The simple things first.....

 7:46 am - Saturday - July 18th - LPG&RVR - 62° F, humidity 16%, cloud cover 15%, wind 12 mph out of the southwest....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 93° F.  On this date in 2018 TLE and I were in Northwest Harbor, Maine.....

....having lunch art the Asticou Inn, one of our favorite restaurants on Mount Desert Island.

Friday began benignly enough.  We slept in, had our coffees, I composed and published my latest blogosphere offering, then I headed outside to dump our black tank.  Once that was done I settled in to watch the second round of 'The Open'.  While I watched 'The Open' TLE started her first load of wash in our Splendide washer/dryer combo.  A typical first day of our extended weekend (3 days this week).

Sometime after 12 pm TLE announced that the washer did not drain after the spin cycle.  She tried he spin cycle again, and once again the washer drum did not drain.....doh!  I just wrote a few days ago how well our Splendide has run since we bought it back in July of 2020.  After she removed the soggy clothes from the washer I set about mopping out the water in the drum, then opened the inspection port to see if anything was clogging the drain, or pump; no clogs.  I was hoping for a clog, so I could clear it and get back to watching 'The Open', but no such luck.

Removing the Splendide from its cubbyhole is not for the faint of heart.  First TLE has to remove EVERTHING from the three pantry shelves, which takes about 30 minutes, then I remove the shelves, and the door structure so I can begin to slowly remove the Splendide, which takes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour.

I want to stop here and talk about the fundamentals of TROUBLESHOOTING.  When troubleshooting (such a long word, with such simple advice) one should always begin with the simplest cause of the problem, in this case a clog somewhere in the drain line, and work your way up to the most complicated cause.  Do we all agree on that principle?  I have written about this on many occasions, but for some reason I had a brain freeze, and started with the most complicated thing first....removing the Splendide from the pantry.  I should have started at the point where the the drain hose enters the gray water tank.

Okay, back to the troubleshooting.  Once I had checked the inspection port and found no clog, I should have stopped right there, and thought about what to do next, but I didn't.  Once the Splendide was out of the pantry, right in the middle of the kitchen, I removed the back to get a look at the water pump, and drain hose.  Nothing looked out of the ordinary.  I spent too much time trying to figure out how to disconnect the drain hose from the water pump, before deciding it was impossible.  

It was at this point that I did do some thinking; always a good thing to do when facing an unfamiliar problem.  By this time I was pretty sure the Splendide drain hose was not clogged, so I disconnected it from the Newell drain hose, and blew air back through the hose to the pump, and found it was not obstructed.  I then blew air the other direction through the Newell drain hose and found it was clogged, and would not allow the air to pass through.  Okay, at least we know what is clogged now, and it wasn't the Splendide, so almost two hours of our time was blown doing something which didn't need doing.....removing the Splendide from the Pantry.

I went out side to the driver side of the water bay where the drain hose from the pantry area is connected to the gray water tank....

....the plumbing fitting Newell used 44 years ago narrows significantly where the red hose connects to the PVC fitting, and I suspected that was where the clog was.....

....I had to cut the red hose off the galvanized steel connector, and when I did I found that a Band-Aid was stuck in the narrow tube, and that was the cause of the clog....a stupid BAND-AID  To think if I had started my troubleshooting HERE, I would have detected, and fixed the problem in less that 30 minutes....double DOH!

By the time I had reinstalled the Splendide in its cubbyhole, reinstalled the shelving, the doors, and TLE had put away everything it was 5:45 pm....almost 5 hours since I began troubleshooting the 'clog'.  Some lessons are hard to learn....START WITH THE SIMPLE THINGS FIRST.

Thanks for stopping by!