0:03
this is Andrew Twidwell, owner of abt plumbing, electric heat and air once again with the show. You got this as a show. Do you have like do’s and don’ts? And I stumbled a little bit there. I usually just like roll with it. But yeah, that’s been a It’s already been a day. So it’s been a week, but we’ve got sun out. And I got Rosalie chiming in from LA, and I’m in our lovely office in Auburn right now. And looking out my window at highway 80. And the sunshine. So I’m kind of happy that it’s been a while, right?
0:34
Well, it’s sunny, right, but it’s not warm and sunny. It’s so nice. Cold.
0:40
Yeah, very just talking like talking about snow in Huntington Beach on Monday. So yeah, I mean, we got some snow up here. I know, I was driving home on Monday night and praying that it wasn’t gonna be snowing in Grass Valley. And it was just just ever so slightly. There were some flakes but it didn’t flip like it has, like it did a couple of weeks, or Yeah, I guess that was two weeks ago, where all of a sudden, it’s raining and then boom, it’s snowing, and it’s snowing hard. We’re we’re just low enough. I know it was snowing pretty good up on banner. But
1:14
you know what’s ironic? So I have somebody that I keep in touch with who had a business they’re in Grass Valley, partner or family lived in? What do we call it again? What’s that place between Alta Sierra? Okay, I’m sorry. It’s visualizing, like doing hand motions. No one knows I’m doing. She lived in Alta Sierra. And then her husband was from Minnesota originally. And so they moved back to Minnesota. She took her practice back there. And so now she’s kind of in the Minneapolis area. And so yeah, it was interesting, because she, we were talking about hits and misses with weather. And she flew down to Florida for Christmas, and missed a whole, like, snow storm situation. And so we were talking yesterday about what it was like to go on Facebook, and to almost be triggered with memories of what it looks like in Nevada County when there’s a storm. You know what I mean? Yeah, I was like, oh, yeah, I was like, Yeah, did you see this? Did you see that? And so we’re kind of comparing notes about, it’s just lands different when you don’t live there anymore. But the idea of snow or wind and the the thing in your head where you’re like, oh, man, oh, man, we’re gonna lose power. We’re gonna lose power, you know? Right. Right. Nothing triggering about that, quite frankly.
2:34
There really is. You guys are losing the power during the winter, and you get the fear of fire storms in the summer.
2:44
So it’s interesting, because she’s a place to live. I
2:45
love it. But yeah, it’s an interesting place to live.
2:47
So there she is in Minnesota now. Right? And she and she’s like, and she’s going, yeah, like I’ve had a more mild winter here in Minnesota than I had my last winter when I was in Alta Sierra. And I was like, isn’t that weird to like, think that that? Yeah. So it’s just a
3:05
they’ve got some good snow this week. I know that. I mean, we’ve been watching, like, we’ve been having some issues at our place, and in St. Paul, and trying to get the boiler guy out. So Oh, and he’s like, I can’t get out there. We’ve got a blizzard coming in. Like, all right, you’re right. All right. I saw that. And yeah, oh, yeah. It’s never ending. It’s a you know, it’s 100 year old building with. We replaced the boiler this year, but most of the piping and the infrastructure is from turn of the century, you know, the last turn of the century. So it’s, it’s, yeah,
3:39
I can relate. I’ve lived it. I can relate. It’s hard to it’s hard to understand that they have never lived or been in that part of the country. But you asked me, you asked me what had been up since we talked last. So listen, yeah, I just am so proud. I have to do two things. I’ve I’ve adult ID twice since I’ve seen you last possibly three times. But you know, at this stage of my life, so I think I told you, it’d been like 20 years since I had an eye exam. Right. All right. And so I was super freaked out about I’m gonna go in and first off, you know, they’re gonna lecture you on? Well, wait a minute. What do you mean your glasses are only six months old, but you haven’t been in the IDI. You know, they hate when you buy your glasses online. They hate it. And so I thought, Okay, I’m gonna get lectured. And they’re gonna say, Oh, you’ve glaucoma or you you need bifocals or something horrible. Right? And so can’t believe this. I’m laughing as I’m because like, I’m actually sorry. I’m actually mentally image my images of my reaction when
4:45
seeing yourself there. Yeah.
4:49
Yeah, so I’m going back to that moment and just laughing at what what an idiot they look like. So they do the horrible thing where they blow air into your eye and stuff like that. Yeah. And I’m like, you know, I’ve had babies without anesthesia. I’ve had a tattoo I’ve had, like, you know, my guts ripped open. And here I am, like literally losing it freaking out about they’re gonna literally I mean, come on up off a puff of air. Yeah. So I’m freaking out about the puff of air, the puff of air is done. And there’s some other tests I gotta take. And so the doctor comes in, and she goes, so 20 years, you’re probably expecting some, you know, crazy prescription change or some crazy this or that. I’m like, yeah, like, I feel like I’m going blind. I think you’re gonna tell me I’ve got glaucoma. I’m gonna go get a prescription for pot like what you know. And she goes, she goes, Well, your eyes are superduper healthy. And I was like, what? And she goes, Yeah, I go. Are you kidding me? She goes, No, no, no, your eyes are super healthy. Everything’s great. She said we’d never know you had been in, you know, in so long. And then she says, uh, and not even a prescription change. And I go, well, then what is it? Because Have you ever considered you’re just exhausted? And I was like, wait, what? I’m like the eye doctor. So. So. So here’s the thing. So
6:08
that’s a nicer way of putting that than to saying you’re getting old. Yeah, exactly. So usually what the doctor always says me, you’re just getting old.
6:15
Right? Like, it just sucks. So she says you’re exhausted. So your prescription is gonna stay the same. But I did get and they haven’t arrived yet? I think another 10 days or so. She’s making me these special glasses for the computer. Which I don’t know, I guess they’re probably going to Yeah, I don’t know if it’s like blue light and a couple other things to happen. But she’s gonna so I have special glasses now for the computer. And I looked at and I go, you know, on the computer, like eight to 12 hours a day, right? She goes, yeah, yeah, these are gonna help a lot. So anyway, so I donated there. And then the second second thing I want to I’m actually bragging about my child. So I decided it was time to order a couch and other native more more couches in my house. So ordered a couch online. The idiot delivery driver, I won’t even get into how far I had to carry this damn 90 pound thanks a lot, guy. Thanks a lot for getting it in my neighborhood. So I get haul it you know,
7:14
physically, but I can get it to the complex building.
7:18
Yeah, he got it to the for he got it too. Yeah, he got it about as far away as it can be and still be considered delivered. So anyway, so get this thing and you know, who put it together in less than 10 minutes? Not me, not me. My daughter. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop done. So 10 minutes or less. So now we have a nother couch. I just am such a grown up this week. I’d like to know where my where I you know, my my TR got a new couch. And I got a new lease on life. My eyes. I’m not going blind. So I feel like a new person. Like a new person. That’s awesome. I’m sure everyone’s thrilled to listen to the saga of my life. So there you bet everybody,
8:00
my mind has been fairly uneventful. Just you know, finally feeling better and actually be able to get outside. It’s been nice, but Shepherd bike ride. You seem for bike rides. Sunday and yeah, I’ve actually that was the first one in like, a month. So yeah. And it really went for a five mile walk on Saturday and like, Alright, I got some feeling better waking up without you know, without feeling like my throat is gonna catch fall out or Yeah, catch fire and effing plop a lot in June before even brush my teeth. Yeah.
8:33
Yeah, I’m excited that you’re not you don’t have a lozenge running around in there. excited about the possibilities of good radio this week? We’ll see. We’ll see.
8:43
So with all this rain, and all this weather, you have a very good topic, and it’s one you’ve been wanting me to talk about for a while we keep just like flowing but
8:54
don’t say hi.
8:57
Well, water and the reason why it’s a hot topic is like one of the things that we have a lot of private wells up in Nevada County. You know, having pipe treated water at your, at your house from Nevada Canyon county Irrigation District is not the norm. It’s the norm. We find that most people have a well. So there’s a lot to be said about having a Well, me and me moving out from the Bay Area 23 years ago, it was all new to me. You know, I was a plumber. But hey, you know, I was dealing with San Francisco water department and you know, marine water department wasn’t dealing with private wells or septic systems or anything like that. So it was it was a learning curve for me as well. So there’s a couple of things that go along with having a private well, like you know, when you have pipe treated water coming to your house, they do all the testing, they make sure everything’s working. They make sure that the water is safe when it leaves the facility. Does you know you will pick up some stuff along the way Long as course to your house, you know, typically Yeah, metals and things like that. But you know, for the most part, you don’t have to worry about color or, or anything like that, or form. I mean, we don’t color up here, but we do have to worry about chloroform and things like that. So you need to worry about bacterial infection or bacterial, but you don’t have to worry about that windpipe tree word, because it’s also got chlorine in it, which kills most of those things. So, but when you have high treated water, you don’t have those sort of things, and you don’t have fluoride for your teeth. So you should be my dentist is like you have to use a fluoride rinse because we don’t have it in our water. But anyway, so there’s, there’s a bunch of things that you need to know about it, right. So and and with this wet weather here. So one of the things that popped up in my mind and my, my further research because this isn’t something I’ve ever experienced. But when you have water that’s flowing from the ground that you have the potential for water to flow into your well are you have potential for there, you have a casing in the well, but you said the potential for water to come in through the of groundwater potential, either through the KC through the top or, you know, the wellhead, or some other areas. And one thing that I was researching is if you notice that your water all of a sudden becomes turbulent or not turbulent, but cloudy, during these times a year should really have it checked out because it could you could have some groundwater contamination. And for the most part, that shouldn’t be an issue. But there could be issues with agricultural runoff, if you got any, we don’t have a lot of agriculture up here. But we do have some we do have things like heavy metals, we do have mercury, we have other things, you know, the legacy of our mining years when they were using all sorts of things and not really not knowing better. That’s contaminated or soil and things. So you also have the potential for you know, any kind of fecal matter that may have been put out by a cow or chickens or a deer for that matter. Yeah, you have the potential for chloroform, you have the potential for what’s the one I got giardia. So it’s you do have cloudy water, it’s a really good idea to have your well tested, they also recommend, and this is something that I haven’t done, and I forgot about this, and we’ve lived in our house for seven years, and I haven’t done this, and I should probably have this done as you should, theoretically, they recommend that you have your water tested at least yearly. And sometimes even more. But fortunately, most people have. Fortunately, and unfortunately, fortunately, we have deep wells, unfortunately, we have deep wells because more expensive to dig a deep well. But the deeper wells have fewer issues with groundwater getting into him. So we don’t generally have problems with bacterial kind of things. We primarily have issues with heavy metals, and some aesthetic issues. So that to kind of go over some of those. So one of the you know, one of the things I was reading some other articles, I kind of you gave me the topic, and then I kind of like went down the rabbit hole and started looking at water in Nevada County. And the big thing that keep kept coming up was mercury, right? Because we you know, during the Gold Rush, they use mercury as a gold magnet, right. And it was a inexpensive way of being able to pull gold out of the material. And unfortunately it ended ended up in the soil and ended up in our waterways. That’s where you’re not supposed to eat the fish, you know, or you can eat the fish but just not too much. But you can also have potential getting into your well. But some of the other things that we have a lot of appears aesthetic issues. So you have hardness you have calcium, magnesium, that’s just you know, seashells and things like that. Those aren’t really necessarily a bad thing. It’s more of an aesthetic thing. That’s what leaves the white stains on your glasses, on your glassware and on your shower doors and things like that. But it will also calcify inside your water heater and inside your piping and I’ve seen situations where you really hard water and oh my gosh, I mean the pipes literally have a layer of calcium and magnesium on the walls of the pipe. And in the water heater, we’ve pulled water heaters that weigh 100 pounds more than they should because they’re just full of metals or calcium magnesium insulating the flame to the water by the way. Yeah, you’re not getting the full dollar out of that cubic foot of fuel that you’re using or whatever. So you can take care of those things. Those are easy. You can use a water softener and you can use other mechanisms to either help remove the calcium magnesium or hold it and Stacy’s so doesn’t drop out. But then we get into some other things that are a little bit more concerning. We do Have a lot of acidic water in our area. And that doesn’t necessarily, you know, some people have, say it could be a health issue that people say it’s not, you know, many, some people say you should be drinking alkaline water, right? I mean, that’s a big thing in some of the circles. But acidic water can wreak havoc on your plumbing system, that’s where it gets a little funky. So we’ve seen, you see a lot of times where people have, you know, copper pipes for their water system. And the walls of the pipes can be paper thin, because the acidity in the water just literally erodes away at the pipe over the course of the years. Copper by itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing in small levels in your diet. But when you have large debt, just as of it, it’s not necessarily healthy. So, to deal with acidic water, we put in acid neutralizers. And again, we’re putting calcium back in, we use a calcium carbonate, and just use seashells, again to to neutralize the acidity. So that’s one thing that you want to have tested for as well. And generally speaking, it’s not terrible, but you know anything off of the pH of seven, if it’s lower than seven, six and a half, six, you’re gonna have it, you’ll will notice some some detrimental effects to your plumbing system. So you really want to have that taken care of like a water my house is in just right outside of town, it is at about six and a half. And I’ve got to I have to put it we have an acid neutralizer in the house. Unfortunately, once you put an Astra neutralizer, then you raise the the hardness of the water because acidic water dissolves the calcium, magnesium, or the calcium and then puts it in the water and then you want to get rid of that right. So then you need a water softener of some sort. So I’ve got that set up in my house. But some of the other things you should get into in our areas are manganese, we see that quite a bit. You’ll notice that by kind of a magneto, you’ll notice like a black, if I remember correctly, I can’t remember that’s magnesium or manganese. But magnesium and manganese are two things you don’t necessarily want a lot of in your diet, right. So we do have ways of getting rid of that. We also have issues with arsenic and cadmium in our area. So and there are ways to get rid of that. But one of the easiest way to do that is to filter it out either through mechanical filter or through aro. And those are more issues with, you know, drinking water than for bathing and stuff like that. But all these things are something that you can that we can handle. I mean, we can take care of this, those things for
17:35
you. Well, when you say we can handle let me ask you a question. So if I had a well, right, and I was concerned after a storm, the condition of my water, especially because depending on how deep my wells and all that. So what I call abt and ask you to come out and test the water, or how do I get my water tested?
17:53
Good question. Here’s just full of good questions. So usually well, though, yeah. So no, you would actually I mean, the best thing is, the easiest thing to do is, yeah, we can come out and test the water. And we could do a free check. We’ll check. You know, acidity and artists. But if you want to get more like if you’ve got if you’ve got water that’s got a lot of sediment in it during rainy season season. You want to get lab tested, so crammed or your buddy Jason had a business and go over there and get a sample bottle.
18:29
So to be clear, what you’re saying is that Kramer engineering, which is also known as c ei, which is on West West domain, is that the right place? Yeah, near near the hospital. They have tested kits, I believe.
18:44
Your college? Yeah, I’m not sure Coach, but you I just don’t think you’re correct. Yeah, you’re right.
18:48
Okay, so what you’re suggesting is by of concern, it’d be really wise for me to get that a bevy of tests run probably. Right.
18:57
Yeah. And depending on your concern will depend on the level of testing that you want to have done. Okay. And there. They’ve got engineers there and chemists that will give you a better idea of what you should be checking for, you could describe the situation that you’re in and I mean, that’s literally a gig, right? They’re an engineering firm, they know a lot about water, utilize them, you know, go talk to them and and see if they can help you determine how often I should be getting it tested. If you know the depth of your Well, that’s really that’s a really handy thing to know. To be honest, I don’t even know the depth of my well I should find that outweighs yours. But if you know that you can let them know and where your area is, and they have a good idea of what kind of water conditions each general area will have to. So go to them, get the bottle, take the sample or samples and bring it back and they’ll test it and it’s relatively inexpensive unless you get like a full panel which can you know, I still think That’s only, you know, I think it’s under 1000 bucks or something, which is a lot of money, it’s and for some people, it’s worth the peace of mind. But for the other tests are relatively inexpensive, we’re talking hundreds of bucks. So yeah, it’s a really good idea to have your well, water tested and checked out. Especially, you know, if it’s something that you’re drinking, you definitely want to have it checked out. Because it, you know, again, we live in an area that has had in its past some pretty questionable practices. With heavy metals, we have a lot of work, you got a lot
20:38
of stuff in the soil, right. So things to think about. And then after, of course, after, after, after some kind of storm or, or weather event, I know, it’s a good idea to kind of take a look at your wall, do a visual inspection kind of look around, make sure that things look right, right, because I mean, depending on how severe the weather is, and we there’s been some severe weather up in Nevada and Placer County’s lately, which is kind of one of the reasons I kept pushing this well topic because I was like, hey, hey, people should be looking at their water after the storm.
21:11
Yeah. And this is the best time to take, take a look at get your water tested. You know, the best time is not during a drought, the best time is not due at, you know, October, or the end of summer, September, you really want to take it take a look at it when it’s wet. So now is a really good time to have it checked out.
21:34
Fantastic. Look at that.
21:39
So yeah, that’s basically our show, I’ve got nothing really else to go over. But we can’t have. So if you know, I do have something else to go over, I can wrap this up. So once you have the water tested, then we know what needs to be removed. And obviously, the more that needs to be removed, the more expensive it’ll be. So you know, determining on what we’ve got will determine what kind of investment you’d have to make for your pipe for your water. But to be honest, I mean, by the time you if you really think about it, if you got to well, and it’s been working really well. And you’ve got some minor things you gotta get rid of with some equipment, it’s still way cheaper than pipe treated water because pipe treated water a lot of times you’re paying a sewer tax and all these other things. So it’s a lot cheaper to have a private well and deal with it even if you’ve got some having to have some expensive equipment, unless you’ve got like salt issues, which we have some down on Brewer that has some salt issues, but the majority of people don’t have that problem. So anyway, yeah, with that. So if you have any plumbing, electrical heating or air problems, you can give us a call at 530-230-9092 That number again 5302 0.925302309092 You can find us on the web at easy as abc.com or abt plumbing. Like us on Facebook, we got a lot of this information and some of this stuff actually look on our website. If you you know we’ve got a good searchable website and I found this a lot of this information on our website that we did 10 years ago. So take a look at it and see what we got. And with that, thanks for listening and we’ll catch you next week. Thanks again. Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai