Hot take: using too much water in my wash kit was making everything worse

After fighting with wet ash clumps for 6 months on a job in Portland, a customer’s plumber friend told me to barely dampen the brush head and it cut my cleanout time in half has anyone else been drowning their flues without realizing it?

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3 Comments

thomasm414mo ago

Took me way too long to figure that out, you're not alone.

10

wyatt5134mo ago

Wait, you're telling me I could've been using less water this whole time instead of making mud pies in my chimney? Ngl I feel personally attacked by how much time I wasted wrangling wet ash that looked like oatmeal. Tbh I'm half convinced the old-timers just let us suffer through it as some kind of initiation ritual.

6

the_morgan2mo ago

Three years of oatmeal-sludge cleanup before someone finally showed me the dry ash scoop. Yeah, they definitely let us figure it out the hard way on purpose.

5