SUMMARY KEYWORDS
toilet, flush, flapper, people, plumbing, abt, redding, water, week, air, long, river otters, 90s, problems, day, product, sea otters, diy, started, talk
00:02
Before you start your next do it yourself project listen to this. You Got This! is on the air. You Got This! is hosted by ABT plumbing electric heat and air owner Andrew Twidwell and Rosalie Brown, with a helpful hand. Here are Andrew and Rosalie
00:18
Hi, this is Andrew Twidwell, owner of ABT plumbing electric heat and air, with the show You Got This!, a show of DIY do’s and don’ts and I’m zooming in with Rosalie Brown. I’m actually sitting in our Auburn office today, looking out of the window and seeing this gorgeous day that we’re having. It’s been kind of crazy nice weather lately. I’m sure it’s been pretty nice down in LA as well. Right?
00:46
I wore a jacket yesterday, but to be fair I wear a jacket all the time. People think in LA we always wake up and go to bed with 71 degree weather. I wake up it’s usually in the 40s and then it climbs right but now we start off pretty cold. We actually have a mountain pass or whatever I don’t even know the right term but we have snow on it. It’s facing Pasadena, its snow covered. So I mean it gets chilly. It’s probably going to be 71 or 72 today, so I’m not complaining.
01:32
Now it was like that this weekend. I we actually we took a trip up to Redding. Of all places. I know why were you going for a weekend away in Redding. But there’s a little RV park that we like up there. That’s right on the Sacramento River. You get spots like right near the river, really pretty. And then we went snowshoeing up in Lassen National Park and it’s one of those parks that we’ve been going to since the kids were little we would go up there with families that the kids went to nursery school with for forever in school and then it’s kind of like morphed into now it’s just two families. Us and one other family because all the kids are gone and adults and living on their own now. So we the castle berries and us went up to Redding and went and are showing snowshoeing around Manzanita Lake and I probably can’t spot and like Blake was all frozen over and this beautiful.
02:27
Empty Nesters club man, you guys know how to do it. You guys know how to do it.
02:32
It was great. And it was cheap little getaways. And we ended up the friend of ours. He grew up in Oroville. So he knows a little bit about reading and found this great bike ride along the Sacramento River outside of Redding. They’ve actually got a bike path that’s 20 miles long from Redding to Lake Shasta. So we did half of that one day. And then Benny and I decided to stay one more night. And we took the second half and rode up from the middle of the trail all the way up to the top of the dam and out of view, Shasta Mount Shasta and Shasta Lake and it was gorgeous. Saw river otters and a bunch of birdlife and it was like in the 70s as well. It was gorgeous. This week is crazy.
03:15
I did live vicariously through you. I saw that I saw the river otters and I was kind of laughing because it took me back to my days at the zoo and shenanigans that otters get up to that. Yeah. I won’t tell you all about because they’re not. They’re not that friendly beast that you think they are. But that’s Oh,
03:31
no. Well, I imagine either Lake year before last somebody got or maybe it was three years ago got mauled by one. And she was swimming and totally Her face got totally wrapped. The pictures of it. And yeah, no, I, when we were in Monterey a few weeks ago, that was kind of cool seeing. I mean, we’ve seen river otters and sea otters this year already. It’s January is not even over a lot of us living in California. But one of the things that I did pull up one of the articles about how awful sea otters are, and oh, goodness, if you want some
04:04
if you want nightmare fuel. Oh, Google, Google with sea otters due to baby seals, and you will never be the same.
04:12
Yeah, yeah. I started reading it. I shared it with the family and they were not happy with me. Little, like, cute. I’m like, yeah, they’re cute, but they’re wild animals.
04:25
Yeah, yeah, I did the same thing. I took my nephews to the zoo. And we were at the zoo, a circuit. We’re at the otter exhibit. And, you know, like I do, I was like, hey, fun fact. And I like you know, shared. And my little nephews face scrunched up and was like, oh, mitt, like, I just ruined it for him. But yeah, Google, if you must, and you’ll know they are brutal, but they’re super cute. Super cute. They’re super cute
04:49
when you’re looking at him and they’re, they’re adorable. And they roll around. Yeah, they crunch on stuff, but
04:57
keep it simple. Yeah, right.
