Let's note the absurdity of moving your washer and dryer to a new house. Those should stay with the house like refrigerators and dishwashers. In the US it is common in some regions and not in others.
I'm so glad I brought my washer and dryer with me through two moves. Modern ones have logic boards in them that eventually malfunction. These machines are 20 years old, simple to repair, and reliable.
I disagree; it's not absurd at all. Perhaps you don't care the clothes-destroyer the previous tenant left makes holes in your wife's silk pajamas. Washers and dryers are very personal items (some prefer top vs front loaders) and are exclusively freestanding, temporary appliances.
Dishwashers OTOH are often plumbed in, sometimes hardwired, and fastened to the counter.
Not to mention most people don't know how to properly care for them (when was the last time you cleaned the filter?). If I moved into a new place I'd probably replace the dishwasher straight away.
Starting with something that you know works can be a time saver, even if it requires a bit of hackery. The alternative is buying new, which for appliances often means buying into some kind of consumer-hostile scheme that the old models weren't subject to.
That's ridiculous. Washers and dryers are expensive appliances.
Unless this guy is paid more than a half million per year, then the four hours spent on the install here are less than the cost of a new washer and dryer.
I've never brought a washer/dryer from one house to the next when moving. In my experience, it's been fine. Sometimes I had a washer or dryer that I didn't like all that much (took longer than I'd like, confusing controls, etc.), but I've never ended up with one that damaged my clothes or was so bad that I needed to replace it.
I'm sure there are many instances where there are replacement-worthy problems, and there certainly are people who have splurged on really nice appliances and will want to take them with them when they move, but I think those situations are uncommon enough that, overall, people save time and money by not lugging their washers and dryers with them every time they move. (In places where it's common not to move them, at least.)
Every time I have moved the contract stated all appliances stay. The legal default is you take them all - washer, dryer, stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, light bulbs, window shades. However realtors all know to put into the contract what stays because most most people want those things in the house and don't want to move them. However more than once I've bought a house without something (the old fridge broke a week before they listed the house so they didn't bother replacing it). If something isn't in the contract and you leave it behind they can charge you for disposal of their garbage!
Where do you live that it's normal to leave the refrigerator? Is this for rentals and/or buying?
If I have to move you bet my fridge, which I love, is coming with me. Same with my washing machine. I don't have a dryer because I'm in australia, which might explain the difference in fridge culture, too.
In the US, most rentals (except for very cheap ones) include a fridge/washer/dryer/dishwasher, but if you're buying the property, typically only the dishwasher is included unless you negotiate with the seller.
It varies on an individual sale level, any appliances can be included when selling a house, but other than built in ones (which refrigerators usually aren't) its hit or miss for new houses that aren't models, and for existing houses it really depends on the seller (owner occupied, they may want to take it with them, depending on the circumstances where they are moving, as it previously an equipped rental, then they’ll more likely offer to include all the major appliances, etc.)—and buyer (may prefer unwanted personal property be removed prior to move jn rather than included, if they want to buy something new that suits them or being their current unit.)
I haven't lived in that many places in the US, but everywhere I've lived -- rental or bought -- the refrigerator came with the house.
Ditto for the dishwasher, and clothes washer and dryer. The microwave, too, if it's a unit attached to the cabinetry, and not a freestanding on-counter model.
I suspect -- and didn't know this! -- that this arrangement is regional, even inside the US.
Odds are your realtor just negotiated those details for you. It is pretty standard everywhere. Very few people want to move those heavy things, so realtors just put them into the contract, if you don't pay attention (you should!) you may not even realize this happened.
When I bought my home, I know that was mentioned explicitly.
Though my understanding is the sale automatically includes all fixtures unless specifically excluded, and I suppose there's a little disconnect there: most major appliances are technically not fixed, but I think most people think of them like they are.
When I sell my home, I was thinking I'd definitely need to put a note on my washer/dryer and smart thermostat, saying I was going to take them with me and they weren't included.
Wait, what...? You leave your refrigerator and dishwasher behind? :)
I guess it depends a lot on your location and custom. Also if the appliance is "built in" (like an oven) or free-standing.
I've personally never left a free-standing appliance behind, and you certainly aren't getting my industrial-quality, 25 year old, top-loading washing machine for free....
That said, these things are negotiated as part of the sale. Buyers are aware ahead of time what they are or are not getting, they don't show up at their newly purchased house and go inside to see what appliances they have vs have to buy.
I've literally never bought a refrigerator, dishwasher, washer, or dryer in my life, and never moved one between houses. Certainly I've run into one of these that had been left behind by a previous owner that was just so-so, but never bad enough that I could justify the expense of replacing it.
As an example, due to a design flaw, the built-in ice maker in my fridge doesn't go more than a week without getting clogged due to water flowing all over inside it and freezing. It's a bit annoying, to be sure, but it's a lot cheaper to just have a couple old-school ice cube trays in the freezer.
> you certainly aren't getting my industrial-quality, 25 year old, top-loading washing machine for free
I think most people wouldn't look at it that way. You'd be leaving behind your washing machine, and the next owners would get it "for free", but you'd be getting a different washing machine in your new house that the previous owners left behind "for free". But sure, if I was really attached to a particular appliance, I would probably want to bring it with me when I moved. I've never cared that much, though, and don't expect I will in the future.
(Also, while top-loading washing machines tend to last longer without needing maintenance than side-loading, they use so much more water.)
Why? They are free standing and just plug into the wall/drain/vent essentially.
If I have a $300 washing machine, or a $3000 washing machine, the potential buyer will offer the same price to me.
I took the $6k fridge out of my home I recently sold and replaced it with the $500 fridge that was in the new house I bought. In my mind I saved $5500 right there.
Why absurd, I did move a washer from an apartment to a house - few hundred kilometers away, along with some other furniture. I liked how it worked, and I could connect it.
In that regard, home equipment and tools maintenance from LED lights (driver and individual diodes), laptops (PCB repairs, thermal paste replacement/cleaning) to garden equipment (carb cleaning, sharpening, gasket, manifold, whatever replacements) is sort of my responsibility, regardless that professionally I'd spend my days on software.
Some german areas, renting doesn't come with a kitchen - you bring one and take it with you when you move out. IE cupboards etc
I find it odd that some american places don't have ceiling lights for every room. Instead the "light" switch powers some points around the room that you supply lamps to.
> Let's note the absurdity of moving your washer and dryer to a new house. Those should stay with the house like refrigerators and dishwashers. In the US it is common in some regions and not in others.
Yeah, if you buy typical consumer grade ones.
I understand washers and dryers are on a downward trend: getting worse, harder to repair, and less durable. I paid quite a bit more to buy a commercial washer and drying that's supposed to last a long time. I'm definitely going to take it with me. I'm not going to leave it with someone who doesn't know what it is, just to downgrade to whatever was cheapest at Home Depot.
An important point that people are missing is that W/D units are commonly bought to fit a specific space and house. For example some dryers are gas, and some are not. That is house dependent.
> Let's note the absurdity of moving your washer and dryer to a new house. Those should stay with the house like refrigerators and dishwashers.
Oh hell no. You never know how the old renter treated the machines - for people with sensitive skin for example it can be a big no-no because the old renter used fabric softener by the truckload, never used dedicated washing machine cleaner (if you don't do this at least once every few months on maximum temperature, the insides of your machine will eventually stink horribly as bacteria develops an outright biofilm), or if the dryer vent has ever been cleaned.
The latter one in particular is a very nasty source of fires.
I just want to buy your house I don’t want you pedestrian 1990’s empty-the-hot-water-heater-twice washing machine. The fridge and dishwasher you left were bad enough.
An interesting consideration next time you balk at the price of a tradesman; or, why the plumber charges $300 to connect a washer in a few minutes when anyone can do it.
$295 of that is knowing to drill the hole in the drain.
Same. Thankfully, the post explains it as needing to drill open the PVC drain pipe under a sink where the washer drain pipe connects, inside a pre-formed attachment point. See "Solution 5" through "Solution 6".
If your washer is draining and working, there's no latent issue to worry about.
The one mentioned at the very end: the drain pipe the washer's drain connected to had a PVC cover that needed to be drilled/punched out (since if a washer wasn't connected it'd be a hole in that drain!). If you're replacing another washer, it was probably already punched out.
It's cheaper to make it without a hole than add a separate component and screw threads on both components. After all, you will drill the hole zero or one time, as needed.
Presumably a tradesman has knowledge and experience with these blockers, which for them should be largely "known unknowns" and easy to fix at that since they have all the right equipment.
So why do they still charge so much? It's not just "knowing to drill the hole in the drain" but overhead like equipment (they need to buy all the expensive pro stuff, and keep it in working order; whereas you might just need the one tool to get your job done, they need all the tools to get all the jobs done), vehicles, gas, etc. And of course the down time traveling between jobs, office space if they have an office, employees, etc.
All these things bring their prices back up to much higher than it would cost you to do it yourself--if only you knew what to do and had the right equipment.
Let's assume a solo plumber has to spend 10k/year on all their equipment maintenance. If they only do 20 hours of paid work per week, that adds 10 dollars to their hourly rate.
The solo plumber also needs to put a lot of time in the office doing book work, scheduling jobs, restocking their van with parts, driving from job to job. If you are thinking about going into business for yourself either charge what your competition does - don't undercut anyone. If you can't figure out what your competition charges figure out what you need to live on and double it for a starting price and then get an accountant to look over your books in a few months. (though if you have no competition that is generally a sign that you have a bad business)
I think it's interesting to also think about it from the other perspective. If this is someone who is supporting themselves through this work, then what they have to at least charge you is going to depend on how much they need to survive, i.e., buy housing, food, tools, etc. If they get only a few jobs per week, then they kinda have to try to pay their bills off of those jobs. They may also have a spouse, kids, and various others who depend on this income for survival.
Unfortunately, how much a person needs to have a decent living is not really what's driving prices: like all markets, what dictates prices is demand and supply. The job may be very easy for a tradesman to do, but if they're the only ones who know how to do the job, and many people need the job done and really can't just do it themselves, they can charge whatever people who need the job are willing to pay to not go without.
For most tradesmen , normally there are many "competitors", so they need to keep prices reasonable otherwise people won't hire them. Some jobs which can be easily DIY'd may just disappear as it's not possible to make a living off them, even if a small percentage of people will never DIY anything and would be willing to pay a small amount for the job to be done.
I am currently trying to hire builders for some larger projects at home (kitchen/bathroom renovations, custom car port) and I see wild differences in prices, and presumably quality. For these bigger jobs, it really becomes a bet unless you can actually verify the builder's previous jobs, which can be hard as people are not going to just let you into their houses to check how good/bad their bathrooms look. I've had bad experiences before, so I am being extra careful and trying to figure out the builder's level of expertise and capability by talking to them about lots of details (which I learned from previously building a garage).
what a person needs to make a decent living is an input into the supply part of supply and demand. Thus it puts a floor on prices. Pay me $500/hour and I'm installing washing machines not writing software thus increasing the supply of labor to do that. (but of course nobody will pay that much)
> If they get only a few jobs per week, then they kinda have to try to pay their bills off of those jobs.
I don't think this has been true anywhere for at least several decades. Every single tradesman I've used tells me they are overbooked/overworked and there's no shortage of jobs.
I'm sure they have their less-busy seasons, but overall I doubt any tradesman can't find 40 hours worth of work/week.
Those rates start to make lot more sense if you think how much would I charge to visit 30 minute meeting on other side of city. Or at least how many billable hours my employer would do. Time spend on traveling often ends up making up for the rest. Not to mention on overhead in admin if this would be just single time thing.
I remember (decades ago) buying a garage door opener at sears, and they offered to install it for $99.
I sort of hemmed and hawed and said ok.
When the guy came by to install it, it was kind of amazing. he opened the box quickly with a box cutter, and started unwrapping stuff. Stuff that was needed came out, extras were discarded into the lid of the box, all within about a minute.
He had a special pole with a carpet covered T at the top to help get the old rail down safely and raise the new one. He ran all the lines quickly and efficiently. Lines that were too long were wrapped around a screwdriver to form a pigtail and efficiently run them with some tension the right length.
I think it was done in ~ 20 minutes and worked right the first time.
Simply amazing to see sometime who has done it before and really knows what they're doing.
Made me question every install I would ever do after that.
They did the same thing with a garbage disposal install a year or two later. ba-da-boom, done.
And that is why I don't build my own PCs even though I can. I build a new PC about once every three or four years on average I suppose [1]. In that time processor sockets have changed, RAM has changed, sometimes other things.
I select the parts, but pay the vendor or someone local to assemble and test it. Not only do they do it every week (if not every day), if some part is DoA they have others on hand to swap in and out to find out which part is the problem, but I don't, see: everything changed since I built the last one 5 years before.
[1] 2009 i7-860, 2014 i7-4790K, 2016 i7-6700K (had moved countries, didn't take the old PC, just the SSD), 2019 TR 2990WX (again had moved countries, taking just the SSD), 2024 i9-13900HX laptop (beats the TR in every way, plus sips power and is portable).
Building a PC is just the right amount of challenge (for me). It's fun. I'd do it for my friends, if they let me. And wanted to spend one or two grand every other year. It's just challenging enough to be fun but not so challenging it's actually hard.
If I was sure they were going to use good parts, I'd do the same.
I bought my current PC from a company that seems pretty good, and targets gamers with medium-high budgets.
The "liquid cooled" cpu cooler died after being bumped with a vacuum, and I had to replace it.
With that one thing that I was forced to do myself, I had to learn a lot about the system that I'd already have known if I'd ordered the parts myself. Worse, they no longer had a list of the exact parts in the system on their site. I had to pull things apart to find out what they were.
I'll be making my own PC from scratch again next time.
I don't mean a small vacuum. I mean a house vacuum, for the floor. They just rammed the computer. It caused the CPU Cooler to make a ticking sound, which I found was a pretty common thing for that cooler. I replaced it with a standard fan cooler instead and it's been fine.
Believe it or not, it was this article that solved the same problem I was having with my new sink / washing machine. For the past week, I've been draining the machine into the bathtub, because it wouldn't pump the water into the sink's drain pipe. I assumed the extension was too long, or the pump motor was too weak – turns out, I never cut the hole in the drain pipe. Thanks Chris!
I laughed when I read it, because my father-in-law just finished telling me the same story about a dishwasher he installed in a new house he built in the 90s. Water everywhere the first time it went to drain. He was perplexed until a friend asked him if he drilled out the plug in the p-trap.
Of COURSE you can't just have a hole in the side of a pipe under your sink, but the existence of the fitting gives you a false sense of security that it's plug-and-play.
It's not always that easy. In my case we were moving to a new country. It was very hard to find English speaking tradespeople and the ones we did find told us that they can do it in 3 weeks earliest. So I had to either work as a dishwasher for 3 weeks (we have 2 kids) or connect the dishwasher myself, which took me a whole day and many trips to the hardware store. I still think I did the right thing.
When we had our new w&d set installed (replacing a dead set), we paid a plumber. Part of that was needing the gas hookup for the dryer, and there was no way I was going to DIY that. And yeah, given what it costs just to have them show up, having both done is about the same cost as just one. And it did save me a lot of hassle.
Vicegrips are very useful. And a pipe wrench ... commonly still called "Stillson" in these parts ... is also useful for shifting anything (even regular nuts) you don't have the correct spanner for and don't mind marking up a little. Chain wrench similarly.
I mean a lot of these tools one collects as one does work around the house. If you can invest in a Bosch washing machine, surely you can invest in a Bosch drill, a plumbing wrench and a spanner. The spade bit to the drainage plug, I must admit, was unexpected.
Not sure I would use a spade for that. It’s easier to take out the trap and drill it out on the bench with a big normal drill. With a spade you might ruin the trap by taking out the side of the spigot.
I used to just buy whatever tool I needed to do hardware jobs and collected a hodge podge of poor quality tools like this. One day I decided to research, buy a bunch of high quality tools, sell all the old ones I had. I wish I had done that sooner, it makes hardware jobs so much easier when you have the most common tools needed and you know they just work.
Something I'm grateful my dad taught me is the importance of good tools. He had cheap knock off vise grips that couldn't hold very well, and also name brand ones which did great. He told me how he regretted buying the cheap ones because they cost more, in the end - he still had to get the more expensive ones anyway. Ever since then I have always tried to get good quality tools when I buy them, and it has served me well.
> So what do we do about it when we don’t even know what questions to ask before setting out on any software project, especially one that ostensibly seems routine?
Well, taking the story as metaphor a bit further… there were several opportunities to learn more about which questions to ask, without so many trips to the hardware store. I’m surprised not to see any mention of that in this section about lessons learned.
Coming back to the topic of software, I’m not opposed to exploratory work as a requirements-gathering exercise. But at a certain point it bears a lot more fruit to stop doing and start finding out what you don’t know as a dedicated effort. When you can take one figurative trip to the hardware store with a big shopping list and set of open questions, you’re bound to spend more of your labor in an effective and relatively straightforward way.
Yes, I was surprised that the learning wasn't along the lines of "measure twice, cut once".
But also, he trusted his dependent team / vendor too much (the new home builder) and assumed that part was done correctly when he started. I feel like in the software world, if you're integrating an SDK into a new project for example, you'd look around a bit to confirm you can integrate it like you have in the past on older projects.
There's nothing wrong with poking around the codebase a bit, or doing a proof of concept, to get a better handle on the estimate.
Honestly, I feel the real lesson here is that, if you want accurate estimates, the job needs to be done end-to-end by someone who's done the exact same thing before - and because things change, "before" really means "recently".
If you're not going to be moving houses every couple months, this means passing the buck to someone else. That is, the job needs to be done by some professional installers, because they're in a position to do the same thing day after day, and can gradually adapt to variance and evolution of products (and plumbing, and homes).
Also, and that's a second step, from the POV of those installers, it would be ideal if they could also pick the washing machine for you - they'd just pick pick the minimum amount of machines[0] to cover common scenarios, and specialize in installing them. That would significantly improve accuracy of their estimates.
But this is, unfortunately, how we get to turning everything in life into a service, and it doesn't sit well with me. I'm willing to accept bad estimates if it means I get to pick and own stuff. After all, this is the model ISPs operate on, and we all know what kind of hardware they install. My first criterion for picking ISPs has always been whether they let you put your own router in place of theirs.
In Germany this wouldn't be possible due to shortage of skilled workers. You'd have to settle with one who at least might have a bigger toolbox, but they wouldn't to an end-to-end analysis beforehand and would prefer to get the job done fast even if sluggishly.
Recently I asked for quotes on adding a power socket to a din-rail fuse box. Easy job: cut two cables to proper length, screw one of them to the neutral rail, use a splitter after the fuse to get phase.
"We don't do that, ask your power company". "Don't have time, 80€ before taxes, in 8 months".
I would do it myself, but it's in the shared area of an apartment house and the slightest issue with it would void pretty much all my insurances.
I've been getting a lot of the same, from reputable companies, and then if I want a single person to get it all done, I have to have a connection I can definitely trust and does quality?
> the job needs to be done by some professional installers, because they're in a position to do the same thing day after day,
Possibly - it depends on the situation. In my experience, the transaction costs of getting people in can be pretty high.
After all, if a guy has to drive 40 minutes to me, perform a 10 minute job, then drive 40 minutes back - I gotta expect to pay for 90 minutes of his time.
And if some install jobs involve lifting a 160 lbs machine by hand, that's a two-man job - now I'm paying for two guys for 90 minutes. Or they want to see the job to check if it needs two guys before they can quote accurately - meaning another round trip.
Oh, and my job doesn't let me work from home, so I gotta take a day off work.
There's also tons of benefits for DYI if done in a correct balance. It allows you to later communicate with professionals more efficiently and figure out who is actually a quality professional, debug issues with the setup you have, make better decisions in the future. I think when owning a house, if something does not pose a significant long term risk health or damage wise, it's wise to at least try and spend few hours on figuring out the DYI. Unless you have serious FU money where you can hire a single, trusted person to just orchestrate everything for you.
6. Cost of "hey man I actually don't have time for your job today, I'll do it next week, sorry"
7. Cost of they just don't show up and you have no idea what happened
8. Cost of trying to call them after 7 to reschedule, it goes to voicemail, but the voicemail is full so you can't leave a message, so you text them, but they don't read texts, so you just have to keep calling all them and hope to get lucky and catch them between jobs
9. Cost of you get frustrated by 8 so you decide to hire someone more established who has a secretary, but the secretary is clueless and gives you misinformation mixed with "I'll ask him and get back to you" (of course never gets back)
10. Cost of you having a flexible sleep schedule, so you usually wake up at 11am, but they want to come at 9am or you have to wait who knows how long, so previous night you are stressed about getting too little sleep, ending with getting no sleep at all because of the stress.
As a reminder it took him only 4 hours. I also had a similar case recently. Except I have much less experience and I tried to involve professionals as much as possible.
It took more than a week overall. I don't see a real world where you can involve professionals and get it done in just 4 hours. I would have been ecstatic with just 4 hours.
I first talked with customer support of an electronics store, I took bunch of pictures of my setup, I asked several questions before hand. I bought both bringing the washing machine and installation from an electronics shop with best reputation locally. It wasn't clear where the water extract hole should be, I did figure it out talking back and forth with another specialist though. But the shop said that they can't do installation there. So I said, okay, let's drop the installation, just deliver the washing machine to the room. I asked multiple times if that involves also bringing it to the 2nd floor. And the customer support said yes.
Then when the delivery finally came, the guy said they only bring to the front door and the first room, not 2nd floor. Luckily he was still able to help me out, we together brought it to the 2nd floor, but he was alone so wasn't prepared, and it weighed quite a bit.
In terms of installation he said he can't help with that.
Then I was talking to a specialist who had helped us on some other things, and with back and forth I managed to understand what to buy, but I had to do multiple shop trips, since the things I needed weren't in the really large construction shop I went to (related to water extraction). I'm not English speaker so I don't know the correct terminology for all of this here.
Then there were other issues, such as machine started vibrating after, etc, etc. Which I managed to solve eventually.
But point being is that even finding, managing, scheduling and using specialists can take way more than 4h that it took him.
> Honestly, I feel the real lesson here is that, if you want accurate estimates, the job needs to be done end-to-end by someone who's done the exact same thing before - and because things change, "before" really means "recently".
I think I inadvertently addressed my attitude toward estimating software by forgetting estimation was even part of the topic. Heh… IMO the real lesson is that no one has ever done exactly the same thing before, otherwise you’re almost certainly paying too much for someone to do it again. In which case estimating is futile, until you’ve done sufficient work to approximate already doing the task under estimation. You can estimate when you’re reasonably close to completion, but the important skill is learning to recognize patterns… including the pattern that you’re facing unknown unknowns, and an unknown scope of same… and then to make the path to resolution more efficient.
Reminds me of "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" [0] — unknown unknowns often remain that way until you get up close and personal with something new.
I’m impressed that they fit it within 4 hours, to be honest.
Assuming 15 minutes each way to the hardware store, that’s 150 minutes or 2.5 hours total for just driving.
So talking with salespeople, checking out, and the whole process of actually installing the dishwasher would have to fit within 1.5 hours, which seems tight to me.
Are you saying it's closer? Or do you refer to using time instead of distance?
Even if you live in a city, getting to a hardware store usually takes at least 15 minutes unless you really live like right next door. Usually takes longer. Distance is a bad measure of the time it takes.
One can easily overestimate how fast walking and taking public transportation is and how close hardware stores are to people, and underestimate how fast cars are.
As a real world example you can consider this:
From a small village called Luvia, Finland, it takes 18 minutes to drive 19 km to a general purpose hardware store (K-Rauta Pori), while it can take easily 30 min to an hour to traverse this on foot from Pori city center (ie carrying everything yourself), or at least 16 minutes if you conveniently live right next to a bus stop (and there's absolutely not just a few minutes between rides).
I live in a suburban area, and I have 2 hardware stores within 5 minutes, a Menards and Harbor freight within 10, and like 5 big box hardware stores within 15.
I grew up about 3 minutes away from a big hardware store, doing projects all the time. This contributed to a very wrongheaded idea about how long projects take.
When I moved into my current house it was suddenly a 40 minute trip. For the first couple years I couldn’t get anything done on Saturdays because I’d never needed to optimize away trips to the store before.
I wonder if it was four consecutive hours or if it was four hours in total, spread over several days. This sounds like the kind of project where you spend half a hour after work each day, every day thinking you'd finally be done...
The thing is, though, the author learned some useful lessons about how new construction houses can be a bit unfinished. I'm sure when the next household task comes up, he'll sit down and look at every step of the task first to see if he can make any of those unknown unknowns, well, known, before he drives out to the hardware store.
I can certainly see someone at this point deciding it isn't worth the effort, and hiring people from then on, but some people (myself included) often enjoy the process of learning these things.
And this is the next step on the journey towards becoming a real senior developer...
> some people (myself included) often enjoy the process of learning these things.
A real senior developer knows when they're writing their own framework or library "for enjoyment", and when to just use the "boring technology" choice and work around any deficiencies it has for the task at hand.
Baffled at what kind of garbage drill this guy has that won't take an arbor adaptor for a hole saw. I cut all kinds of holes in my current place with a brushless Dewalt combi that was <£100 on sale.
The not taking part is likely 10mm chuck, even though the twist drill for hole saw tend to be 8mm. One the pictures has a 10mm plastic chuck.
Lots of hole saw have even 6.3mm (the 1/4) hex drive for impact drivers.
Other than that it's quite baffling the guy had rather poor tools, and likely kept buying low quality tools too. Yet, he was very determined.
These tools cost here ~1200€ and are not expensive at all. Nobody in a trade job wants to mess with a torch, gas cans, dirty paste and soldering chemicals all day anymore. It takes seconds instead of minutes for one pressed connection. Ok, pressed connections are thicker than soldered, but doesn’t matter for most cases. Obviously as a hobby builder I can toy half day with torch and solder paste for 40 connections in my house.
copper pipes are not popular in this part of the pond (not any longer at least, outside gas). The most common domestic pipes are "pex/aluminum/pex" type which are designed for crimping and bending (by hand).
Other than that it makes a lot sense to go w/ crimping if possible - quite surprised it's rated up to 2".
I have steel pipes for my central heating flow (UK) because my house was built during a copper shortage in the late 1960s. Every plumber has said they're a nightmare to work with compared to soft copper.
The story I know is that US gas (used to) cause corrosion of the Cu pipes. I don't have a gas line (in the house), so no recent installation - and of course I won't be installing a gas line on my silly-own (while I can go by and do some plumbing for the water). Yet, if i see a tiny (8mm) copper tube I'm quite confident, it's for the gas.
Perhaps a relic of the days of manufactured coal-based gas that they kept because there was already so much infrastructure. Out of curiosity I’ve been trying to see if the local steam utility offers new supply connections but I don’t see anything.
I know those kind of drills since I bought one at IKEA. It looked more like a slightly beefed-up electric screwdriver and I was surprised you can actually drill into walls it it.
But what I'm baffled is that this kind of stuff is now the standard for "consumer-grade" drills, while the normal ones with power cords are "professional-grade"? When did that happen?
I have a "toy" 12v cordless Bosch drill (small ~cylindrical battery in the handle and not the square ones hanging underneath that you see in non-toy drills) that was approx the same price and I did pretty much exactly this same thing of drilling a 60mm hole through the side of a kitchen cabinet and it didn't even blink. The drill is a bit of a beast through for such a toy - I have drilled 16mm bits directly though double skin brick walls using it (installing external socket + fused spur) so not sure what level of crapness it takes to be below the toy drill I have.
Yeah same. I’ve got an extra drill that was free with any purchase from harbor freight (but normally sells for like $15) that I’ve used with a 2” hole saw several times for cord management. Maybe the poster had a drill-shaped electric screwdriver rather than a drill-driver?
Biggest cause of the estimate being wrong is the machine trying to balance the load for the spin cycle. It's basically brute forcing it by tossing the clothes over and over again until it's all balanced enough for the spin cycle.
This can take hours, or even fail altogether and then you're left with sopping wet laundry.
Some washing machines actually measure how dirty the drain water is to decide whether to do another pass with fresh water. Since this is a dynamic decision, the remaining time cannot be accurately predicted in advance.
(Not saying this is true for all, some might just lie outright).
A big factor of uncertainty at the end of the cycle is the weight distribution for spinning.
Newer washing machines rotate the drum slowly until the clothes separate, bringing the centre of mass closer to the axis of rotation, leading to much less vibration during the spin cycle. If the weight does not distribute after n cycles (e.g. if you put a single large and heavy duvet cover inside), some lower the spin RPM to a level that is deemed acceptable.
I've always assumed that they perform this measurement via the current curve of the motor during a rotation. Flattened curve -> distributed load, CG close to spin axis. Huge spike -> offset load, CG far away from spin axis -> bang bang bang walking washing machine.
jiggling the mouse generates random data. The installer uses this for all kinds of things.
Some older versions of gnupg also stated 'please move the mouse' while generating your key pair just to have access to more random data :)
Similarly and I extended to think about a dryer with a humidity sensor; it doesn't measure time well, it measures complexity, it gets more accurate the longer it works on the task, but the last progress meter can still take significant time with significant clothes.
Time estimation which continually gets updated and doesn't inform you about the drift of the original estimation and actual time, nor when it was actually used vs finish time.
There's some humor in the parallels with software development.
Yes, so did I. My washing machine that died a few weeks ago lied about it all the time. The replacement doesn't display the time at all, which made me think at first I should have paid more for one that does... which just goes to show why the manufacturers do it!
Yeah same, Having watched my machine give interesting time estimates while it was broken. I was hoping it was more about how it added up each task it was trying to do until it had to re do a task.
The washing machine example is great, here in NL (from what I've seen) the tap drain and power points are (required to be) always exactly the same. The only exception is that it use to be required to wire it directly into a pull cord and now you may use a normal water resistant wall socket.
The same thing needs to happen in software, the freedom to do whatever you like has to be limited by reasonable standards. That way we can reduce much of the bullshit you run into. We do have all kinds of standards of course but they aren't usually required by law.
It's a bit like turning a lawless society into a one with laws, it has to happen gradually one [sensible] thing at a time. It might be fun to (for a change) keep the number of laws under control from the start :P
When the author needed to make a hole for the power cable, he drilled it nicely and fitting a plastic insert.
When the builders cut holes for the water hoses, they just spent 10 seconds hogging out a rough rectangle with a Sawz-All and then wandered off for a smoke break.
This lines up with basically all my past experiences so the pictures were entirely unsurprising
This is why I DIY pretty much everything which doesn't require me to climb onto our roof. It often takes me longer overall, because of general lack of energy after work combined with kids activities all throughout the week and kids competitions on weekends. But once I get started, I find the process goes quite quickly and that often includes YouTube research time and finding videos that solve my exact problem with the exact model of appliance I'm working on. Even building my own cabinets and epoxying my garage floor was all quite easy and has led to higher quality results than I've seen in the past from contractors that we've hired as well as work done for friends and neighbors. Hopefully this weekend I'll be pouring a concrete countertop for my daughter's bathroom so we can get that room wrapped up.
It's just time consuming and life has a lot of demands. I'd happily pay for this work if I had any trust in the results. But good contractors are hard to find and already very busy.
> I'd happily pay for this work if I had any trust in the results. But good contractors are hard to find and already very busy.
Even the "good" contractors are unlikely to take as much care as you want them to for these sorts of things. Previous owners had a bathroom fitted, and did a really good job except for the tiles behind the toilet where they clearly didn't bother spending 45 seconds installing tile spacers between like 4 tiles.The rest of the job is flawless, but it annoys me every time I see it.
> I'd happily pay for this work if I had any trust in the results.
This is exactly how I feel.
What's even worse is that when I hire contractors, I invariably have to clean up their mess and fix things myself so that they're up to my standards.
I've had a contractor do a job so poorly that it was more trouble to fix their mess than it would have been for me to do the thing myself from the start.
Plus, contractors don't want to do your small, easily-DIY-able job. They want to do big, profitable projects. The contractors around where I live won't even get out of bed for less than $1,000. And, as others have mentioned, there's no craftsmanship anymore. They show up, do everything exactly to code as fast as they can, and leave. You're the one who has to live with the quality of work.
After multiple bad experiences with contractors [1], I decided I could fail all by myself, for free.
So I bought all the tools, all the books (now youtube videos), do some mockups (eg practice tiling in the garage) before each project, and still (mostly) hate the results.
But it's cheaper, I learn a helluva lot, and my third attempt is usually good enough.
[1] Just 4 weeks ago, after a storm, I finally figured out my very expensive backyard fence doesn't have footings. That contractor just stuffed the posts in the ground and filled in with dirt. Stupid me wouldn't have even thought to ask, much less verify that work. So now I'll be learning how to make a fence. So it goes...
This reminds me of a conversation I had with the BT engineer who came to connect the phone line, when I was in the latter stages of renovating before moving in. He happened to be renovating a similar house. We were in full agreement, from our experiences, that most of the time, you can do a better job than the professionals - because you care more. It shouldn't be like that, but it is.
(Unfortunately he then fitted a cheap-and-nasty master socket, which I had to replace with a decent quality one myself when it turned out to be causing a problem. Partly proving his own point.)
I've experienced similar with corroded fasteners -- the stubborn nut or bolt that breaks off in its hole and turns what could've been a 5-minute job into one exceeding an hour.
I just had a similar experience moving into my new flat this year (including the builder forgetting to drill the hole for the power plug). With absolutely no disrespect to the author, because I also learned this the hard way, I'll say that a little bit of BDUF would maybe have saved some time. It was my third iteration or so (sprint?) before I decided to just walk through the entire job step by step and see what other tools I would need and what else might go wrong. I can't just pop down to Lowe's or Home Depot in Singapore, after all.
This especially hits home because my current feature ticket ("Oh, yeah, it looks easy, a couple of days") was under-specified, and what specification there was had flaws. Two weeks later....
For this you have to know upfront that it will be a "big job"... In my case, after the second trip to the hardware store, I still thought that it's just a bad luck, instead of a "serious job". Ended up going several more times of course.
With all due respect, I agree that the blocked spigot was surprising, but the block is not hard to see if you just peek inside the spigot before connecting it. I struggle a bit to imagine how someone figures out they have to connect the hose there and even does all the connecting but never views the spigot from an angle where they can see the block.
I have no trouble imagining that since the spigot is already connected and sits in a cabinet (visible on the photo), you can't peek inside and it won't occur to you to poke it. Unknown unknown.
I also hate cleaning my spigot for that reason - there just isn't enough wiggle room in the cabinet to put it back leak-free after I unscrew it.
Good point. If he wasn't around when the sink was installed or at that point never knew that the spigot was important, there's be no reason to have noticed the block.
The spigot is too thin to fit a finger inside it, except for maybe the pinky finger, which is too short to reach the blocking part. Shining a light inside is also deceiving, because the blocking part is so far back, it might as well be the wall of the main pipe. The only way to realize there's a wall there, is to stick a screwdriver inside.
Pretty much all the pinch points encountered were things visible and could have been through about at the start of the project. They've done this 9 times before, you need a wrench/pliers to put the hoses on. It needs to drain (also that drain cover likely needed a only a flathead screw driver to remove. Drilling it out leaved burrs and usually they are designed to be popped out with a little force.) They lived in 9 places and don't have a drill that can chuck in a small hole saw. Seems surprising. But I guess the point is you don't know what you don't know.
430 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadI’m also impressed at how much suffering was saved by that E39 error instead of a backed up laundry room full of waste water.
Washing machines are cool.
A couple of other good perspectives on software estimation:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/software-estimates-have-never-work...
https://softwareforgood.com/estimates-lies/
Dishwashers OTOH are often plumbed in, sometimes hardwired, and fastened to the counter.
Not to mention most people don't know how to properly care for them (when was the last time you cleaned the filter?). If I moved into a new place I'd probably replace the dishwasher straight away.
This just seems like nothing less than purposeful absurdity for blog fodder.
Unless this guy is paid more than a half million per year, then the four hours spent on the install here are less than the cost of a new washer and dryer.
I'm sure there are many instances where there are replacement-worthy problems, and there certainly are people who have splurged on really nice appliances and will want to take them with them when they move, but I think those situations are uncommon enough that, overall, people save time and money by not lugging their washers and dryers with them every time they move. (In places where it's common not to move them, at least.)
If I have to move you bet my fridge, which I love, is coming with me. Same with my washing machine. I don't have a dryer because I'm in australia, which might explain the difference in fridge culture, too.
Ditto for the dishwasher, and clothes washer and dryer. The microwave, too, if it's a unit attached to the cabinetry, and not a freestanding on-counter model.
I suspect -- and didn't know this! -- that this arrangement is regional, even inside the US.
Though my understanding is the sale automatically includes all fixtures unless specifically excluded, and I suppose there's a little disconnect there: most major appliances are technically not fixed, but I think most people think of them like they are.
When I sell my home, I was thinking I'd definitely need to put a note on my washer/dryer and smart thermostat, saying I was going to take them with me and they weren't included.
I guess it depends a lot on your location and custom. Also if the appliance is "built in" (like an oven) or free-standing.
I've personally never left a free-standing appliance behind, and you certainly aren't getting my industrial-quality, 25 year old, top-loading washing machine for free....
That said, these things are negotiated as part of the sale. Buyers are aware ahead of time what they are or are not getting, they don't show up at their newly purchased house and go inside to see what appliances they have vs have to buy.
As an example, due to a design flaw, the built-in ice maker in my fridge doesn't go more than a week without getting clogged due to water flowing all over inside it and freezing. It's a bit annoying, to be sure, but it's a lot cheaper to just have a couple old-school ice cube trays in the freezer.
> you certainly aren't getting my industrial-quality, 25 year old, top-loading washing machine for free
I think most people wouldn't look at it that way. You'd be leaving behind your washing machine, and the next owners would get it "for free", but you'd be getting a different washing machine in your new house that the previous owners left behind "for free". But sure, if I was really attached to a particular appliance, I would probably want to bring it with me when I moved. I've never cared that much, though, and don't expect I will in the future.
(Also, while top-loading washing machines tend to last longer without needing maintenance than side-loading, they use so much more water.)
If I have a $300 washing machine, or a $3000 washing machine, the potential buyer will offer the same price to me.
I took the $6k fridge out of my home I recently sold and replaced it with the $500 fridge that was in the new house I bought. In my mind I saved $5500 right there.
In that regard, home equipment and tools maintenance from LED lights (driver and individual diodes), laptops (PCB repairs, thermal paste replacement/cleaning) to garden equipment (carb cleaning, sharpening, gasket, manifold, whatever replacements) is sort of my responsibility, regardless that professionally I'd spend my days on software.
Some german areas, renting doesn't come with a kitchen - you bring one and take it with you when you move out. IE cupboards etc
I find it odd that some american places don't have ceiling lights for every room. Instead the "light" switch powers some points around the room that you supply lamps to.
Different strokes for different folks.
Yeah, if you buy typical consumer grade ones.
I understand washers and dryers are on a downward trend: getting worse, harder to repair, and less durable. I paid quite a bit more to buy a commercial washer and drying that's supposed to last a long time. I'm definitely going to take it with me. I'm not going to leave it with someone who doesn't know what it is, just to downgrade to whatever was cheapest at Home Depot.
Oh hell no. You never know how the old renter treated the machines - for people with sensitive skin for example it can be a big no-no because the old renter used fabric softener by the truckload, never used dedicated washing machine cleaner (if you don't do this at least once every few months on maximum temperature, the insides of your machine will eventually stink horribly as bacteria develops an outright biofilm), or if the dryer vent has ever been cleaned.
The latter one in particular is a very nasty source of fires.
$295 of that is knowing to drill the hole in the drain.
If your washer is draining and working, there's no latent issue to worry about.
If the drain backs up and the pressure is high enough to force water out, it might be enough to pop any screwed cap too.
The ones I encountered had a tapered pipe point for several diameter drains. You saw off to the matching diameter of your hose.
Often you would also put on a flowback protection valve so dirty water from e.g. draining a full sink would not get into to hose of your appliance.
So why do they still charge so much? It's not just "knowing to drill the hole in the drain" but overhead like equipment (they need to buy all the expensive pro stuff, and keep it in working order; whereas you might just need the one tool to get your job done, they need all the tools to get all the jobs done), vehicles, gas, etc. And of course the down time traveling between jobs, office space if they have an office, employees, etc.
All these things bring their prices back up to much higher than it would cost you to do it yourself--if only you knew what to do and had the right equipment.
I don't think this has been true anywhere for at least several decades. Every single tradesman I've used tells me they are overbooked/overworked and there's no shortage of jobs.
I'm sure they have their less-busy seasons, but overall I doubt any tradesman can't find 40 hours worth of work/week.
Not to even think of materials, tools and such.
I sort of hemmed and hawed and said ok.
When the guy came by to install it, it was kind of amazing. he opened the box quickly with a box cutter, and started unwrapping stuff. Stuff that was needed came out, extras were discarded into the lid of the box, all within about a minute.
He had a special pole with a carpet covered T at the top to help get the old rail down safely and raise the new one. He ran all the lines quickly and efficiently. Lines that were too long were wrapped around a screwdriver to form a pigtail and efficiently run them with some tension the right length.
I think it was done in ~ 20 minutes and worked right the first time.
Simply amazing to see sometime who has done it before and really knows what they're doing. Made me question every install I would ever do after that.
They did the same thing with a garbage disposal install a year or two later. ba-da-boom, done.
I select the parts, but pay the vendor or someone local to assemble and test it. Not only do they do it every week (if not every day), if some part is DoA they have others on hand to swap in and out to find out which part is the problem, but I don't, see: everything changed since I built the last one 5 years before.
[1] 2009 i7-860, 2014 i7-4790K, 2016 i7-6700K (had moved countries, didn't take the old PC, just the SSD), 2019 TR 2990WX (again had moved countries, taking just the SSD), 2024 i9-13900HX laptop (beats the TR in every way, plus sips power and is portable).
Here's a current catalogue customisable much cheaper machine from them with ECC:
https://www.adamant.com/adamant-custom-intel-xeon-e3-series-...
I bought my current PC from a company that seems pretty good, and targets gamers with medium-high budgets.
The "liquid cooled" cpu cooler died after being bumped with a vacuum, and I had to replace it.
With that one thing that I was forced to do myself, I had to learn a lot about the system that I'd already have known if I'd ordered the parts myself. Worse, they no longer had a list of the exact parts in the system on their site. I had to pull things apart to find out what they were.
I'll be making my own PC from scratch again next time.
Of COURSE you can't just have a hole in the side of a pipe under your sink, but the existence of the fitting gives you a false sense of security that it's plug-and-play.
Vicegrips are very useful. And a pipe wrench ... commonly still called "Stillson" in these parts ... is also useful for shifting anything (even regular nuts) you don't have the correct spanner for and don't mind marking up a little. Chain wrench similarly.
Somebody hasn't read In the Beginning Was the Command Line, else they'd know you need a Hole Hawg for a job like that.
Well, taking the story as metaphor a bit further… there were several opportunities to learn more about which questions to ask, without so many trips to the hardware store. I’m surprised not to see any mention of that in this section about lessons learned.
Coming back to the topic of software, I’m not opposed to exploratory work as a requirements-gathering exercise. But at a certain point it bears a lot more fruit to stop doing and start finding out what you don’t know as a dedicated effort. When you can take one figurative trip to the hardware store with a big shopping list and set of open questions, you’re bound to spend more of your labor in an effective and relatively straightforward way.
But also, he trusted his dependent team / vendor too much (the new home builder) and assumed that part was done correctly when he started. I feel like in the software world, if you're integrating an SDK into a new project for example, you'd look around a bit to confirm you can integrate it like you have in the past on older projects.
There's nothing wrong with poking around the codebase a bit, or doing a proof of concept, to get a better handle on the estimate.
If you're not going to be moving houses every couple months, this means passing the buck to someone else. That is, the job needs to be done by some professional installers, because they're in a position to do the same thing day after day, and can gradually adapt to variance and evolution of products (and plumbing, and homes).
Also, and that's a second step, from the POV of those installers, it would be ideal if they could also pick the washing machine for you - they'd just pick pick the minimum amount of machines[0] to cover common scenarios, and specialize in installing them. That would significantly improve accuracy of their estimates.
But this is, unfortunately, how we get to turning everything in life into a service, and it doesn't sit well with me. I'm willing to accept bad estimates if it means I get to pick and own stuff. After all, this is the model ISPs operate on, and we all know what kind of hardware they install. My first criterion for picking ISPs has always been whether they let you put your own router in place of theirs.
Recently I asked for quotes on adding a power socket to a din-rail fuse box. Easy job: cut two cables to proper length, screw one of them to the neutral rail, use a splitter after the fuse to get phase.
"We don't do that, ask your power company". "Don't have time, 80€ before taxes, in 8 months".
I would do it myself, but it's in the shared area of an apartment house and the slightest issue with it would void pretty much all my insurances.
I've been getting a lot of the same, from reputable companies, and then if I want a single person to get it all done, I have to have a connection I can definitely trust and does quality?
Possibly - it depends on the situation. In my experience, the transaction costs of getting people in can be pretty high.
After all, if a guy has to drive 40 minutes to me, perform a 10 minute job, then drive 40 minutes back - I gotta expect to pay for 90 minutes of his time.
And if some install jobs involve lifting a 160 lbs machine by hand, that's a two-man job - now I'm paying for two guys for 90 minutes. Or they want to see the job to check if it needs two guys before they can quote accurately - meaning another round trip.
Oh, and my job doesn't let me work from home, so I gotta take a day off work.
2. Cost of explaining your situation to them.
3. Cost of back and forth email and calls.
4. Cost of scheduling a time that fits you both (and having to wait possibly several days).
5. Cost of having to be at home at that specific time.
There's definitely tradeoffs and they're very context dependent on your location/circumstances.
6. Cost of "hey man I actually don't have time for your job today, I'll do it next week, sorry"
7. Cost of they just don't show up and you have no idea what happened
8. Cost of trying to call them after 7 to reschedule, it goes to voicemail, but the voicemail is full so you can't leave a message, so you text them, but they don't read texts, so you just have to keep calling all them and hope to get lucky and catch them between jobs
9. Cost of you get frustrated by 8 so you decide to hire someone more established who has a secretary, but the secretary is clueless and gives you misinformation mixed with "I'll ask him and get back to you" (of course never gets back)
It took more than a week overall. I don't see a real world where you can involve professionals and get it done in just 4 hours. I would have been ecstatic with just 4 hours.
I first talked with customer support of an electronics store, I took bunch of pictures of my setup, I asked several questions before hand. I bought both bringing the washing machine and installation from an electronics shop with best reputation locally. It wasn't clear where the water extract hole should be, I did figure it out talking back and forth with another specialist though. But the shop said that they can't do installation there. So I said, okay, let's drop the installation, just deliver the washing machine to the room. I asked multiple times if that involves also bringing it to the 2nd floor. And the customer support said yes.
Then when the delivery finally came, the guy said they only bring to the front door and the first room, not 2nd floor. Luckily he was still able to help me out, we together brought it to the 2nd floor, but he was alone so wasn't prepared, and it weighed quite a bit.
In terms of installation he said he can't help with that.
Then I was talking to a specialist who had helped us on some other things, and with back and forth I managed to understand what to buy, but I had to do multiple shop trips, since the things I needed weren't in the really large construction shop I went to (related to water extraction). I'm not English speaker so I don't know the correct terminology for all of this here.
Then there were other issues, such as machine started vibrating after, etc, etc. Which I managed to solve eventually.
But point being is that even finding, managing, scheduling and using specialists can take way more than 4h that it took him.
How on earth can he make 5 trips to the hardware store in only 4 hours? Something is not adding up...
I think I inadvertently addressed my attitude toward estimating software by forgetting estimation was even part of the topic. Heh… IMO the real lesson is that no one has ever done exactly the same thing before, otherwise you’re almost certainly paying too much for someone to do it again. In which case estimating is futile, until you’ve done sufficient work to approximate already doing the task under estimation. You can estimate when you’re reasonably close to completion, but the important skill is learning to recognize patterns… including the pattern that you’re facing unknown unknowns, and an unknown scope of same… and then to make the path to resolution more efficient.
[0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
This is an important insight that I will try to use
Assuming 15 minutes each way to the hardware store, that’s 150 minutes or 2.5 hours total for just driving.
So talking with salespeople, checking out, and the whole process of actually installing the dishwasher would have to fit within 1.5 hours, which seems tight to me.
Even if you live in a city, getting to a hardware store usually takes at least 15 minutes unless you really live like right next door. Usually takes longer. Distance is a bad measure of the time it takes.
One can easily overestimate how fast walking and taking public transportation is and how close hardware stores are to people, and underestimate how fast cars are.
As a real world example you can consider this:
From a small village called Luvia, Finland, it takes 18 minutes to drive 19 km to a general purpose hardware store (K-Rauta Pori), while it can take easily 30 min to an hour to traverse this on foot from Pori city center (ie carrying everything yourself), or at least 16 minutes if you conveniently live right next to a bus stop (and there's absolutely not just a few minutes between rides).
When I moved into my current house it was suddenly a 40 minute trip. For the first couple years I couldn’t get anything done on Saturdays because I’d never needed to optimize away trips to the store before.
I can certainly see someone at this point deciding it isn't worth the effort, and hiring people from then on, but some people (myself included) often enjoy the process of learning these things.
> some people (myself included) often enjoy the process of learning these things.
A real senior developer knows when they're writing their own framework or library "for enjoyment", and when to just use the "boring technology" choice and work around any deficiencies it has for the task at hand.
The not taking part is likely 10mm chuck, even though the twist drill for hole saw tend to be 8mm. One the pictures has a 10mm plastic chuck. Lots of hole saw have even 6.3mm (the 1/4) hex drive for impact drivers.
Other than that it's quite baffling the guy had rather poor tools, and likely kept buying low quality tools too. Yet, he was very determined.
Accurate description of me as a programmer tbh
It could attach copper pipes to each other using pressure instead of getting out a torch and brazing. pretty amazing.
EDIT: this one: ($3000!)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011HX3HI0
Other than that it makes a lot sense to go w/ crimping if possible - quite surprised it's rated up to 2".
Sounds like the hardware store guy maybe sold him the wrong thing.
But what I'm baffled is that this kind of stuff is now the standard for "consumer-grade" drills, while the normal ones with power cords are "professional-grade"? When did that happen?
I have a "toy" 12v cordless Bosch drill (small ~cylindrical battery in the handle and not the square ones hanging underneath that you see in non-toy drills) that was approx the same price and I did pretty much exactly this same thing of drilling a 60mm hole through the side of a kitchen cabinet and it didn't even blink. The drill is a bit of a beast through for such a toy - I have drilled 16mm bits directly though double skin brick walls using it (installing external socket + fused spur) so not sure what level of crapness it takes to be below the toy drill I have.
This can take hours, or even fail altogether and then you're left with sopping wet laundry.
(Not saying this is true for all, some might just lie outright).
Newer washing machines rotate the drum slowly until the clothes separate, bringing the centre of mass closer to the axis of rotation, leading to much less vibration during the spin cycle. If the weight does not distribute after n cycles (e.g. if you put a single large and heavy duvet cover inside), some lower the spin RPM to a level that is deemed acceptable.
I've always assumed that they perform this measurement via the current curve of the motor during a rotation. Flattened curve -> distributed load, CG close to spin axis. Huge spike -> offset load, CG far away from spin axis -> bang bang bang walking washing machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mqy5uWXvzM
There's some humor in the parallels with software development.
The same thing needs to happen in software, the freedom to do whatever you like has to be limited by reasonable standards. That way we can reduce much of the bullshit you run into. We do have all kinds of standards of course but they aren't usually required by law.
It's a bit like turning a lawless society into a one with laws, it has to happen gradually one [sensible] thing at a time. It might be fun to (for a change) keep the number of laws under control from the start :P
When the builders cut holes for the water hoses, they just spent 10 seconds hogging out a rough rectangle with a Sawz-All and then wandered off for a smoke break.
This lines up with basically all my past experiences so the pictures were entirely unsurprising
It's just time consuming and life has a lot of demands. I'd happily pay for this work if I had any trust in the results. But good contractors are hard to find and already very busy.
Even the "good" contractors are unlikely to take as much care as you want them to for these sorts of things. Previous owners had a bathroom fitted, and did a really good job except for the tiles behind the toilet where they clearly didn't bother spending 45 seconds installing tile spacers between like 4 tiles.The rest of the job is flawless, but it annoys me every time I see it.
This is exactly how I feel.
What's even worse is that when I hire contractors, I invariably have to clean up their mess and fix things myself so that they're up to my standards.
I've had a contractor do a job so poorly that it was more trouble to fix their mess than it would have been for me to do the thing myself from the start.
if you're lucky
> do everything exactly to code
if you're lucky
> as fast as they can
if you're lucky
After multiple bad experiences with contractors [1], I decided I could fail all by myself, for free.
So I bought all the tools, all the books (now youtube videos), do some mockups (eg practice tiling in the garage) before each project, and still (mostly) hate the results.
But it's cheaper, I learn a helluva lot, and my third attempt is usually good enough.
[1] Just 4 weeks ago, after a storm, I finally figured out my very expensive backyard fence doesn't have footings. That contractor just stuffed the posts in the ground and filled in with dirt. Stupid me wouldn't have even thought to ask, much less verify that work. So now I'll be learning how to make a fence. So it goes...
This reminds me of a conversation I had with the BT engineer who came to connect the phone line, when I was in the latter stages of renovating before moving in. He happened to be renovating a similar house. We were in full agreement, from our experiences, that most of the time, you can do a better job than the professionals - because you care more. It shouldn't be like that, but it is.
(Unfortunately he then fitted a cheap-and-nasty master socket, which I had to replace with a decent quality one myself when it turned out to be causing a problem. Partly proving his own point.)
[0]https://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/g...
This especially hits home because my current feature ticket ("Oh, yeah, it looks easy, a couple of days") was under-specified, and what specification there was had flaws. Two weeks later....
Sounds about right!
I also hate cleaning my spigot for that reason - there just isn't enough wiggle room in the cabinet to put it back leak-free after I unscrew it.