HOUSEHOLD TIPS NOT FOUND IN WOMAN'S WEEKLY

[Stanley]

In a way I think we are Cathy. I often wonder what people's priorities are when I hear some of the self-indulgent whingeing they do over trivial matters. I suppose we had to get on with life despite the drawbacks and it gave older people a different mind-set. A classic example was the opposition to the MRA jab, people were more bothered about a remote possibility of harm than the vast benefits of the protection. They had never experienced those terrible childhood diseases.

[Tizer]

Back to household tips...In one room of our house, very occasionally, a horrible fishy smell would suddenly appear and then it would go just as fast as it appeared. Nothing to do with cooking and it didn't correlate with wet or windy weather. Not detectable in any other room. The room is in our dormer under a flat roof and we expected the smell might go away after the new insulated roof had been put in - perhaps it was a dead mouse or bird in the old roof. No luck, it appeared again a few days ago even though the roof had been replaced. But finally we've solved the puzzle! The smell was coming from the ceiling light, specifically the plastic bit around the bulb, when it got hot. It was old and had gone yellow. I've replaced the whole fitting now. Apparently the deterioration of old plastic electrical fittings is a well known cause of fishy smells in houses, something I'd not heard of before.

[chinatyke]

Especially the Bakelite type of plastics based on phenol-formaldehyde resins.

[Stanley]

You remind me of the woman who filled the hollow curtain rod with frozen prawns when she left the family home after divorce....
I have very little sense of smell but strangely I can always detect a foreigner. I often ask visitors for a sitrep on the house smell. My cleaner reported the other day that she got baking bread, Condor and slow-cooking meat, not bad. She promises me that if she ever notes my body odour she will tell me! I don't want to get to be a smelly old man! Youngsters may find this funny but it is something I am aware of.
In Flatley mode... I always bristle a bit when I hear modern historians talking about the way people stank in the days before frequent bathing and deodorants. It's a personal perception I know but I think this is not as big a problem as they think. I have only ever met two men who smelled bad. I think I have read somewhere that some medical conditions can cause this. There's no doubt that there were more smells in daily life than there are now, coal smoke, drains and dustbins to name but a few. We also favoured strong disinfectants like Jeyes, San Izal and Dettol. Carbolic soap was a big seller. I remember once visiting a maggot farm at Bradford......

[David Whipp]

For over 20 years, I worked next to the sewage works at Skipton; most of the time, we were oblivious to any odour. Customers could smell it clearly though...

[Tizer]

Anaerobic sewage sludge is fascinating stuff and I became closely acquainted with it while doing my PhD when one of the other students in the lab had a project funded by a local sewage company to make methane gas. He had to collect samples from the big digester at the plant, bring them into the lab and then incubate them under various conditions and measure the methane production. He would fill a bottle to the brim, cap it tightly and bring it into the lab. Those `not in the know' would run away when he said he was going to open it but we all carried on with our work regardless. When anaerobic, the sludge has only one smell, that of paraffin, there's no nasty smell - you could stick your nose over the top, inhale deeply and simply be reminded of winter days with the paraffin heater going to keep warm. The trouble began if you left the jar open. Within minutes the sludge would absorb oxygen and the smell would change to...well, the ripest sewage you could imagine!

The method of collecting methane was the simple school chemistry lab beehive shelf with a glass cylinder inverted over it in a water bath. The fun bit was lighting the methane, you got an almost invisible blue flame at the mouth of the cylinder, where it mixed with the oxygen.

That triggers another thought. We all know that you need oxygen for combustion but what many folk don't realise is that oxygen itself is not combustible. You can't `burn' oxygen alone, there has to be something else to burn at the expense of oxygen.

And I'll take this opportunity to repeat a story that will probably make you all say "Oh no, not that one again!". When Mrs Tiz's grandfather was in charge of Glasgow's sewage plant during WW2 he was quoted in the local newspaper as proudly saying: "All Glasgow's sewage passes through my hands". (He then emigrated to New Zealand and all Auckland's sewage passed through his hands.)

[Cathy]

On the subject of not noticing things reminded me of some people I used to know who lived within 20metres of a major railway line, they said that they never noticed the trains noise unless it was the Goods Train going past at 2am in the morning, and that was mainly because the house would shake a bit.

[Stanley]

" All beverages in this establishment have been passed by the management"
At one point in my varied career I was in charge of the sewage plant at West Marton after we converted to a cheese factory. It was an aerobic process, we pumped air into the primary tank through big canvas socks. Under ideal conditions the material flocculated(?) and the discharge was clear as gin but as anyone who has done this job knows, everything can change if the incoming mixture changes for any reason. On those days I could tell it had gone awry as I walked down the lane to the plant. The smell told me all I wanted to know! It would be running out over the overflow like mulligatawny soup..... I never did crack it and was glad when I went back on to tanker driving! By the way, I had no training, I was simply told what the maintenance procedures were and left to it.
When you think about it, our very survival depends on monitoring all the incoming information and taking appropriate action. It can be smell, sound or touch like vibration. That's how you run machinery safely and cook food. Think of the way you have to monitor a pan of milk....



Some people might look askance at my ragged wipers in the kitchen. It's a trick I learned from my mother. Old towels were cut up and used as 'dish cloths', general wipers. She knew that there is nothing dirtier than a wet dish cloth festering on a ledge for a day. I change mine at least daily and often more frequently. I wash often enough to keep up the supply by hot washing in the machine. Mother used to boil hers if they built up during the week.

