: 5 mins
Cost: £0.00

Dr Martens Boots Shoes

Unearthed from under the bed, one pair of Dr Martens shoes.

1461 Dr Martens shoes

They appear to be a pair of 1461 Oxford style DMs; made in the original factory in Wollaston, England, before the corporate suits at Permira closed it in 2003 and shifted production to Thailand.

Originally made from German fighter planes, the brand didn't really take off until the '60s when the design was licensed and improved by R Griggs Ltd. in the UK. Initially sold as cheap and practical workwear they became counter-culture fashion items in the days of punk and ska, but are now sold mostly as a general fashion brand.

Bob Martens on the street

I don't know if these count as vintage but they are not new. They are in OK nick but I can't wear them anymore, so it's time to move them on to someone else. On inspection the only thing that needs to be done to them before sale is to clean the shoe polish off the signature yellow sole stitching around the welt.

Discoloured sole stitching due to polish

A bit of on-line research threw up a range of different methods for cleaning up the stitches, mostly revolving around the use of solvents; isopropanol, acetone and lighter fluid were all mentioned. Basically anything that will solvate the wax in the polish should work and to this end a review of Wikipedia indicates that shoe polish is a mix of wax and dyes in 70% solvent (Stoddard solvent - a form of white spirit or naphtha).

Let's compare and contrast. I applied each solvent to a single stitch with a cotton wool bud and then cleaned off the polish with another dry cotton wool bud.

Solvent

Before

After

Acetone

Isopropanol

White spirit

Overall the performance of each solvent was much the same as the others. Perhaps acetone was marginally worse at removing the polish than the other two and seemed to attack the rubber of the welt slightly, but if it is what you have to hand it will still do the job. For me white spirit is probably the first choice for this task and in total I used about 5 mL of solvent to clean the pair.

Before (L) and after (R) cleaning with white spirit

JOB DONE

Time taken: 20 minutes.
Cost: pennies for white spirit, liberated cotton buds for free.

PS The title reference is to Mr Balowski's nephew.

Freezer Gloves

Tired of almost getting frostbite while digging through the chest freezer for that bag of sausages that you know is in there… somewhere…?

I am.

I noticed that the freezer guys at Tesco were wearing something more insulating than disposable gloves but not as bulky as freezer gauntlets (yes they are £160/pair, but to be fair you can work down to -190^oC in them).

Off to eBay, which brought forth the snappily titled Thermal Insulated Winter Work Gloves Latex Coated Cold Safety Freezer Strong at £2.69 a pair including p&p.

At that price, even if they are no good at all, what can go wrong?

So I duly ordered some and they look just as naff as the ones in the picture; but they do the job. Result!

Freezer Gloves Strong

All that was needed was to sew on a couple of loops so that they could be hung up in the kitchen. I found some similar material and badgered one of the tykes to do that.

Freezer gloves hunged up

JOB DONE

Time taken: none for me, 45mins for tyke
Cost : £2.69