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Replacing an oxygen sensor
Since last fall or so, the car has been getting really rubbish fuel economy. Our Fabia has never been right on the cutting edge of economy — ours is one of the last years that Skoda continued to use a block designed in the 1970s — but it used to do much better than it has recently.
I’ve been trying to figure out what’s caused this dropoff, slowly working my way through the car piece by piece. I’ve replaced the oil, ensured that the tyres were properly inflated; then I replaced the spark plugs: the previous ones were improperly gapped, but the new ones did not solve the problem.
On Wednesday, I jacked the car up and replaced the oxygen sensor behind the catalytic converter. Aaaaaand it has not made a difference. Still, it's given me a bit more confidence crawling around under the car, which isn't valueless. And I also learned a futile lesson in taking apart and repinning a plug.
Next up: the front oxygen sensor.
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Replace a sink waste
Americans call this a drain, but British people call it a waste. As I'm only about a week out from having to prove to the government that I've become adequately Anglicised to be allowed to stay here—I'm going to call it a waste. Anyway, it turns out that this is one of those jobs that you don't have to call a plumber to do for you.
Okay, cards on the table here: this is a guide for British sinks. I've just been on Lowes dot com and all the drains are weirdly long and a search for "bottle traps" just turns up a bunch of results for Bag-a-Bug Japanese beetle traps. It turns out that if you live in the United States you may need to call a plumber after all.
Wastes can be had for pretty cheap at e.g. Screwfix or Toolstation. Get a new bottle trap while you're at it—the anti-siphon ones are best and only cost an extra quid or two above the regular ones. Might be smart to get a bit of flexible piping as well, since bottle traps all seem to be about 3mm out of line with every other one.
The hardest part of the job will be getting the old waste out. If, like me, your wastes haven't been changed in fifteen years, they will be a repulsive, corroded catastrophe, adhered to the sink and to the sub-sink plumbing with a mess of grimy and expired silicone. If you're lucky, the black hex nut will be in place; if you're unlucky, there'll be some sort of chrome ring that will have fused itself galvanically to the waste, and the only solution will be your trusty hacksaw.
Once the waste is out, all that remains is assembly. A rubber gasket on the user-facing side of the sink sits under the waste flange itself.
Here is the most important step in the process: purchase a tub of Plumber's Mait and wrap a slug of the stuff around the threads of the waste before tightening down the hex nut. When you tighten the black hex nut down on the threads of the waste to seal it to the sink itself, the Plumber's Mait will squidge into all the nooks & crannies & out the sides and form a watertight seal. Silicone will not do the job: it's messy and thin, and besides not being watertight, it's very difficult to remove next time you need to replace the waste. Plumber's Mait is a fiver and is designed for this job specifically. You don't need to wait for it to dry; once you've tightened down the plastic hex nut (tight) and the Plumber's Mait has squeeged adequately, you can run water down the waste immediately (provided you have attached the trap, which is left as an exercise for the reader). Again: do not bother with silicone. If for whatever reason you do need a plumber to work on your sink, and they discover that you have used Plumber's Mait, they will shake your hand warmly and offer to buy you a pint. I am not kidding about this.
That is how you replace a sink waste:
- Remove the old waste, peeling off all the crummy old silicone left by the previous schmuck;
- Install the new waste, with the included rubber gasket between the waste flange and the sink tub;
- Apply Plumber's Mait to the threads under the sink;
- Tighten down the black hex nut slightly more than you feel comfortable with;
- Attach the (non-siphon) trap to the sink and the downpipe.
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2024: the year so far
Twenty twenty-four has been a weird year so far.
Last year, I got really into running and I read plenty of books. This year, I've read almost not at all and I've been kept off the roads and trails of East Durham by a wonky knee that demands slow reacclimatisation. I don't know what's going on. We're like seven weeks into the new year and I've barely posted to the blog, even.
It's not like I'm just sitting around, either. Sam and I have undertaken a ton of small jobs around the house:
- Fixing the sink in the kitchen
- Whacking the various moles preventing the Porsche from starting
- Replacing furnishings in the bathroom
- Laying slate tiles downstairs
- Installing new wastes and traps in all of the sinks throughout the house
The start of the year has also coincided with a moderate expansion of my responsibilities at work, which has been a drain—but it's a drain that I recognise. I can account for it in the emotional rebalancing at the weekend. I feel like I should be able to work around it. But I've no desire to read any of the four or five books I've got on the go, when it comes to lunchtime or the quiet hour before sleep—
Instead I open up YouTube, almost by reflex, and click through to a video where a bearded Iowan revives a Jeep Grand Wagoneer, or where two pseudonymous Europeans play Age of Empires II. Like I've got nothing left in the tank for any activity that demands even a little bit of engagement from me. I'm still busy; I'm still getting things done; I'm not unhappy or despondent or unmotivated; but my priorities have been reorganised without my consent, and I feel disengaged from what I thought my life was about. What's up with that?
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January updates
A couple of other updates from January, a month in which I have had neither the time nor the inclination to write on my blog:
- After running 40k through the Dales, my knee got cross with me and wouldn't let me run anymore. I took a week off, icing regularly and giving it Total Rest, and it got worse. The following week I did a buttload of yoga, and my knee has started responding positively. When I break the course record at the Fellsman in April I'm going to thank K. Pattabhi Jois in my victory speech1.
- A trip up to Haughtongreen revealed a massive hole in the stove's flue pipe. I have only a vague sense of how to fix this—but the wizened hands at the Mountain Bothies Association probably have a combined four or five centuries' worth of experience with solid fuel stoves, so aid is at hand.
- We started watching For All Mankind on Apple TV+, a television program about NASA set in a world where the Soviets beat the United States to the moon. Continued competition between the nations drives all sorts of hijinx, and it's fun to imagine a world where space exploration receives abundant government funding—but the program is hampered by weak characters who spend most of each episode telling us how they feel or discursing at length about their pasts. Solid B grade.
- We started redoing the bathroom downstairs, and while the furnishings are still strewn in pieces throughout the hallway, I at least know now what the various parts of a sink are and how they fit together.
- It is extremely unlikely that I will ever break the course record at the Fellsman.
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Fixing the sink
There's not a lot to say here: when we redid the kitchen a few years ago, the sink was installed in a sort of suboptimal configuration, so I got out the circular saw and the electric planer and moved the sink around and then caulked it all up and it's much better now. This felt like a minor victory for the usually plumbing-averse me, and I felt that I needed to mark it somehow, so:
I've left the rubbish & dirty dishes in because that's just the sort of thing I'll be interested in seeing in 10 years when I revisit this blog post I also disassembled the waste and cleaned it all up, and intend to do so again every year from now on. Yuck.
Oh and I finally finished tiling the backsplash! The kitchen is, some two years late, finally finished.
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