HOUSEHOLD TIPS NOT FOUND IN WOMAN'S WEEKLY

[Stanley]

I've mentioned before that I clean my pint pot every morning with boiling water and bleach. About once a week I pour the boiling bleach over the sink tidy and the contents. I scald my mug out with more boiling water to warm it up and wash the bleach off and pour the boiling water over the inside of the sink. The result is that every day the sink and waste pipe (including the overflow) get a dose and once a week the sink tidy and contents get the same treatment. All potential reservoirs for bugs if you don't attend to them regularly.... Good practice!

[Stanley]

Always tap your aneroid barometer before reading it. There is a small amount of friction in the linkage between the diaphragm and the needle and this will free it. This used to be automatic in the days when everyone had them but modern owners may not have seen it done. A mercury barometer doesn’t need this treatment as there is little if any friction in the mercury column.

[Tizer]

It's surprising how often a sharp tap makes all the difference and it was used a lot in the past. I'll bet the astronauts on the International Space Station sometimes tap their equipment!

[Moh]

Re, bleaching your cup Stanley - I find Milton better, no taste and just as clean.

[chinatyke]

Re, bleaching your cup Stanley - I find Milton better, no taste and just as clean.

Milton is sodium hypochlorite same as bleach. The only difference is that it is purer because it is made specially by passing chlorine into sodium hydroxide, known as synthesis bleach, whereas bleach simply comes from absorbers on chlorination plants and can be contaminated with whatever process materials are present in the off-gas stream from the reactors, obviously not suited for sterilising baby bottles and equipment. At the last place I worked we made phenolic materials and the bleach from these absorbers always smelled of disinfectant. This was a waste material and the price we got for it was 1 pence/litre at >10% activity, the stuff you buy for cleaning is usually <5% active.

Something else you could try: use your cup for cleaning your gobblers with steradent, it will do the same job, might taste of peppermint though.

Don't worry, commercial and household bleach isn't likely to do you any harm because you'd taste it if any was left in your cup. By the way, I sometimes use household bleach for my gobblers!

[Stanley]

I've used oven cleaner on mine before now! Re residual taste, there isn't any because the final operation is to warm the pot with boiling water before filtering the coffee into the pot. Bleach, at £3.50 for five litres is a lot cheaper than Milton.... Don't forget that under my regime the bleach and boiling water can is made to work more than once.

[Stanley]

If you like bleach, don't live in a property served by a septic tank.......

[Sue]

Exactly Stanley. We have one in France. French coffee stains sinks, work tops and cups. I regularly bleach all but throw the residue in a bowl and throw it away on the gravel path, where it helps to keep the weeds down. I wipe the residue off sinks and work tops with paper towels or a kitchen cloth that I am about to throw away. What a performance to keep everything looking stain free. The previous owners didn't bother and we have tiled work tops like most of the french. It has taken about 8 years to get the grout white again.i found a good toothbrush and bleach has worked a treat. I leave the bleach sitting for ages before wiping down.

[Wendyf]

I have the double problem of a septic tank and a cat who cant resist the smell of bleach. If I wipe down worktops using bleach she appears out of nowhere and starts rolling around on them in ecstasy. One day I hope to have doors n the kitchen.....

[PanBiker]

The old tipplers at ILP Clarion house were flushed with the water from the kitchen sink and the resultant waste runs into a settlement/septic tank in the field below. We always had to induct new brewing up teams not to be to fastidious with the bleach when cleaning up. The new flushing WC's fed from the mains are much better but the result still goes to the same arrangement. When It was my turn for running the Clarion first job on a Sunday morning while you were waiting for the two Bellings to come up to the boil was to run the taps to flush the toilet blocks a few times, the old tipplers still get used during the week with passing walkers and cyclists. No steamy Bellings now, we have an instant heat boiler over the sink and a dedicated one for brewing up with a built in reserve tank feeding and instant heat reservoir. No decanting water in big enamelled jugs anymore and a lot less condensation.

[Stanley]

If mother was washing and emptied the tub on the washer while you were enthroned you got a waft of scented steam past your bum. Newton told me that the tipplers in Wellhouse Yard were used as a sump for the outlet pipes from the cylinder drains on the engine. He said that in winter they were lovely and warm..... See Harold Duxbury in the LTP for good information about clearing blocked tipplers.....
Septic tanks. When a new double deck septic tank was installed at farm cottages at Bank Newton the builders told me that the best way of starting them off was a dead cat.... If one stalled because of contamination by chemicals they flushed them and gave them the same treatment.

[Stanley]

One of my least favourite jobs ever was when I was put in charge of the new sewage treatment plant at West Marton Dairy after conversion of the dairy to cheese making. It worked on the aerobic principle. Unlike septic tanks which are anaerobic because the bugs hate oxygen, we blew air into the raw sewage because our bugs liked it. On a good day the outfall ran like gin but then you would go down in the morning and find it running out like grey milk. Very disheartening and I never did crack what made it change. Luckily the management didn't know either and I never got blamed, it was regarded as a mystery despite more 'experts' than you could shake a stick at coming to peer into the tanks and shake their heads! It was a good day for me when they took me off the job and I went back to normal duties driving milk tankers.
So today's tip is that if you are ever offered a job like that, bow out gracefully!

[Tizer]

The label of our bleach bottle says "Safe for use with septic tanks".
Did you see that TV programme the other day presented by an American chap and about the development of cleaning chemicals and sewage systems? Quite interesting and I didn't know that John Snow (he who traced the cholera in part of London to a water pump) had previously spent time in mines in the north-east of England and had observed that although the miners got cholera he didn't get it even though he was breathing in the same air as they did. And that was in the days when people thought cholera was due to bad air, `miasma'. It triggered his idea that it might be `something in the water'. Also interesting was that Chlorox bleach was developed for industrial use but it flopped until one of shareholder's wives put some in small bottles and sold it as a domestic disinfectant. Woman power!

[Stanley]

I don't see how any bleach (Kills 99.9% of germs) can be safe in a septic that depends on these germs processing the waste. At the very least it will hamper the action. The same thing applied at West Marton, I suspected that the failure of the process happened when the concentration of cleaning materials reached an unsupportable level where it was killing off the bacteria but we never proved it. The large communal sewage treatment plants get away with it because the volume of waste that contains no bleach is so great that lethal levels of cleaners are avoided.

[PanBiker]

Clarion House system is a good example as it's a small standalone system supported only by the waste water from the kitchen and now the output from the two indoor WC's. The original toilet block had two long drop pedestals and a urinal. They still contribute as they are still functional and used on occasion during the week.

I don't know a lot about it apart from the fact that the settlement system works by bacterial process. In my time serving on on a Sunday and all the time I have been involved with the house over the last 30 odd years or so, the only time we have ever had problems is with over use of cleaners such as bleach. You could tell the week after how fastidious the previous weeks team had been. We introduced a dictate to the brewing up teams essentially banning strong cleaners and bleach. We have a central buying team for the produce we vend at the house on Sundays so they also buy all cleaning products. We are basically only brewing up, no food production as such, pre packed sweets and snacks. So its just a case of washing up and wiping down. We use mild washing up liquid with copious amounts of water and use sprays to wipe down the surfaces. If the regime is adhered to, Clarion House and it's environs remains smelling sweet.

[Stanley]

If you do need to sterilise anything boiling water is safe. If you wanted to be super safe get one of these modern domestic steam cleaners.....

[Stanley]

Never mix an acid with bleach to get a stronger cleaning affect. Ted Lawson found this out at West Marton when cleaning the concrete floor in the bottling department. The wrong combination produces chlorine gas, used as poison gas in WW1. Three people had to go to hospital but luckily with no permanent damage.

[Tizer]

And don't mix bleach with ammonia or you'll get not only chlorine gas but possibly also choramine which too is poisonous. Stale urine contains ammonia, so don't mix them together except in a well ventilated space.

[Stanley]

That'll be the occasional smell I detect if I have a pee after giving the lavatory pan and the bog brush a bleach soak about once a week! I usually pee in the bleach water and it's a funny smell!

[Stanley]

My friend Joyce Tierney who was a cleaner at Nelson and Colne College once gave me a tip which works. When you have done your usual deep clean of the lavatory finish off by going over all the exterior surfaces with a good spray furniture polish. It really does make a difference!

[chinatyke]

You've just reminded me of another tip. The worktops in our new kitchen were made from stone. The stone was a grey colour, very slightly porous and unsealed. We soon discovered that cooking oil penetrated the surface slightly and left dark marks. The manufacturer was called to look at the problem and he laughed when I asked if I could soak the entire surface in oil to make everything the same. Anyway he ground out the small marks and repolished the affected areas, then he applied what looked like beeswax to the small areas he had repaired but not to the entire worktops. I thought about what he had done as I wanted to treat the whole surface to make it oil-proof. Later I sprayed the surfaces with a copious coating of Pledge furniture polish and left it overnight to soak in. In the morning I removed the excess and polished the worktops. It was completely successful, beautiful polished surfaces that have proved to be stain proof and have not required another treatment for 2 years.

I wonder if WD40 would have done the same job? It seems to have a million and one uses and might have penetrated better.

[Stanley]

China, your mind works like mine. I would have done exactly the same thing but perhaps used straight cooking oil. The toughest wax is Carnauba, I suspect that would do the same thing.

[Tizer]

I've used Pledge spray polish on our red hearth tiles to get a clean, shiny surface. I think China was better using wax polish than WD40 - the oil would have penetrated and kept out water but probably wouldn't have given sufficient surface coating to give a good appearance unless he kept spraying at intervals (and then his missus might have complained about the kitchen smelling like a workshop!). When buying granite work surfaces it's as well to remember that granite is porous and therefore does need sealing. One of our friends lives in a granite cottage on the Scilly Isles and has perennial problems with water coming through the stone. On the other hand, some worksurfaces sold as `granite' are actually a different type of rock - the manufacturers use the word granite to describe any hard rock rather than the specific meaning used by geologists. So some surfaces might be naturally water and oil proof - a good material would be the volcanic rock obsidian, which is technically a black or brown glass, but it might be a bit expensive!

[Stanley]

That's interesting! I always assumed that granite was impervious to water. Like this pink granite at Ardnamurchan.



As good as the day it was built. You can still see the chisel marks on the stones....

[Tizer]

More details on stone porosity and permeability here:
http://www.ethosmarblecare.co.uk/petrol ... sity.shtml