After breakfast Linda headed to Ann Arbor to babysit our younger grand-daughter.  I had a long list of things to do at my computer today, and planned to spend the day inside at home doing them.  I did not manage to do most of them as I ended up doing other things instead; so much for plans.

Wednesday is trash day (sorry, Prince Spaghetti), so I got the trash to the curb.  (I know, I know, how have I managed to arrange such an interesting life?)  A box of Bus Conversion Magazines arrived yesterday, so I opened it to check the contents and then e-mailed the publisher that all was well.

We do not have curbside recycling at the house the way we did in the previous one, so we have to take our recyclables to a drop-off center run by Recycle Livingston.  The center is open Wednesdays and Saturdays.  On her way out the door Linda reminded me that I had to take the recyclables to the center.  We keep a set of cardboard boxes on the floor in the pantry and sort our recyclables as they become available.  I loaded them in the car for later.

At some point in the past the shower diverter in the bathtub quit working, so that had been on my “to do” list for a while.  Coincidentally, while we were in Florida I had seen an episode of “Ask This Old House” that dealt with this exact repair!  I had to use a large pipe wrench to unscrew the old bathtub spout/diverter as the threads were corroded.  With the old diverter off I now had a fairly good idea of what I needed in the way of a replacement part.

I had been putting off fixing the leaky dishwasher fresh water connection but today was finally the day to tackle that project.  As I was thinking about heading to the recycle center, and then to Lowe’s for plumbing parts, I got a call from Steve at Village Landscape Development (VLD).  He wanted to swing by and go over the front stairs and rear retaining wall projects again and get us on his schedule.  We agreed on 1 PM.  It was 11:30 AM, so I had just enough time to drop off the recyclables and get a new diverter from Lowe’s.

Steve (VLD) came by and we walked through the two projects.  We were on the same page and settled on tentative start and completion dates, so we signed an agreement and I gave him a deposit.  After he left, I called Wayne (KD8H), set up to get the tower tomorrow at 11:00 AM, and then e-mailed Steve (N8AR) to let him know the date/time.  He had permission to use Bruce’s (W8RA) closed trailer to help me with the tower.

Back at the dishwasher I turned the water supply on and the connection didn’t just drip, it spurted.  I redid the connection with pipe thread compound instead of Teflon tape but it did not help at all.  I tried tightening it and it got worse.  It was clearly time to rethink my approach.

I find that a good way to rethink my approach to a problem is to do something else, so I installed the new diverter for the bathtub/shower in the hall bathroom.  It only needed to be threaded on hand tight as it is not a pressurized fitting.  Water either flows out the spout into the tub or gets blocked and forced (diverted) up to the shower head; a pretty simple device, really.  It was not quite the right length and left a 1/2 inch gap between the base and the wall tile.  At least this way I could see if any water was leaking out the back end.  🙂  It wasn’t, so I let it go for now.

I returned to the dishwasher problem and took another look.  It appeared that the rubber seal (O-ring) in the end of the hose may have gotten nicked or mis-shapen, perhaps from over tightening.  There was no indication of a leak between the 90 degree elbow and the dishwasher inlet.

I headed back to Lowe’s for a new 8’ dishwasher connection hose.  I could not purchase just the hose; it only came as a kit with the 90 degree elbow and another adapter, which turned out to be fortuitous.  I noticed that the instructions did not call for Teflon tape or pipe thread compound and I verified that with the associate in plumbing.  I also picked up a decorative filler plate for the diverter.

The flexible water line connects to the lower left front corner of the dishwasher, loops underneath the unit, goes through a hole in the adjacent cabinet at the lower left rear, goes through the other side of that cabinet into the space under the corner sink cabinet bottom, and finally emerges through a hole in the floor of the cabinet along with a water pipe.  The only way to run the new flexible line, without removing the dishwasher and disassembling cabinets, was to attach one end of the new line to the dishwasher end of the old line and use the old line to pull it through.  Zip ties have lots of uses, and this is one of them.

Before making any connections I read the instructions again.  The connections at the end of the hose were to be “finger tight plus 1/4 turn.”  Although “finger tight” is an incredibly imprecise term–some number of inch-pounds would be precise–these directions clearly indicated that over tightening was a bad thing to do.  I connected the line at both ends following the directions as best I could and opened the supply valve a little.  No more spurting but I still had a drip leak and shut off the water supply.  I knew the hose was OK so it had to be the elbow.  I had to pull the dishwasher part way out to get to the 90 degree elbow.  (This why I installed an 8 foot hose.)  After I got it out I examined it and did not see any obvious thread damage or cracks, but there was some pitting and one pit in particular looked like it might be a through pinhole.  No matter, it was trash.

I installed the new elbow using pipe thread compound on the male NPT pipe threads that go into the female NPT fitting on the dishwasher.  These kinds of fittings are always a bit tricky.  They have to be tight enough to not leak, without overdoing it, and they have to be oriented a certain way to allow something else to connect to them; in this case the supply hose.  I reattached the flexible hose, turned on the water supply, and voilà, no leaks!  As long as I was on a roll I unscrewed the bathtub diverter, slipped the decorative spacer over the pipe, and screwed the diverter back on, lining it up carefully with the spacer and getting it snug but properly aligned.  Even though it took most of the afternoon I had successfully completed two plumbing jobs in one day.