life in the fat lane

While i'm in the mood for posting, i'll just share these delightful pictures:

A couple of months ago i was washing up when rancid, eggy smelling water started pouring out of the front of the sink cupboard. Upon investigating i discovered that the pump which collects water from the kitchen sink plughole and pumps it overboard, wasn't. The float switch which activates it when the box is full of water was so encrusted with what seemed to be either some hideous demonic substance from hell itself, or a putrid mixture of fat and limescale, that it couldn't float and so the pump just filled with water until it overflowed into the kitchen.



The first challenge was to disconnect the full pump (which has an outlet near the bottom) from the outlet hose so i could take it out and clean it. During this operation about 80,000 gallons of eggy smelling, fatty water poured out into the kitchen, via my trousers, before i could get the outlet hole over a bucket. Then i could take the pump out on the jetty and jet wash the fatty limescale off, leaving it looking like this, which looks a lot healthier:



Kids, always remember to descale your sink regularly.

p.s. I was told a story recently by our neighbours. They bought their boat in holland and for a couple of months innocently used the kitchen sink, as you would, assuming that the water was going overboard. After a while though they started to wonder where the hole was that it was going out of, and followed the pipe from the sink, under the floor, down the length of the boat through the bilges, to the front where there was a small lake of filthy washing up water under the floor, the pipe having just ended inside the boat! So it could have been worse....