[LizG]

Some people might look askance at my ragged wipers in the kitchen. It's a trick I learned from my mother. Old towels were cut up and used as 'dish cloths', general wipers. She knew that there is nothing dirtier than a wet dish cloth festering on a ledge for a day. I change mine at least daily and often more frequently. I wash often enough to keep up the supply by hot washing in the machine. Mother used to boil hers if they built up during the week.

I agree with your Mum Stanley. All my old towels go to my daughter for use on her horses but I buy micro fibre cloths in bulk from one of our local hardware stores and change them every day. I often soak the dirty ones in Napisan before I wash them. Once they are past their best they go to Steph as well and she uses them for cleaning bridles and saddles.

[Sue]

I don't like micro cloths. You can't disinfect them, they shed water so don't wash well. A good cotton dishcloth bleached daily is best. If you have a dishwasher they recommend that you put the cloth in with the dishes, however they always look mucky then. I bleach ours daily, change it for a new one once a fortnight and demote first to a general cleaning cloth...windocills and the like, then a floor cloth, then Bob has them for his workshop and then the bin. Sometimes the last step is missed out if Bob has enough. My dad used to do the same with towels Stanley but in later years was not so good with washing them!

Ps I was once a bacteriologist in disinfectant research. The old dish cloth was a common tester.

[LizG]

Tell me more about micro cloths. I didn't realise you couldn't disinfect them. Why's that? I don't use them for washing up just wiping the benches but I'll still re-think it. I use a scotch brite if I need to wash dishes that don't go in the dishwasher.

[Sue]

They don't absorb water so it is difficult for disinfectants to penetrate all of the fabric. mind you there are micro cloths around these days that were not around when I worked in the labs. We used to test our disinfectants on a variety of surfaces to see what deactivated them and how efficient they were. We always found the artificial fabric cloths went slimy with constant disinfection. cotton fabrics, wipes etc were used when we disinfected surfaces after using them usually with bleach or our iodine based disinfectants. We rinsed the cloths in weak bleach afterwards. Bleach left no no ill effect on the fabric ( although it did weaken the fibres with time) but the iodine stained everything yellow or blue if it had starch in. We used alcohol on clean surfaces when we prepared our work space. Long time ago though Liz, things change, but I have never liked microfibres cloths except for dusting as they move dust brilliantly.

I had a habit of standing with my hands on my hips and had one labcoat with a blue hand print there. It never washed out lol!

Be careful with scotch brite it roughens the surface and increases the places bacteria can harbour. Always rinse pots in 80degrees centigrade or above. The water quickly evaporates and there is no need to wipe dry. That is why a dishwasher is so good.

[Tizer]

Liz, this web page will add to what Sue's already said. Note that the page talks about `cleaning' with the cloths, not using them to kill bacteria. In other words, removing grime and dust etc. I've used one to clean smeary windows and it worked well at that job but otherwise I'm old-fashioned!
http://www.explainthatstuff.com/microfibercloths.html

[Stanley]

I have never liked micro cloth wipers, no technical reason, just that they didn't have the feel of pure cotton. I love Scotch Brite as well. We once did a job on a boiler at a plant that made them and I was given a box full of offcuts, never bought any since! I have a stainless steel scourer pad for the bad jobs but Scotch pads do the rest. They get bleached as well! Good in the shed as well for cleaning bright surfaces with WD40.

[Stanley]

Some household tips weren't in Woman's Weekly because they weren't needed. In those days only the most modern households had a refrigerator and even those didn't have any freezing capability beyond making a couple of trays of ice cubes. Today we have proper freezing compartments and of course occasionally they have to be defrosted. I was in a house the other day and the Man of the House was doing the job with a hair dryer and a screwdriver! There are easier ways of doing it and this is mine. A pan of boiling water and a tray to catch the water. Not rocket science I know but it's surprising that more people don't read the instructions and do it this way.

[Stanley]

Just washed my mouth out with salt and water, it was a bit sore for some reason. Such an old fashioned remedy and surprisingly effective still.

[Cathy]

Does anyone have a homemade remedy for calming down insect bites? I'm using ice-packs and cold sorbelene cream but these only work temporarily.

[LizG]

Have you tried tea tree oil Cathy?

[Stanley]

Mother always used surgical spirits to stop her chilblains itching.....

[Stanley]

I had to make this as they are unobtainable these days. If your pan or bucket sprang a leak you went to the ironmongers and got one of these. Pop it through the hole tighten the nuts up and cut the spare thread off. Problem solved. Plastics and better pans knocked these off the market.

[Stanley]

One thing I remember clearly from the early days of wireless radio was the lengths people went to to get better reception by using imaginative aerials. You would quite often see long runs of copper wire strung on roof tops or across gardens. My dad favoured an aerial which was basically a bundle of heavy copper wires clamped in a wooden holder which you could mount high on the outside of the house and fan the wires out till they looked like a very large copper shaving brush. It seemed to work well with our '8 Valve superhet' Ekco console radio which was I suspect a fairly high end machine in the 1930s.

[PanBiker]

Wire antennas are alive and well within the amateur radio fraternity Stanley. I have more designs than you can shake a stick at. They are still the simplest and in many cases represent the most effective method of both plucking a signal from the ether or inserting one of your own. I use a multi band design for my station which does me very well.

[LizG]

My 6 year old Grandson assured me on the weekend that the reason I had a fat bottom was that I didn't fart enough. If only it was that simple........

[Stanley]

I love it Liz! Things are so obvious at that age!

[Tizer]

Liz, you're use of that terminology reminds me of how my mother, a South African, apparently upset some of the local women with her choice of words when she arrived in Lancashire after WW2. I think one of the most shocked was my father's mother!