I don’t mean what you use to chop down your feces, but an object that you realized only your family has and people would raise their eyebrows at. Best if said object has a sole purpose.
We’ve got a frog tong. Every time a frog gets in the house catch it with a tong and toss it in the garden.
The fact that this is a common enough occurrence to warrant a special tool for the occasion makes me so jealous of your life
This is a common occurrence at my home as well. When there’s heavy rain frogs get caught in our window wells, some make it inside, some get caught between the windows and screen. I just put on a pair of gloves, fish em out and set them free on higher ground.
Once my cat frantically came yowling up the stairs with a frog in her mouth. Set it down gently, unharmed and stared at me loudly meowing as if to say “look what I found, WTF is this? Do something about it.”
This might be a dialect thing, but I’m intrigued at what one tong is? I’m in Australia and we only have pairs of tongs - like we only have pairs of pants - and I’ve never heard them referred to in the singular.
I don’t like to use ‘pair of’ for things like tongs or spectacles spectacles which are one physical item. I do it for stuff like shoes tho. I think pair of tongs is technically correct tho
Bucket in the shower to collect run-off water for flushing? Thought it was standard until I learned people don’t even bother turning the faucet off when brushing their teeth.
What I love so much about the whole “turning the water off when you brush your teeth” debate is how everyone is basically telling on themselves.
The ADA recommends brushing your teeth for two minutes. Do you think anybody sits there and lets the water wash down the drain for two whole minutes? Or more likely does everyone have terrible dental hygiene?
I lived with people who would have full political debates with a tooth brush in their mouth and the tap on.
Why does it matter how much I use? Agriculture uses 20 times more than I do!
Said after a tossing half their food away…
Bro unfortunately I do belive people would be careless enough to do that.
Had roommates that when they did dishes would keep the water running instead of filling up the sink. Didn’t matter if it was even a few days worth of dishes.
I even mentioned to them about it, they said they just didn’t want to put their hands in a sink full of dirty dish water.
People really do be that senseless.
People also have a dishwasher but prefer to do dishes by hand with the water running the whole time because they think the dishwasher wastes water and does a worse job. They don’t bother to look up why the dishwasher does a worse job (it’s always because they don’t put any soap in the pre wash tray) and refuse to accept that they could be wrong.
I’ll let the water run but only at a trickle. Enough to get the suds off.
Reason being that to fill the sink with rinse water means that water then has to be drained and replaced after you’ve rinsed enough dishes that it’s gotten soapy or murky itself.
Best option is a faucet with a spray trigger, but in lieu of that, there’s ways to do it more responsibly.
Also just a reminder you can adjust the GPM (Gallons per minute) of any faucet with a different regulator. Unscrew the tip of the faucet head, take it to Home Depot or something, and buy one with a lower GPM rate. Kitchen faucets tend to have higher GPM rates, but it may not be necessary for you, so you can reduce it to something less wasteful.
Lol, at the idea that people don’t think I’d let the water run for “two whole minutes”
Right. Two minutes is nothing. I live in Florida my water bill for 4 people is $50. Water conservation is the very very least of my worries.
Maybe if there was a way for me to send my hypothetically unused water over to Cali I’d care more, but.
Because that is an absurdly long time to watch water run when you’re not using it for anything. I feel like “turn off the tap when brushing your teeth” would be inherently obvious to people brushing the full two minutes.
What’s more likely to me is people brush for about 15 seconds and don’t bother turning it off because it’s such a short period of time.
Christ, I don’t even let the shower run for 2 minutes straight. I get in, wet down, turn it off and lather up. Then rinse off. Might have it on for 2 minutes total.
Plus there is LITERALLY ZERO BENEFIT to leaving the water on. It’s just pure waste. If I was learning to brush my teeth for the first time, turning off the water would have been the intuitive solution.
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Our water bill is included in the rent, the amount we use doesn’t affect it, so I could do that. I don’t because why would I, but I could.
However, on a couple occasions I have opened just the hot water tap in the bathroom and let it run for 15 minutes, doors open, to steam up the air. It was winter, very cold, and air moisture content was like 15%, extremely dry.
That is mad. I am super conservative with the water i use but this all goes to a treatment plant
It’s not about treatment, in a severe drought there are financial penalties for excessive water use, and this is one way avid gardeners can cope.
I mean, do we really need to flush with drinking water? It’s literally drinking water straight into the toilet. 6l at that for “big business” and 4 for a single whizz. And that multiple times a day.
I found myself thinking about that. I looked at the clean water on the toilet and thought, that’s the exact same water, from the exact same source, that comes out of the kitchen faucet I use to drink and cook… What a fucking waste… (water is drinkable here ofc)
I sometimes see those eastern flushes with a tap on top that you can use to wash your hands or wtv and so the runoff water goes into the flush reservoir. I thought that was a great idea but, I think recently on lemmy someone asked about something that sounds like a good idea but isn’t, and someone spoke about those toilet/sinks. I don’t remember what the issues were but at the time I thought it made sense not to use it.
Still kinda hurts flushing perfectly good water down the drain :/
A friend had the shower drain piped directly to his garden sprinkler at one point. His shower was on the 2nd floor so gravity did the rest.
Well, if it counts, we have a homemade potato grating machine from the Soviet times my grandfather has made because he was a genius and partly because of Soviet Union. It draws a lot of energy, emits a lot of noise (seriously). To turn on, it has two buttons, one for capacitor or something, another for the motor itself and, nowadays, I have no clue which one I should turn on first, left or right… It stands on three legs and weighs around 10 kg (old transformers were heavy). It produces good results, though, despite looking odd.
Nornally first the capacitor and then the motor. The capacitor is there to absorb the power surge when the motor starts up.
If you’re on single phase power, you almost always need something like a start capacitor, at least for large-ish motors. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the reliability of the grid, and moreso how single-phase AC motors work.
If that is a start capacitor, OP might actually want to shut it off once the motor is running, as they’re typically not meant to run continuously. Usually, there’s a mechanism that disconnects the start capacitor once the motor is up to speed, but it’s not strictly necessary
Pretty much all decent sized electric motors have a start up capacitor. They need an extra bit of energy to build up the magnetic fields, overcome static friction and accelerate the motor up to the operating speed.
I wonder how their opa figured this out. Did he try it out and encountered problems when starting the motor? Then maybe got suggestion to add a capacitor?
Reminds me of the joke I heard from the TV series Chernobyl. From memory:
Q: What weighs 2 tons, emits lots of smoke and noise and cuts apples into 3 pieces?
A: A Soviet machine designed to cut apples into 4 pieces.
“What’s big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces?”
“A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces!”
Here you go, internet stranger: https://spectra.video/w/dre1z1tfm3KDupVCfi8MhS
No beer to power it up. It’s 8:49 PM in Lithuania and my neighbours will be mad.
Note: the capacitor says:
МБГО ¬2
20мкф ±10%
500в 1077
ОТК
Which means 20 micro-pharads capacity, rated for 500 volts.
EDIT: no markings on the motor.
EDIT2: apparently, these capacitors are still being sold.
We have a pvc pipe cutter that is used to cut up frozen small animals, like quail and mice, for our raptors. It works really, really well.
Yoga swing.
Anytime an adult asks what it is and I explain. They always - always always - assume its a sex swing.
Which, admittedly it could very well be if the wife wasn’t so damn unwilling.
