9/1/2002: Kinetico and Kongress KO Mr.Wonderful !
My $4,000 Kinetico® "no maintenance" water softening system works flawlessly except in a few nagging instances. One is when you let the potassium rocks get too low, and in a futile effort to soften water without its fuel, it drains a never ending waterfall through the system and straight into the sewers at the very pricey City of Phoenix summer water rates.  The other instance is when the 1/2" diameter plastic tubes inside the units rupture as they age (they don't warn you about this inevitability - after all it is billed as a "no maintenance" unit) and spew red Mars-dust inside your abode's water pipes. This dust typically makes its presence known via your washing machine (which is the closest appliance to the Kinetico® softening unit) emiting various tell-tale clues. Clues such as the rinse cycle not filling the tub with water. And, evidence such as the interior washing machine cold water valve becoming jammed with the red dust-muck whence it then stays open, and even with the washing machine turned off, drip by drip eventually fills the tub to overflowing. This isn't all bad, as after the first time it occurs (about five years ago in my case) you quickly realize what is happening and take corrective measures. (However, my first time the turned off washer did not fill to overflowing.) The day before yesterday afternoon, not knowing the Mars dust-muck was on its way to clog the interior inlet valve of the machine, I placed my Kinetico® twin tank no maintenance system into the bypass mode and even though almost overcome by the chlorine fumes from the straight-up Phoenix water, I managed to clean the hose inlet filter so that soon the tub quickly filled with rinse water, just like normal. However, on the following day, when everyone, except Shadrach and Sport, were out of the house, I came home to laundry room only a West-Nile Virus carrying mosquito could love. The floor was about 1/2" deep in water because the tub had over-filled and over-flowed in our absence. Turning the appliance on, I knobbed it into the final phase of the rinse cycle and listened with triumph as I heard the thirty three gallons of clean, clear, and over-chlorinated liquid being sucked out into the zig-zagging 4" PVC pipe that leads to our City's sanitary sewer system. This morning, Sunday, my one day off, awakened by the single, brief, beep of my pager at 5:40AM I phoned 'dispatch' only to find out I would have to immediately get dressed and drive the twenty miles to my post as one of my officer's was fighting a car that wouldn't start. Thankfully, with the help of Triple-A he got his car started and was off to work, but I was already wide awake with chores on my mind. One was to wash my three white uniform shirts, which if sewn together, could easily drape the exterior a Chevrolet Suburban and reflect the searing Scottsdale sun away from every inch of the interior. I grabbed my blouses, along with other whites, many with mysterious skid marks tatooing them, and lumbered off to the musty smelling laundry room. My mind still in a haze, I fuzzily thought, "What the hell? These are all whites. I don't need the cold water anyway! I can wash and rinse them using my solar heated hot water that is generated for free from April through September in the Valley of the Sun thanks to my Grumman roof mounted unit." However, the Big Brother types in Washington, D.C., had years ago thwarted any possibility of me, an emancipated, tax paying, adult citizen of these United States, choosing to rinse my laundry in other than cold water! You see, rather than letting the privately held utilities determine special winter or summer electricity rates to discourage wasteful energy consumption (the same way the City of Phoenix does to penalize what they define as summer-time 'water-wasters') these Stalinistic Senators, with an understanding of climate and geography that rarely stretches beyond the Morton's Steak house on Prospect Street or the bar at the Watergate, mandated decades ago that manufacturers of washing machines could only offer cold-water rinse cycles.  This they thought, would drastically curb consumer energy use because the number two gobbler of energy in any household is the electricity eaten by water heaters in the midst of converting cold water into hot. Of course these law-givers laid no hand on the millions of governmental workers in federal, state, county and city offices who, during hot summers refrigerate cubic miles of office space with a twist to the thermostat by dialing in a bone chilling 70o Fahrenheit or less. Since my clothes were already tumbling away, happily being churned in a steaming mixture of agua caliente, Tide® and Amway® All Fabric Bleach, I thought, "What to do, what to do?" Inevitably, the knob of the Built-in-America Amana appliance clicked to the rinse cycle setting but yet the device sat strangely silent while the normally unnoticed mechanical timer ticked off the seconds as the machine attempted to pull water through the clogged cold water inlet valve, much like trying to suck the semi-frozen chocolate pleasure through the too small straw of a just purchased Carl's Jr® extra large shake. Thinking quickly, and in a revolutionary spirit, I began to fill an empty 2 1/2 gallon Schwan's® ice cream tub with HOT water from my kitchen faucet. After five trips and about thirteen gallons of cloudy water, I pulled out on the knob that turned the machine back on. Instantly it then began its most efficacious rinse cycle ever. How so? Because hot water rinses out detergent and contaminates many times better than the government mandated cold-water-only regimen. Why do you imagine most clothes washers these days have the option of rinsing your clothes twice? So let me understand this: to save electricity our government is forcing us to double our rinse water usage in order to wash out the gunk that the first cold water rinse didn't accomplish?
|
