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Simple means to energy conservation
After repairing my refrigerator and then seeing the movie An Inconvenient Truth, it dawned on me that people probably have several appliances in their house that aren't running efficiently and simple solutions might exist. In the case of my refrigerator, the blocked up grill probably caused the refrigerator to run twice as often as needed. If other people did the same thing, it could be a real energy saver.
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Fixing a refrigerator
Lately I've noticed that that the freezer part of our refrigerator wasn't keeping stuff completely frozen despite cranking down the temperature. What do I know about refrigerators? Turns out, I know enough about mechanical/chemical engineering to be able to understand a diagram of a heat exchanger. I took off the top panel of the refrigerator (a lot of the mechanical stuff is on the top of this unit), looked around, looked at the little diagram showing how it worked, and saw tons of dirt. I figured that before I called an appliance repair person, I'd take a look to see what I could do. I vacuumed out the grill to the condenser and as I did, I felt a blast of air coming from the other side of it.
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MCI doesn't know how to listen
After my phone call with the barely English speaking MCI representative yesterday where I hung up on him out of frustration (not being able to understand him and the representative not being able to think on his own were the causes of my frustration), I received an email from Rajmohan at MCI:
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I'm not a plumber, but...
Sometimes I pretend to be one. This past weekend, I finally decided to fix our toilet that seems to keep running as the flush chain keeps hanging. Since I had to muck with the toilet, I decided to replace the major components. It isn't rocket science to do plumbing, but it is harder than it looks. I figured I could replace the parts in 30-45 minutes. I open the directions (after the trip to Home Depot), unscrew some of the stuff and then get to removing the bolts from the tank. The bolts were rusted and wouldn't budge. 2 hours later after using my Dremel to cut them off (without putting a hole in the tank), I managed to get the bolts off and put the toilet back together. I didn't see any leaks from what I put back together, but the next day, the only part I didn't replace started leaking...another trip to Home Depot to get that part. This part only took about 45 minutes to replace instead of the 3.5 hours to get the other parts replaced. However, I cheated and gave up installing the "LeakSentry" feature as the little piece of plastic didn't want to cooperate.