Author Archives: Samurai Appliance Repair Man

Brave New Look

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Yes, it’s a brave new look but it’s still the same Fixitnow.com you all know and love. The sprucing up started with the new logo and the rampage has continued ever since. The latest eyeball tickler is the links table at the top of the page. The re-organized links are now accented by outrageous pastel colors along with a brief explanation. And the Appliantology Group now has a similar table.

In my relentless quest to make it easy for my grasshoppers to find the appliance repair information they need, I’ve added a new page, Samurai’s Appliance Fixit Shack, where I store my pearls of appliance wisdom, all yours for the taking. When you’re ready to pop a cold one and get to work, come on in to the Fixit Shack.

Google Deskbar

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This is one of those tools that rivals the usefulness of a beer bottle opener on your key ring: the Google Deskbar.

If you’re not Googling when you search the web, well, you just ain’t searching the web. Plain n’ simple. But aside from being the most comprehensive search engine, I use Google for all kinds of stuff: spell checking, thesaurus, news, looking for images…I mean, if it’s happening on the web, it’s happening on Google. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it ain’t happenin’ on the web unless it’s happenin’ on Google. Yeah, that’s it.

So, anyway, back to the Google Deskbar. Not to be confused with the Google Toolbar that fits sveltly into our browser so Google is always there for a quick search while we’re surfing. The Deskbar is kinda the same idea except they cut the umbilical to Internet Explorer. Now you can have Google built right into your desktop toolbar. Ya hey, you don’t even need to open a browser to Google something. For those of us on a broadband connection (and if’n you ain’t, you awwta be, suckah!), it’s Google-manna from heaven.

Ok, happy Googling!

Appliance Tip of the Day: Getting Ready for Cooking Season

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appliance tip of the day archiveThanksgiving is almost here. This is the time of year when we get reacquainted with our ranges after Grilling Season. We practitioners of the appliance repairing arts call this Cooking Season. Here are some appliance tips to help keep your kitchen sizzlin’ throughout the Cooking Season.Range/Stove/Oven

Clean the crud out of your self-cleaning oven now. Since ovens are more likely to fail during and just after a self-cleaning cycle, clean yours now in case you need time for a repair.

You can clean any porcelain stovetop or glass range/oven control panel with a non-abrasive cleanser or glass cleaner, such as this one. Watch out for some “cream type” cleansers as they often have tiny abrasive particles in them, which can damage your stovetop or control panel.

Refrigerator

Now’s a good time to scrape that black slime off your refrigerator’s door seals so they don’t stick to the door frame and tear (not to mention infecting your holiday guests with salmonella). Use an old toothbrush and a little dish soap and water to clean all the nooks and crannies. Use this product, a high quality, highly concentrated germicide, to clean away any mold or mildew.

To reduce odors inside your refrigerator or freezer, be sure to cover all foods well and put onions, garlic, and other strong smelling foods in sealed bags. And throw out old flesh meats before they turn into bacterial jelly. Read more about storing flesh meats safely.

Dishwasher

If your dishwasher isn’t getting dishes clean enough, there may not be enough water entering the machine during the fill cycle. After the dishwasher fills, check inside to see if there is water covering the entire bottom of the dishwasher floor. If not, replace the water inlet valve–come git you one.

Fun Fact to Know and Tell

When cutting onions, a chemical called suberin is released. This irritates the eyes and causes watering. This chemical is sensitive to heat. Therefore if you cut onions near your hot stove, the irritation will be less intense.

Who You Gonna Call?

There are dozens of brands of appliances. But when one of your appliances breaks, there�s only one name you need to know � Samurai Appliance Repair Man. I am a trained expert in repairing just about any appliance problem � on virtually any brand. And with 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week emergency service, I’ll be there to help you get your appliance working again in a hurry. Any day. Any time. With service like that, why would you click anywhere else?


grasshoppers baking pot brownies with the master for thanksgiving dinner

Samurai Love Song

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As many of you know from reading the Samurai’s bio, I was kidnapped by a marauding band of sheep when I was a young whelp. I know: it sounds like a traumatic ordeal for a young, delicate flower of a boy to endure. And it was. But, looking back, I see it now as a positive experience that taught me many valuable life-skills, such as making animal noises and licking myself, which served me well upon my return to humanization.

Unquestionably, the most important way I benefitted from living with a bandit sheep herd was in winning the affections of Mrs. Samurai. Had I not lived immersed in that flock all those years, raised as one of their own, I would never have sung that momentous love sonnet to Mrs. Samurai that won me her heart. Let’s listen:

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Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places

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Having trouble find the appliance wisdom you seek here at the muthah of all appliance repair websites? Despair not! Try the new, enhanced search utility. Yes, grasshopper, the new and improved search utility now includes the contents of Fixitnow.com and the Appliantology Group, including the accumulated threads of appliance wisdom in the repair forum. Go ahead, give it a try. Seek and ye shall find!

