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PhilGoetz comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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After having about 50 different housemates, I'm shocked by how few people have basic home-maintenance knowledge. Things like:
The others were obvious to me, but I don't understand these two. I've been disobeying them for a long time without any problems.
Tupperware runs the risk of melting close to the heating element. Metal and plastic/wood expand at different rates in dampness and warmth, so the interface can weaken if they're washed in the high heat of the dishwasher. That said, you can usually get away with both of these things.
Most tupperware should be "dishwasher safe", meaning it's been tested to high temperatures and won't melt even in the lower rack of the dishwasher. The real problem with putting tupperware, or indeed any plastic container, in the bottom rack is the water jets. The jets shoot out of the aerator (that's the plastic spinny thing on the bottom), and will blow light objects around the dishwasher instead of scrubbing them out. Putting tupperware on the top rack restricts their movements.
I think there is vocabulary confusion happening here.
Real Tupperware -- the expensive stuff -- is nigh-indestructable. Some of it is made out of polycarbonate, the same material used for windshields in fighter jets and in presidential limos. At the thickness used in the Tupperware line, it is not quite bulletproof, but it is still very, very tough. You don't have to worry about it in the dishwasher.
Lower-end Rubbermaid plastic containers are much cheaper and not made out of the same material. (Rubbermaid does have a "premier" line that is supposedly comparable to true Tupperware.) These bins should not be placed in the lower rack of the dishwasher.
Agreed. Also, for light objects, it is handy to have something to hold them down, even on the upper rack. I have a small plastic-covered-wire rack which I put over light objects (normally plastic ones) on the top rack of a dishwasher to prevent them from getting flipped over.
I had a teapot cover fall into the heating spiral and partly melt. Thats not recommend.
Weird. I live in France, and I have never seen a dish-washing machine with an exposed heating element.
many people would say: don't put knives in the dishwasher at all.
Meaning, good kitchen knives...tableware is fine. But kitchen knives (slicers, dicers, etc) depend on very thin foils at the blade edge. The chemicals and heat involved in dishwashers can damage the blade.
(this is only marginally resolved by using serrated knives...those may not be damaged by dishwashers as much, but I have yet to find one that works as well as a pretty good kitchen knife that is even marginally maintained)
Henckels do a really nice serrated knife. That being said - they also do really nice proper knives. They're really expensive, but if you have, say, a mother who never ever sharpens her knives and therefore believes that only serrated knives are "sharp", a Henckels knife is a great present.
Aside from melting the plastic, lightweight containers can get flipped in the dishwasher, fill up with water, and then get not quite clean. If you put them on the top rack, they're farther from the jets of water, and are less likely to be tossed around.
Ok. I confess that this one more than any of the others makes me seriously worry about how good my theory of mind is. How do they think their heating systems work?
They think that the furnace burns at a different temperature depending on how high the thermostat is.
Couldn't it just be an erroneous application of (an intuited version of) Newton's law of cooling, which says that heat transfer is linearly proportional to heat difference? They assume that the thermostat temperature is setting the temperature of the heating element, and then apply their intuited Newton's Law.
Seems pretty rational to me.
For example, this absolutely works with say, an electric stove.
This is actually implementation dependent. Though the most common implementation of a thermostat is just an on-off switch for the heater, it is possible to have a heater with multiple settings and a thermostat that selects higher heat settings for greater temperature differentials.
Also, turning the thermostat up extra-high means that you don't have to go back and make the temperature higher if your initial selection wasn't warm enough.
Even with an ordinary thermostat, cranking it up can be effective in some realistic situations. If some corners of the house take longer to heat up than the location of the thermostat, they'll reach the desired temperature faster if you let the thermostat itself and the rest of the house get a few degrees warmer first. Or to put it differently, scoffing at people who crank up the thermostat is justified only under the assumption that it measures the temperature of the whole house accurately, which is a pretty shaky assumption when you think about it.
As the moral of the story, even when your physics is guaranteed to be more accurate than folk physics, that's still not a reason to scoff at the conclusions of folk physics. The latter, bad as it is, has after all evolved for robust grappling with real-world problems, whereas any scientific model's connection with reality is delicately brittle.
That's an important lesson, generalizable to much more than just physics.
This general point is seriously deserving of a top-level post.
Since about 50 years ago all but the lowest-end thermostats are designed to be "anticipators" — they shut off the heat before the requested temperature is reached, then gradually approach it with a lower duty cycle. More often than not, the installer doesn't bother to fine-tune this, in which case it can take a long time to reach equilibrium. Turning it a few degrees warmer than you actually want isn't a completely stupid idea.
(reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermostat)
Thank you for reassuring me that I'm not crazy :)
Do you actually think a typical person has a coherent theory of how a heating system with a thermostat works?
It's a very human and intuitive way of thinking. People bundle together various things that seem like they should somehow be related, and assume that if something has a good or bad influence on one of these things, it must also influence other related things in the same direction. When you think about it, it's not a bad heuristic for dealing with a world too complex to understand with full accuracy.
I would imagine it's simply an application of the extremely general (and useful) rule of thumb "if doing something has an effect, doing it a lot will probably have a lot of that effect".
Depending on the type and size of the heater relative to the area to be warmed that statement could very well be false.
I have lived in some places where turning up the heater produced much hotter air than at a lower temperature, which would heat a house much more quickly. These houses had relatively modern central air conditioning systems with electric furnaces, or really good gas furnaces.
I've also lived in places with radiators or really crappy wall mounted heaters where it wouldn't make any difference at all.
Arent these self correcting? I would expect to make this mistake only once.
The combining factor seems to be an ignorance into how things work, and how to maintain them. At least that is my observations of flatmates..
I think these are just remnants of times when colors were made of something much less resistant to heat. These days it's not a problem at all.
I've been mixing everything and washing at 90C, and I've only had problems once ever, with some green towels which made everything green. Colored clothes are perfectly fine at that temperature.
I had two mishaps a few years ago. Once A blue pant that darkened a whole load of white shirts, another time a red one. The color wore off after a few washes, but I don't recommend it. Even if most items are fine, just one is enough to ruin a whole load of clothes.
I still have issues with bright reds, even wearable clothing. Not so much other colors.
(Or replaced with our lifetime stay sharp guarantee!)
No.
Those are not called "knives", those are called "saws".
We (family) got some knives at marriage, and just sort of puttered along. Then I bought her some "good" knives, which arrived fairly sharp.
Oh. My. Sourdough bread in SLICES instead of ragged hunks.
Then we used them for a couple years, and I realized that since these were low-end "chef quality" knives (I'm not a chef. I don't much care about cooking, and I don't talk shop with real chefs, so that may not be an accurate statement, but the reviews I read indicated that these were as good as MUCH more expensive knives except in maybe the quality of the handle), that maybe we should get them sharpened, so I found a place in STL that had a knife sharpening service for local restaurants and went there.
They refused to even consider sharpening our steak knives. The guy called them "cheap junk". So we bought some of of the same brand as our other knives (basically the cheapest he had in stock). (Victorinox "Fibrox")
Oh. My. Steak is SO much easier to deal with now. Bread (on the rare occasions we have it ) cuts cleanly. Tomatoes and oranges can can be sliced as thin as you want. Limes for your gin/vodka? Clean cuts.
Knives are tools. Tools need maintenance or replacement.
Washers and dryers really need to come with more thorough instructions printed on them, for people who don't know anything about clothes. It would be nice to know what the different settings actually meant practically.
Many articles of clothing have instructions like that on their tags, along the line of "machine wash warm with like colors, tumble dry low". This doesn't help someone figure out things like 'red and blue are not 'like colors' but blue and yellow can be' or what to do with a red-and-blue striped shirt, but it's a start.
Especially if you like green. :P
Do not leave pieces of colored paper in the pockets of clothing before washing.
I wash my dark blues with my black and dark brown clothing, and my medium and light blues with my other non-red medium and light colored clothing, and haven't noticed any cross-contamination of colors. I haven't tried it with reds, but my understanding is that red things are much more prone to bleeding than any other color and should definitely be washed separately.
I wash all of my colours together, with no problems, but I also always wash them on cold/cold. If I ever have to wash something red on hot, I hope that I'll remember to separate it from the blue clothes, but I might not.
I wash my red things with my other colorful clothes. I haven't had problems.
Apart from the first few washes of a red thing I wash all my clothes in together. I haven't had problems either. :)
I have had exactly one load of laundry go wrong ever due to colors running. (Purple.) I pretty much blatantly ignore washing directions, except for formalwear and business suits. If something cannot survive being thrown in with the regular wash, it's too much trouble to keep. (It helps that I thrift the vast majority of my wardrobe, so I'm rarely out more than $5 or so if something is ruined.)
And those are easy to handle - drycleaners!
Classic.