In today’s episode, Reuben and Tessa discuss their recent experiences with house-sitting and caring for pets. They also discuss their participation in outdoor activities like disc golf and the Tough Mudder. The main topic of the conversation is about dishwashers and the use of double traps. Reuben shares his findings from testing the drainage time of a single trap versus a double trap and discusses the lack of a clear answer as to why plumbing codes prohibit double traps.
Check out this link for Brad’s YouTube video, where Tessa as his guest host, and Eric Houseman with Structure Tech Home Inspections get featured:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoFfdbs7ZcQ
Here’s the link for Tessa’s website: https://www.yourhousecoach.com/
Takeaways
House-sitting can be an adventure, especially when dealing with challenging pets.
Participating in outdoor activities like disc golf and obstacle races can be fun and rewarding.
Contrary to popular belief, pre-rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher may not be necessary.
The use of double traps in sink drains is prohibited by plumbing codes, but the exact reason for this is unclear.
Chapters
00:00 Adventures in House-Sitting and Dealing with Challenging Pets
02:35 Outdoor Activities: Disc Golf and the Tough Mudder
14:34 The Truth About Pre-Rinsing Dishes Before Dishwashing
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host, alongside building science geek, Tessa Murry. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom. Welcome back to the show. Tessa, looks like you’re back at home.
Tessa Murry: Hey, Reuben. I am. I’m back at home for the moment. Yes, I’ve been doing a little bit of traveling here and there, but it’s good to be back. And I’ve actually been spending some time at a different house this week too, house sitting and cat sitting and chicken sitting.
RS: Oh, fun. Well-behaved animals, I assume?
TM: You would think so. You would think so. Actually, I can’t blame my friend for one of these cats. It’s actually… It’s a friend of theirs’ cats. But it has definitely kept me on my toes, and it has reminded me why I don’t like cats.
[chuckle]
RS: Oh no. Did it try to smother you in your sleep?
TM: I think it would’ve if I didn’t lock my doors at night.
[laughter]
RS: Oh, no.
TM: But, no, I think it would actually try to kill me. It’s one of those cats where I… There’s a screwy loose or something with this cat. It growls, it hisses, it doesn’t like anyone to be near it. And it could turn on you on any second. It did rub up against my legs for the very first time on the last day that I was there. And I thought that it wanted attention, but I’m like, “Nope, I’m not gonna be tricked by you. I’m not gonna be lured in by this show of affection, ’cause this is not you. I know better.”
RS: “‘Cause you’re gonna bite me.”
TM: That’s exactly what it did. I ignored it. I didn’t pet it, and it turned on me, and it jumped up and it clawed my thigh and it had its teeth out. I was like, “What the heck?” You know, I can’t ignore this cat, and I can’t not ignore this cat. So anyways, the people that I’m watching this cat for left me a spray bottle of water to use to keep this cat in line. In order to walk past this cat, I have to have the spray bottle in hand to get past this cat. So it spent more time in the garage than in the house, I would say.
RS: Good. Good.
TM: And that’s where it should stay.
RS: That’s where it belongs if it can’t behave.
TM: Yes, that’s where it stayed.
RS: Okay. Alright. That sounds dreadful. Good for you.
TM: I mean, I… God bless that owner. Maybe the cat is not like that with the owner. But if it was, that cat would be… I don’t know. It should be a street cat, or it should be put down. I don’t know. Duh, I didn’t say that, but yes.
RS: Alright, we’ll edit that out in post, Tess. We’ll edit that out. Nobody’s gonna hear you say that.
TM: Ah, yeah.
RS: Don’t worry.
TM: Yeah. Okay, enough about my cat woes. [laughter] Moving on.
RS: Alright, moving on. Okay, well, I teased this last show. We talked about this about how we had something to share with our audience, was, you got… Well, you and Eric got featured on a show.
TM: Yes. Well, and Structure Tech did. Structure Tech did too.
RS: Yeah. Yeah.
TM: So Brad Lowery, who works at Porch, reached out to us. And he’s been doing a series where he interviews different home inspectors across the country and features them on his YouTube channel. And so we were honored that he reached out to come to Minneapolis, St. Paul, and film Structure Tech and myself as your house coach, looking at a very unique, beautiful property. And Reuben, tell us more about that property, ’cause you’re the one that connected us.
RS: Sure. Well, okay, I know Brad through IEB, Inspector Empire Builder, whom, I don’t know if I announced it yet, but they are officially a sponsor of the show now. So shout out to Inspector Empire Builder.
TM: Awesome.
RS: We joined them back in 2019. They have been extremely influential. Extremely helpful. So much coaching, so many fantastic relationships that I’ve built through that organization. And I’m very proud that we’re partnering with them. This is not an official commercial for them. But I gotta say, we are partnering with them. And I’m gonna be talking about them briefly, a little voiceover type commercials in pretty much all of our episodes at some point in the future. We’re still working on the details. But, okay, the total tangent, the name of the show is called The Ride Along, and the episode that Brad filmed with us… Well, let me pull this up here. It was titled “$2.5 Million can get you this 9 bedroom house in St. Paul, MN!” And that’s what the property is being listed for. And what was unique about this one, normally, Brad is the guy with the mic and he’s interviewing people and all that. But in this particular case, Brad just stood behind the camera for almost the entire show, and you were the host of the show, Tess.
TM: Yikes. Okay, yeah. First time being featured on a… Well, in front of the camera, it’s not my most comfortable place. [laughter] But, no, we had a lot of fun. And Eric did a lot of inspecting, and I was able to ask him a lot of questions. And Brad asked some good questions. And the owner of this property showed us some really unique, interesting things too. That was fun. So that’s featured in the episode. So yeah, we had a great time. And I think… I mean, Brad had… We were there for probably, what? Four, five hours filming? Huge house. So much ground to cover. So he had a ton of editing to do. But he did such a nice job. He trimmed it down to, I think, like 20 minutes and just kind of highlights some unique features on it. So that was pretty cool.
RS: And you did great.
TM: Oh, thank you.
RS: You did really great, Tess.
TM: Well, thank you. Thank you so much.
RS: Yeah, you were a good help.
TM: Like I said, he cut out four and a half of the bad hours and then he featured the 30 minutes that were good. [laughter] One thing that was really funny, though, was Reuben, you were there with your dad, and he did some interviewing of you guys, but this is something that did not make it into the episode.
[laughter]
RS: No.
TM: We actually went up to the flat roof on this house, which is what? Like four stories up in the air. It’s a beautiful view. You can see the Capitol in St. Paul from the roof. And it was actually so cold that day that it was snowing. There were little flurries in the air. We popped our head up to the roof, and we realized that we locked ourselves onto the roof.
[laughter]
RS: Oh, no.
TM: The little latch closed, and we could not get it open. And so I tried calling… Who did I try calling? I think you might have been… I can’t remember… Eventually, we got a hold of Neil, and Neil popped up and let us out, I believe. So he did make a little…
RS: A little cameo.
TM: Cameo in the video. He actually… [0:07:32.3] ____. [laughter] He rescued us.
RS: Yeah. He did show up in the video.
TM: He did. He had to rescue us.
RS: He featured on it. Like, “Yep, I’m staying out of the cold. This is enough for me.” [laughter] And then he got out of there.
TM: Yep, yep, yep. So we had fun that day.
RS: Yeah, yeah. That was good. And I will put a link to that in the show notes…
TM: Perfect.
RS: If any of the listeners wanna watch that fun episode.
TM: Yeah, yeah. We encourage you to do that. Okay, moving along then, what’s the topic of today, Reuben? What do you wanna dive into?
RS: Today’s topic is… It’s not super technical today, but there was somebody on our team who had… And he’ll know who it is, somebody I love very much, [chuckle] and I won’t say who it is. But he had installed this… It’s like this bar glass washer. It’s like the kind that you have in a bar where it mounts on your sink and you take a glass and you hold it over the sprayer and it sprays the inside of your glass and it gets it all clean. And I was like, “Oh, so you just do that to clean some of your more commonly used things?” He’s like, “No, no, no, no. We use that before you put it in the dishwasher.”
TM: Oh.
RS: And I’m like, “What? Wait. So you’ve got a super duper pre-washer before you put your coffee cups or beer cups in the dishwasher?” He’s like, “Yeah, the dishwasher is just for sanitization. But when my dishes go in the dishwasher, they’re clean. They’re super clean.” And I thought, “Hmm, I need to do a video or do a little bit of testing on this.” Because [chuckle] at my house, the way it works is I’ve got bowls all over the house. I got two teenage kids, and we’ll find bowls behind the couch, we’ll find them in the kids’ rooms, silverware with food dried on for a month, whatever. [laughter] And it’s my daughter’s, Lucy’s, job, daughter Lucy’s job to load the dishwasher. That’s her thing. She takes care of all the dishes, she loads it, she unloads it.
RS: And there is no pre-rinsing of anything going on in my house. She takes these dishes with food stuck on, dried for weeks, and she puts them right in the dishwasher. The standard cycle for my dishwasher… It happens to be a Bosch, but I don’t think that really matters. The standard cycle on my dishwasher is two hours and 10 minutes. It’s a long cycle. And everything comes out pristine and perfect. It comes out very clean.
TM: What?
RS: Yes.
TM: Even the bowls that have caked on cereal that’s been there for a month?
RS: Even that. After two hours of it blasting it with hot water and steam and dishwashing detergent or whatever, everything comes off.
TM: Okay. Is this gonna turn into a commercial for, like, Costco dish soap? ‘Cause I’m assuming that’s what you’re using. [laughter] What kind of soap are you…
RS: How did you know, Tessa?
TM: Wait. [laughter] Are you being sponsored by Costco now? No. Okay, how…
[chuckle]
RS: I should be.
TM: What kind of soap are you using? Is this the soap, do you think, or is this the… Would the dishwasher function that way with any kind of soap? Have you tried different soaps?
RS: You know what, I think I’ve only used what Costco sells. It’s Kirkland Platinum Performance UltraShine. It comes in a box of these little pods and you stick one pod in there. And it’s the greatest deal, ’cause it’s Costco, whatever. It’s not expensive. And so maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe it’s the fact that my dishwasher cycle is two hours and 10 minutes…
TM: Two hours.
RS: Whereas growing up, I swear the dishwasher must’ve taken 45 minutes. It was a much shorter cycle. But today’s dishwashers, I mean, you look at the installation instructions. I blogged about this, and I started reading a handful of dishwasher manufacturer user manuals. And right in the Bosch manual, before we even get to what type of detergent you’re using, they say, “Do not pre-wash items with loosely attached soiling. Remove food particles, bones, toothpicks, and excessive grease.” It says, “Items that have burned on, baked on, or starchy soils may require some pretreatment.” And I’ll admit that I’m exaggerating a little bit when I say everything comes out pristine. If you got eggs, like egg yolks that have dried on there, those need a little treatment. And I think if you’ve got dried-on cheese…
TM: Cheese. [laughter] So random.
RS: That’s a challenge. But [laughter] basically, we scrape the big food particles off the dishes, stick them in the dishwasher, they come out clean. And here’s my challenge to anybody, is try using a better detergent, try the stuff at Costco or whatever, and try sending your dishwasher for a normal cycle, and just humor me. Put your dishes in there. Don’t do all this crazy pre-washing. Just put them in there and see what happens. ‘Cause I grew up basically doing what my good friend would do. [chuckle] And I would pre-rinse everything. I mean, you’d look in the dishwasher and you’d go, “Wait, are these clean or… “
TM: “Clean or dirty?”
RS: “Or do these need to be run?” And you’d kind of stack it on. And it’s like, “I can get every speck of anything off of there.” And I would use it to sanitize things. But I realized I was wasting a ton of water and a ton of time. You don’t need to do all that.
TM: Well, it sounds like it’s a new dishwasher thing too, ’cause you read through a lot of different user manuals, and that’s what they’re all saying. So I wonder at what point dishwasher technology changed where the manufacturers are saying that. ‘Cause I think I recall as well, when we had an appliance person, and they talked to us about maintenance for like clothes washers and I think dishwashers. I can’t remember… That was a while ago. I have to look back. But I remember him talking about, “You’re supposed to load dishes in that still have food on them. That actually helps the dishwasher do what it’s supposed to do.”
RS: Yes. And actually, what I did was I went on the Cascade website. They’re a manufacturer of dishwasher detergent. And I found this about pre-rinsing. They say, “As long as your dishes are properly loaded, even tough, burnt, stuck-on food is broken down so it can be washed away inside the machine.” And get this, “The enzymes actually work better if you don’t pre-wash your dishes. Because without food to attack, the clean power is underutilized. By not pre-washing, you’ll end up with cleaner dishes while saving time and water as Cascade.” And they can send the check to me directly, please. [chuckle] “And your dishwasher work in unison to eliminate stuck-on food and the residue.” And more sales stuff for Cascade, but the manufacturer says this.
TM: Wow. So there it is. Okay, so maybe it’s dishwasher technology and the technology of the soap…
RS: I think it’s both.
TM: That it’s got the enzymes that’s searching for the food particles.
RS: Yeah.
TM: Okay, that’s very interesting. Well, you know, I always have trouble with my… I make smoothies in the morning a lot of the time, and I’ll use chia seeds or whatever else and peanut butter sometimes or almond butter. And it seems like that stuff doesn’t really come off perfectly every time, but maybe I’ll just… And I always try and rinse it first. So maybe I will try not rinsing it and see how it does.
RS: Try it. You try it. See what happens. Come back next week, let me know.
[laughter]
TM: And avocados. I don’t know if you eat avocados in your house, but I always get avocado residue stuck on spoons. It doesn’t seem to come off of there.
RS: Interesting. Okay. Alright. Well, that’s…
TM: We’ll see. I’ll run some experiments.
RS: That’s my challenge. Give it a shot.
TM: Okay. I like it.
RS: Let me know how it works. It’s totally worth it.
TM: Sounds good. And we should also tell our listeners too. Please let us know, write into us and let us know how your dishwasher works.
RS: Yeah. If it doesn’t work out, Tessa will personally come to your house [laughter] and take care of it for you. Or maybe I will. Yeah. [laughter] All right.
TM: No.
RS: Maybe not. [laughter] All right, so that’s dishwashers. And it segues into one other topic I wanted to talk about today, because I’m thinking about the kitchen and the sink and sink drains. And I was on a panel for this one home inspector conference, and I was on the panel where we were fielding a bunch of plumbing questions. People had pre-written in with all these questions. And me and a few other guys were answering all these questions. But the one question that stumped me, I didn’t have a good answer for, was, What is the problem with having a double trap? And that’s where you have two traps underneath the kitchen sink where water from the sink goes through one trap, it comes over a little bit and then it drains through a second trap. We’re not talking about two traps at the sink, we’re talking about a double trap where the same water needs to go through a trap twice. Exactly. Yes. That would be called the double trap. Two traps are fine.
RS: So the question is, What’s the problem with the double trap? And what I’ve always heard is that it’s gonna drain slower through the two, which increases the potential for clogging. And I’ve also heard that in the space between those two traps, you can get some kind of air lock, where air is trapped and it’s not gonna drain right. So I thought, “Okay, I need to put this to the test.” I’ve been meaning to test this for a long time. It’s been in the back of my mind. But then when we were in the middle of the seminar and we were all stumped as to what the problem is, I thought, “I gotta do a little backyard testing.”
RS: So I put together a pedestal sink, and I set up a double trap, and I set up a single trap, and I drained them a few times, and I timed it. And it took exactly the same amount of time to drain the water out of a single trap as a double trap. And it was identical. I took videos of it. And I got side-by-side videos. There’s no difference. So inconclusive results is what I’m telling you, Tess. I still don’t know what the issue with the double trap is. It’s definitely wrong. I mean, all the plumbing codes prohibit it. They expressly… Or not express, explicitly? I don’t know what they’re call it. They say you can’t do it. I don’t know why.
RS: Well, it’s interesting you say that, Tess, ’cause in my video, I slowed it down a little bit, and you can see for the first trap, it does siphon a little bit of water out of the first trap. We ended up with about 2 inches less water sitting in that first trap. But the second trap still has all the water that it should have, so we’re still fully protected by another trap. So that can’t be it. So that’s a challenge to any of our listeners out there. If you know the real reason why you can’t have a double trap, please tell us. And maybe I’ll repeat my testing and prove the reason for not having two double traps. But at this point, I don’t know what the issue is. It’s gonna be a very minor issue in our inspection report saying, “Hey, it’s technically wrong. The end.” I can’t tell you why, other than the code says you can’t do it.
RS: Oh, totally. Totally. It feels like a waste of time. Inconclusive results. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I didn’t take… Yeah, it wasn’t all day. Yeah. But I got all the parts. The only thing that took time was trying to put a support up for the pedestal sink, ’cause it didn’t really wanna sit flat. So I had to get some janky wooden support to build a little frame for it. That probably took more time than anything, but… And they’re usually fun and rewarding and satisfying, unlike this one. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we’ll find out someday, but as of today, I’m stumped. And I did a lot of Googling, a lot of reading on forums and discussion panels and all that, and I could not get an answer.
[laughter]
[music]
RS: Well, that is A1. And I’ll try to think about some others. All right, I think that’s it for today. Yeah. And next week, we’ll be here for this. Please email us, podcast@structuretech.com. And Tessa’s info is also in the show notes. You got a link to her website there. Anywhere you’re listening, Apple Podcasts. Anywhere you find the show description, you can find Tessa’s info there too. All right, appreciate it. Take care.