Attention Maytag and Amana Refrigerator Owners

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If you own a Maytag or Amana refrigerator with an ice and water dispenser in the door, keep reading. Amana and Maytag have used a Y-connector in their refrigerator water supply tubing. This connector brought two water lines into one, and is located right after the fill valve. The Y-connector can be in the icemaker or chilled water lines, or both. This connector has had problems with leaking and, even worse, breaking and is now no longer available.

To eliminate this potential flood hazard from your fridge, come git you this Maytag valve kit or this Amana valve kit. Problem solved!

Mailbag: Help! My Washer Flooded!

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Robert Pinder wrote:

Hi. Your web site is too much!!!! Howver, I have a four year old Kenmore apt size washer which just blew its fill valve. Needless to say the insurance company’s emergency crew have been here most of the afternoon tearing out broadloom and inventorying thousands of $’s of expensive clothing damaged in the store below my apartment. My question is: is this something a fairly machanically competent guy can do himself? Advice or tips greatly appreciated. I’m in Canada and the Sears repair gut can’t get here for a week and a half and along with everybody else my wife’s not happy (either)

Robert

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this is you, grasshopperI feel your pain, bruthah! You put a load of dirty clothes in your washer, start it up and walk away to watch Jerry Springer just like you have a thousand times before. Only this time, something goes wrong…very wrong!

After the booing and cheering on the Jerry Springer show stops, you hear an unfamiliar sound of running water coming from the laundry cubby just down the hall in your trailer. You set the bag of Doritos aside, grab your can of Old Milwaukee and grunt your way out of your Lazy Boy as you exhale the last drag of your Marlboro and shuffle down the hall to investigate. You don’t get 10 steps before your pink bunny slippers are sloshing through a huge pool of water. Now the bile starts burning the back of your throat and you feel your sphincter dilate as you prepare to do battle with the single greatest horror of your lifetime: a washer flood out.

FloodstopYes, it finally happened: your washer dutifully filled with water and then…it just kept right on filling, and filling, and filling… Turns out that the water level control switch in your washer decided to take a permanent vacation and so never told your washer to stop filling with water. Hi. Welcome to my world. Oh! But if only you’d listened to that nice appliance repair guy not long ago who told you that you really, really needed to have a Floodcontrol on your washer and that it was cheap insurance against a devastating washer overfill. But that money was earmarked for that Dish TV you’ve been lusting after for so long and, besides, you’re not sure you trust people who can throw around fancy words like “devastating.” Damn straight! Well, Bubba, now you’ve got one helluva mess to clean up in your trailer, ain’t ya? Hey, newsflash: do yourself a favor and come git you some o’ dis.

Universal Stainless Steel Water Fill HoseAnd while you’re at it, go ahead and upgrade those cheesy 12-year old rubber fill hoses on your washer to the steel braided hoses. What, you’re gonna wait for those to burst and find water spraying out from behind your washer like a firehose on that ’71 Cutlass you got parked out front? Haven’t we learned our lesson by now? How long? How long? I say, how long must this bullshit go on? How ’bout when we do a job, we go ahead and do it right? Ok then, come git you some steel braided hoses, too.


grasshoppers watching jerry springer with the master while they do a load of wash confident that their trailer won't get flooded out on them because they just installed a floodcontrol.

Hillstomping Update: Mt. Waumbek

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the samurai grunting on mt. starr king--click for larger viewthe samurai on mt. waumbek--click for larger viewA superlative hillstomp last week up Mt. Waumbek, one of New Hampshire’s 48, 4,000-footers. This was number 43 for me–five more to go and I’ll have bagged ’em all. Then I can die.

Even though it was still October, we got an early foretaste of winter as we hit snow less than a mile into the hike. At the summit and ridge, we were hiking in about 5″ of fresh snow and the temp dropped into the mid 20’s. We were hiking in our summer hiking boots and didn’t carry any special winter gear other than knee-high gaiters, but we stayed warm…as long as we kept moving. Check out all the pics from this excellent hike here.

Mailbag: Slow Flow from a Refrigerator Water Dispenser

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John W. Turner wrote:

I have a GE Refregerator model TFX24R,with Water and ice in the door. When I go to get water from the door there is a hesitation and it then comes out slow. Can hear it as soon as I push lever , and have changed filter and lines but still does the same thing. Is ther a part that is holding up the water??
Tahnk You John

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Start by checking the water supply going to the fridge using the technique of the Master:

  • Turn off the water at the saddle tap valve.
  • Disconnect the water line in the back of the fridge. Place the disconnected end in a bucket and open the saddle tap valve.
  • Observe the flow rate–water should shoot out vigorously. If not, then the saddle tap valve is probably gunked up with sediment and you’ll need to replace it.

That should restore normal water pressure. You can buy a new water supply kit, which includes the saddle tap valve, here. More tips on the proper installation of a water supply line and saddle tap valve here.

If the water supply flow rate test, described above, appears normal, then the water inlet valve on the fridge may be gunked up with sediment. Here’s how we check for that:

  • Reconnect the water supply line to the valve and turn the water back on.
  • Disconnect the nylon tube from the dispenser side of the valve and replace it with section of tubing so you can out the other end in a bucket.
  • Now actuate the water dispenser and observe the flow out of the tube. It should be the same as the flow you observed in the first flow test described above. If not, then you know the valve is restricting the flow–replace the valve.

The foregoing discussion is neatly contained in this haiku (inspired by Fixum in the Appliantology group forum):


the bamboo reveals all
Fridge water flows slow.
Saddle tap or solenoid:
it’s one of those two.

New Logo for Fixitnow.com

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Check out the new logo. Pretty slick, ey? The old logo served the site well for many moons but, in the end, I just got freakin’ sick of looking at it. Actually, Mrs. Samurai got sick of looking at it first and started harping on me to change it. Those graphics gurus at Logobee.com designed the new logo for me. They were an utter joy to work with: quick turn-around on revisions and fast answers to questions I couldn’t decide. If you need a logo, any kind of logo, click on over to Logobee.

Mailbag: Washer Drain Pipe Overflowing

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DK Ezekoye wrote:

Thanks for your site! I have had major problems with all (4) of our less than 3 year old Kenmore aplliances. A tip and one question on my washer (Kenmore 417.40042990 front loader).

Every so often, the machine will not spin properly (at all). Solution, there is an interlock which will not let the spin cycle start if the water level is too high. Makes sense for a front loader. This points to the pump failing. In one case, unclogged it to find pantyhose in the pump(blood boiling). In the second case, there was a nickel in the pump which had sheared off the impeller blades and had rendered the pump useless. $50 for a new pump.

My newest problem is leaking from the standpipe. I snaked, and poured liquid plumber etc., but it stills overflows during the initial surge when the pump starts. Is there anything that I can do short of getting a plumber to put a drain in the laundry room floor? We live in Texas and there ain’t no basements here. Could it be that there is not enough of an air gap between my hose and the 2″ standpipe drain? Thanks…

DK ( a Texas PE)

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Your Kenmore front loader is made by Frigidaire and is, in my vaunted opinion, the best front loader out there. Most of the problems I’ve seen with this washer have to do with debris in the pump, as you described, or door catch breaking. Both are extremely minor problems in the world of washer repair. Compare with the Maytag Neptune which has been nothing but one long, sad song about fried control boards and door latch assemblies–at much more than $50 a pop! I talk more about various appliance brands here.

The U-hook on your drain hose should just hang in the drain pipe–the diameter of the drain hose hook should be less than the diameter of the drain stand pipe. Typically, drain hose diameters are around 1″ o.d. and standard drain stand pipe diameters are 2″ o.d. The hook of the drain hose is simply placed into the drain pipe and secured with either duct tape or a tie wrap. You can see that this creates a natural air break which you should not try to obstruct. If your drain meets these criteria and you’re getting the suds-back condition, then we need to consider a couple of other things.

Start with the simple things. Have your drain professionally reamed out by a plumber who knows his sh*t: Mr. Rooter. If you’re not using a high efficiency detergent (especially critical for front loading washers), then it’s time to start. Finally, and worst case scenario, if your house is on a septic tank system, the back wash from the drain pipe could be an early warning that it’s time to have your septic tank pumped out.

Bird Watching Update: Rare Sighting of the Cacapee Bird

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The rare and beautiful Cacapee bird once flourished throughout all New England. The name, Cacapee, is an Iroquois word meaning, “beautiful feathers.” Its long, brightly colored tail plume was highly prized for fashionable head wear. The wing feathers of the Cacapee were commonly used as “tonsil ticklers” in the vomitoriums which were hubs of social activity in New England during the Colonial period. Because of these popular uses of its feathers, the Cacapee bird was hunted to near-extinction. In fact, this exquisite bird was thought to be extinct…until now.

During one of his recent bird-watching missions, the Samurai documented the existence of one of the last remaining Cacapee birds on the entire planet. The bird was spotted in a forest abutting Lake Sunapee, near the Samurai’s home town of New London, New Hampshire. Unfortunately, the camera was damaged in a shower mishap, so no image is available. However, the audio recording survived. Here, now, is the only recording in existence of the Cacapee bird’s mating call (patent-pending, all rights reserved, void where prohibited). Let’s listen: