Around the home

Plastic drain valve on Kenmore Power Miser 9 hot water heater, how to remove...

Hot water heaters such as the Kenmore Power Miser 9, come with a plastic drain valve that is most likely going to start leaking soon. Mine started leaking at about the 7 year mark, through the plug valve washer, but recently the valve sprung a second leak and was leaking right at the threads so it had to be removed. It is extremely difficult to remove these little bastards without breaking the plastic flats. If you break the thing off at the threads you may need to resort to special tools for removing broken bolts, or even perhaps painstakingly using a hacksaw blade to slowly split the threaded end so you can pry it out. Most likely though you have started to break this on the plastic flats with an adjustable wrench like I did. Anyway, there is an easy solution, don’t break the valve off completely yet with anger! The trick to remove this bastard is to first remove the white/grey knob assembly (by twisting the white part) and valve plug washer… once that is removed, you can then find around your house a metal rod that you can insert into the open hole where the knob/plug assembly used to be… and now with your adjustable wrench and your rod together in each hand, it should turn! You should be able to remove the valve! Even if you cracked the plastic flats slightly trying to remove the valve with your adjustable wrench, this will likely still work like it did for me, I illustrate below…. once it’s off I highly recommend replacing the valve with a standard 3/4″ NPT brass nipple, full-port ball valve, and garden hose adapter as shown in the last image below. These water heaters all use standard 3/4″ NPT fittings which are readily available in your local hardware store, likely even cheaper than the replacement value of the plastic valve from Kenmore, and the brass fittings are a million times better quality and will last much longer. Even if they cost more I still think it’s completely worth the upgrade. In fact, if you buy a new water heater in the future, look for the stupid plastic drain valve and immediately replace it with brass fittings. It will make life easier years down the road. They drain faster too.

 

loose MOEN kitchen faucet

This isn’t necessarily a very difficult problem to fix, but I thought it was a bit confusing with these old MOEN kitchen faucets.  This particular faucet is about 22 years old.  It has a U-shaped black plastic thing underneath, which at first I thought was missing some screws and thought the missing screws were the reason the thing was loose.  However, that is not the problem at all.

 

This isn’t really that difficult of a problem but I thought it was pretty slick and easy so I’m posting this up.  My requirement was that the pots and pans rod must be up and out of sight as shown in the images above, and that the S-hooks must be twisted 90 degrees so that the pans face sideways, and therefore save space.