05:01
Yeah, so the weather’s been nice here as well. And it’s even like nice right now. It’s it’s gonna be 60 degrees today. So yeah,
05:07
I think so thanks for joining me this week. I know it’s good weather, just to keep you focused. But thanks for showing up. Last week, I couldn’t even get it showed last week. Yeah, we
05:18
started. We missed you guys last week. We were just talking about that off air. Because yeah, I had planned a trip for managers. And I totally forgot until I’m in the meeting, running a meeting with the managers and all of a sudden, I’m getting notifications on my phone that I’m supposed to be recording in half an hour an hour, like, Darn, okay. messed up.
05:42
Trust me, wasn’t the first text I got from a guy saying, oops, I can’t make it. So it’s fine. All is forgiven? Um, oh, that’s
05:53
what you guys had to repeat last week? Because yeah, I completely forgot. And I was so wrapped up in this meeting that we had. It was a great meeting. Everything’s going really, really well at Abt. So
06:05
Well, let’s talk about that for one moment, shall we? Yeah. And aside from your scheduling issues, that’s a personal issue, though. So let’s just remind anyone who is excited or interested in the idea of kind of changing careers or starting something new, right? We are absolutely in the market for a few different technicians, right?
06:30
If you we’ve got openings for everything that we do from plumbing, electrical, and heating and air. So if you’ve known anybody, or once thinking about doing it, or preferably somebody that’s already in the industry, we’re looking for people. And, yeah, one of the things is, as I like to say, I’m I, I’ve been working in this industry for a long time, and I’ve worked for a lot of different contractors. And one thing that I found with most contractors that I worked for is they weren’t the most personable people and they tended to yell at me a lot for no good reason, sometimes for no reason at all. Don’t do that. So you won’t be having any managers or, or owners yelling at you at this company. So yeah,
07:13
it’s it’s weird to say that, but we’ve all had those bosses that you were like, wait, what does happen? And especially in the trades, right? So essentially, it’s
07:22
a male dominated environment. And we tend to be people that are exactly, you know, the most sophisticated. No, I’m not. And
07:32
you’re not, you’re definitely, you’re not sophisticated, you’re not always tactful, but you do not yell and you did not throw things up. So having said that, if you if you are like working a lot of hours and not getting the pay that you want, or you’re not having the experience that you want, abt definitely might be a right, a good fit for you. So the easiest way to kind of move things along, instead of calling and all that good stuff, you could do that. But the fastest way forward is to check out the openings on our websites, easy to find our websites easiest abc.com You can easily go right to our employment opportunities. Find out you know a little bit more about you know, PayScale and like what we’re doing and then you can apply right from the website. So if anyone’s looking please, or you know, someone please refer them to easy as abc.com We’d love to talk to them.
08:22
Yeah, yeah, we could use people and especially right now. It’s we’re just busy. Everybody’s busy. We’re slammed. And sorry for those people that we weren’t able to get out to last week or week before because like everybody else we had COVID go through our company and kind of ruined it. We had one out of five plumbers last week and week before so it was a little difficult to get to people’s homes.
08:48
There’s a storm so January January just fan like horrible.
08:53
It’s been crazy for everybody everybody that I know that owns a business or works in the business has said the same thing. Like you know, you go to the grocery store and like see pallets of stuff in the middle of the aisle because they don’t have enough people to man just stack just restocking the shelves or long lines at the cash register. And yeah, I mean, it is what it is. So hopefully, you know, I just want to say sorry in advance or sorry. Proactively if we missed, we missed you. There’s there’s a reason we’re doing the best we can with situation we’re in like everybody else. It’s been an interesting time to be alive on this planet.
09:31
My grandpa used to say what a time to be alive. And that was the way you could get out of everything you could get out of insulting someone you can get out of telling someone their idea was stupid. You just want a time to be alive to be alive. So that’s a good segue.
09:46
We should talk about DIY do’s and don’ts. Well, this
09:49
is your favorite topic. Hardly mine in fact, I was not on board with this topic in particular, because
09:57
because we missed last week so we had another topic we could Talk about we just push that one off because yeah, this one is easy for me and I it is it is. It’s truly something that I get calls on all the time. So DIY do’s and don’ts, how to and this is actually in our newsletter. So if you’re not getting an newsletter, definitely sign up for it, give us a call and we’d get you on our on our list or email and we’ll get you on our email list. Anyway, how to handle a chronic CLOGGER. So we ran into this all the time, toilets tend to be one of those problematic fixtures in people’s homes, and you know, some work better than others, and through the years things start to fall apart. So if you have a toilet that seems to always get clogged, or aka chronic CLOGGER no one has time to pay for patients to put plunge a toilet four times a day it is and I’ve actually had clients say that, you know, I have to plunge this thing every single time I use it.
10:58
That’s when you know, like something’s Something’s just not right, because things aren’t right. Yeah, or go to the hospital. I mean, if it’s not you medically, and it’s definitely the toilet. And that is
11:08
actually we did have that issue with one customer and we put a power flush toilet in and solve the problem. So there was a commercial grade toilet and we put it in their house and yeah, um went away. So a couple things you can look for is one of the most, the easiest thing to look for is faulty flapper. The flapper is that little device that’s inside the toilet that goes up and down. Most everybody has a toilet or as a homeowner has probably opened the lid and taken a look back there to kind of fiddle with it and jiggle it to make sure it actually functions right. So I think that opens and closes which makes the water flush the tank. If that toilet if that flapper is not working correctly, unfortunately, with low flow, different manufacturers use different flappers and some use floats. And some use flappers that have floats in them that are metered and closed at a certain rate. Sometimes they just don’t work right. And they’ll do a short flush. And I’ve seen that countless times where they need to have some adjustments done on them. Sometimes they will, the wrong flapper. I’ve seen people install generic flappers and people in their toilet when they should definitely be using an OEM flapper
12:19
and it doesn’t, it doesn’t seal correctly, like they don’t, but they don’t see what they’re
12:24
flush correctly. So I was saying you replace it, and then when you flush it, you’ll get a short flush. Just you open it. And then if you’re not holding the handle, it’ll shut right away. And then it won’t evacuate the bowl. So you know, if you do have to replace that flapper, the best thing I could recommend is take that flapper into the store into your hardware store or plumbing supply store with you. And as long as it’s the original OEM product and get the proper OEM product, don’t just get a generic, quirky. We’ve just seen so many issues. And we’re, we’re trying you know, we know which ones we can install generic one on and which ones we can’t. And in this day and age of flow flow, it’s pretty much we’re moving away from the, from the from the generic, and it’s pretty much all we have now. Because they’re getting designed to be able to flush with 1.1 gallons per flush. So you know, not 1.6 but down there down to close to a gallon now. So yeah, definitely look at the flapper. But speaking of low flow, if your toilet was manufactured in the mid 90s, or your toilets, you know, 20 or 30 years old, there was a lot of product that was put out in the 90s, that just wasn’t so good. They didn’t engineer him very well. And when we first started rolling into this low flow stuff, we I know when I was in the trade, there was only two toilets that we’ve installed people’s homes and their cars. And there was a plethora of different manufacturers out there. But we just had so many problems with other manufacturers because there’s this whole process of engineering that has to occur to make it full make it so that these toilets work on. So low flow or so low little water, that if they didn’t take the proper r&d, they just didn’t work. And it unfortunately gave low float with a really bad name. But in I remember fixing toilets that, you know, born and raised in San Francisco and I was working on toilets that were flushing with five gallons of water and they would leave stuff in the bowl. So it’s all about the engineering, all about how you make it work. Same thing with showerheads, but that’s a whole other subject. But anyway, if you do have an older toilet, from especially if you’ve got one that was made, you know from like, the beginning of the 80s to the end of the or excuse me the late end of the 80s to the end of the 90s You should probably just replace it. Just get anyone and how can you tell that inside the toilet? Every single porcelain toilet will have a manufacturing code stamped into To the tank. So if you just open the lid of the, the toilet tank lid, you can see the date that it was actually manufactured the month and the year. And you can tell when the thing was built. So if you’ve got one that’s in the 90s, I’d get rid of it. I literally moved in the houses with them from the 90s. And I just put a new toilet in.
15:18
Can I ask you a question? What would you know? I guess there’s a wide range, right? And maybe since you’re not always at the plumbing supply company, you can’t tell me this. But what what, uh, if I were to go buy a toilet, like, what would I expect to pay for that? Like?
15:34
Yeah, you can still buy toilets that are cheap, you know, like, 100 some odd dollars. And that’s considered cheap these days. I wouldn’t, I would get a name brand and I would get a higher end one. And not, you know, a higher end one doesn’t necessarily some higher end ones will mean you know, they’re decorative. And you’ll pay more money for the decorative ones just because they don’t sell as many of them so the margins are higher. But if you’re just talking about the basic toilet looking for the coal or American Standard there’s a couple other manufacturers I pretty much we pretty much stick with coal or American Standard, to be honest. But there are others some of St. Thomas makes a decent product. They got some good write ups and Consumer Reports. But expect to spend a little bit more and you know, spending an extra 5200 hours on a new toilet. Comparatively, you’re gonna save that money in one service call. Headache alone.
16:27
Just give me the product. Yeah, like, Ooh, my least favorite topic. Least favorite top
16:34
five, buy it, buy a quality product by name brand product, don’t buy one that’s on sale that’s made somewhere. Well, they’re all made in Mexico now. But that’s made some that’s not a made a name that you would recognize because I don’t want to clean it putting engineering into it. I would just avoid it. It’s just gonna cause you headaches and cost you money down the line?
16:56
Yeah, I was looking at just real quick search, like Kohler, just kind of the different models looks like just a quick, cursory look. You’re talking about, you know, like to add all the way up to like, Okay, what was this one? Okay, okay. Yeah, I can go really high and go up into the nine hundreds for toilet. I wouldn’t do that. But that’s just me. No, I would not expect
17:18
Kohler makes one that is I think it’s 10 grand. Oh, yeah, it’s got, you know, all these sensors, the toilet opens, flushes itself like I’m okay
17:27
with like, I can handle the actual work crazy. I can take care of the putting the lid up, I can take care of pushing the button. I usually the thing that work, right, and like, yeah, so I’m good in the 200 300
17:40
specs, spend extra money, spend the extra 100 bucks and get a good quality product that will be happy at the end. Flushing foul stuff down the toilet. One thing that we also see is we see a lot of abuse with toilets, especially in the commercial areas where people flush paper towels, diapers, all sorts of things. Just you know, really the only thing that’s gonna toilet is toilet paper. Yeah. All right. And
18:11
can we just talk about that for a second. So I know that in the moment, we’re not at a toilet paper shortage, right. And so when we were, we’re getting really creative, and those cottonelle and those, whatever wet wipes has really made a killing right? In that time, because we couldn’t get toilet paper, but you get that stuff. But you and I’ve talked about this, even if something calls itself flushable. That doesn’t mean that just because it fits down there, you want it to go into your system,
18:36
right? Next one that they call it flushable and it will break down eventually. But if like one of the things with toilet paper, it’s made the the binder that holds the fibers together is water soluble, right? So it literally just disintegrates into pulp. A wet wipe is in water. Right? It’s not made to disintegrate right away because it’s gonna stay wet. So it’s not going to it’s not going to break down as fast it will break down eventually in your septic tank but not in your toilet. So it has the potential for clogging your toilet, so and even dental floss or hair and stuff like that can potentially clog your toilet. Just stay away from everything but TP and what’s it got? Yep. What do you have to do? Or have a have a trash can that’s the other thing too. If you don’t have a trashcan next to you to get a trash can put it next to toilet. Just just have one because, you know, there’s always stuff that people put down there as opposed to because they just don’t want to be embarrassed. You know? Anyway, we get into some touchy subject.
19:44
Nothing is off limits here. You heard my dog vomit earlier. So the radio listeners miss that but you know, we have no secrets here. Yeah,
19:53
and even Oh, even the applicators like some, you know, tampon applicators and say flush of books are made out of cardboard. Don’t flush those out. That’s all Oh, it’s gonna clog it. Just just keep them out of the toilet. I know she likes seeing us. And you don’t mind us pulling these things out and showing them to you, because my guys will probably show it to you. Because they want to show you what they found.
20:13
Right what you’ve done to your house. Yeah,
20:17
little, we call them little sewer mice, you know, so they have little tails. So anyway, so this, you know, if you don’t want to see it, don’t flush down the toilet, because we will show you. Okay, time for a little bit more I knew I knew we could make this into a show. We weren’t sure if this was enough,
20:35
enough. So I don’t I don’t know. Let’s be clear, I wasn’t keen on talking about toilets. That’s what I was. But here we are.
20:44
So let’s, let’s go, I’m gonna go with this one. And we’ll come on let’s go this one tick, tick troubles, toilet isn’t getting enough water. This is we’ve seen this often where the water level will be set to low. We also saw during the 90s, when people were putting bricks and water bottles in the toilet, the toilet sit flush properly.
21:04
Now that you’re saying that no.
21:07
70s, right, getting a visual on
21:09
the brick. But what was the purpose, I don’t remember why we
21:11
did that it was displacing the water. So you’d need less water to fill it up. And the toilet would sort of flush, but it may cause problems. By a toilet that flushes with less water don’t be put out of work. And making sure the water level is going to the to the right level. And it literally will literally say on if it’s a reputable company with a wind products on inside of it, it will say water level, right. And you want to make sure that water level is is met because even like a half an inch below it. Or you can start seeing some problems with problematic flushing. So make sure the water level is high enough. Because a lot of toilets now they use what’s called head pressure. You want a higher water volume of water here and a toilet may actually stop flushing halfway down before it actually evacuate the entire tank. That head pressure, that height that helps even though six inches of extra height adds a little bit more pressure on on that because you got that weight of the water pushing down and will help with the flush. Hope that makes sense. Okay, last but not least, and this is something that we see occasionally up here. Hard water build up. A lot of people have wells up here and have hard water. Fortunately, we don’t have really hard water like you do down in the southern states where you can have you know, 2040 20 3040 grains, we typically run, you know, like a hard water for us is anywhere from like four to 15 grain sometimes 20 Max, but we will see buildup in the jets of the toilet. And those jets actually helped with flushing. And we’ve had replaced toilets because of falled. Jets and felled the P trap inside the toilet will just get filled with calcium and magnesium from the hard water. So with those situations, it’s gonna be toilet, new toilet and probably a water softener. Because if it’s building up that fast, you should probably get a water softener. Because that’s just one issue because you’re also having problems with your water heater and your plumbing as well. So
23:20
yeah, yeah, no, definitely.
23:23
That’s it with the with toilet. So you know, the takeaway really is if you got a toilet, it was built in the 90s. Replace it if you replace it with one that’s quality and spend a little bit of money because you’re gonna save money in the long run. And then yeah, don’t flush stuff down the toilet that you shouldn’t be flushing. That’s our show. Okay, so if you do need help with plumbing, if you do need help with H fac HV, heating and air if you do need help with electrical, you can reach us at 530-230-9092 That number again 530-230-9092 And we are looking for competent plumbers, competent HVAC people and competent electricians. Give us a call. And you can find us on the web at easiest abt.com. And I guess that’s pretty much it. That’s it till next week. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you guys next week.
24:16
Right. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Rose Lee. Now let’s get that project started. You got this. We’ll be back next Friday morning at nine o’clock on Cancio Newstalk 830