Sometimes it seems as my entire life is lived by accident. What I mean by that is that I’ve picked up many skills as a result of either being to broke to pay someone to fix something for me (teenager with an old car) or too cheap to pay someone else. For instance, since I learned how to replace an alternator as a teenager, I have a hard time spending $200 extra for an hours worth of work when I can just do it myself. I also have a few I.T. skills but again, that’s because when I worked for companies who were too cheap to hire an I.T. guy. I spent many hours on the phone with tech support learning how to fix stuff myself. In short, I have mechanical and technical aptitude but, unlike my brother who has the same kinds of skills (more advanced though), I don’t enjoy exercising those skills. It’s practically a curse because other people know I possess them and they ask me for help (the horror).

By the way, it’s not so much that I’m cheap it’s just that I am not a fan of unplanned expenses (like anyone is right?). So when my kitchen faucet started leaking instead of calling a plumber or repairing it I wrapped it with some silicon tape to kick the can down the road. Eventually though I had to get the dang thing fixed. I looked at how to do it on YouTube and finally decided NOT to pay someone else because I figured it would take me an hour. I usually underestimate on the time on these things and installing my new faucet (which looks awesome and works even better thanks for asking) took about 4 hours. Installing a faucet shouldn’t take four hours BUT while I was under my sink I found other issues.

A month ago my wife told me our dishwasher wasn’t draining… yet another expense I didn’t want to deal with so I had a look at my dishwasher (I know nothing about fixing dishwashers) and cleaned out the filter in the bottom which seemed to help a little. A couple of days later my wife said the dishwasher was draining again so I thought “problem solved”. Wrong. It began to get clogged again and I didn’t know why so we used our wet/dry vac to suck out the water mid-cycle (this went on for a month) because I’m stubborn and didn’t want the unplanned expense, lol. Okay, maybe I am a little cheap.

Flash forward to my replacing the faucet and while I was under my sink I thought “I should probably replace the air drain” that is fed by my dishwasher since I had already removed my old faucet and had plenty of room under there. For some reason, I don’t know why, a rubber hose from my garbage disposal hooks up to that same air drain. I’m at a loss for what the dishwasher and disposal have to with each other but when I pulled that hose off I checked it to see what it looked like and to my surprise it looked like the inside of the aorta of a 65 year old man who ate nothing but twinkies, potato chips and butter all of his life. It was clogged as you can see from the photo above.

So in the process of replacing the faucet I decided to also replace that hose with a new, clean one, then I replaced the air drain and put in the new faucet. The faucet works and looks great and lo and behold, the dishwasher drains now too! I still have no idea what the relation of the disposal to the dishwasher is but if you find your dishwasher isn’t draining then check that hose. Like me you just might save yourself hundreds of dollars!