westend wrote:
djdawg wrote:
westend wrote:
...The stove burners can be soaked in a sauce of baking soda and water to remove grime....
So I've done this overnight and they seem to be better but still a lot of gunk on them. I just filled up the sink with water and dumped a big load of baking soda in there...not sure if it was a sauce per say...just water with baking soda. Would it hurt them if I took a scrubber to them and scrubbed them gently? I'm not really sure what's inside of them...propably just chambers and metal?
Yes, you can scrub them. I discovered the baking soda treatment when I was looking for something to clean my RV oven. I was pretty sceptical but the introductory price was low so I proceeded. What I did was to mix baking soda and water to a consistency of toothpaste. I applied the paste and let it sit, every so often spraying the paste with water to keep it active. This is important, the baking soda works on grease and burned solids only when wet. After a few days the grime and burnt pizza bits slid off. I'll never use caustic based oven cleaner again. The soda paste does just as good a job but takes a bit longer.
If you have one of the older galvanized water tanks and a small diaphragm compressor to pressurize the tank, I'd think a bit about changing to a demand pump system. I kept mine for a few reasons: 1) Amount of noise, the compressor makes little noise and only runs when a set low pressure is reached. The demand pumps cycle every time water is removed from a pipe 2)If the demand pump fails, you are without water until it's replaced or repaired. With a cheap air compressor, you can pressurize the system should the built in fail. Mine even has a Schrader valve on the fill cap so the tank can be pressurized at a filling station.
I also found a couple other features that make the pressure tank a better system: winterization is a snap, hook a compressor and air hose up to the cap and you're soon done. There is no need to have a separate "city water" valve or entry. Hook the hose up to the cap and you're done. I don't use a regulator, the tank won't break and I have all new Pex pipe that will handle city water pressure.
these are great points about the positives of the pressure tank option... spot on with the cheap compressor option (we did that one weekend before swapping the tank. with ours it had a very obvious metal taste with the water (i'm sure it was the tank because our well water was great)and i believe the tanks are lined with something (i'm thinking glass but i may not be sure) ours either had broken or maybe the galvanized fittings were rusting. the whole system is a good idea but anytime you have two different types of metals touching each other you're going to eventually have issues (i assume they didn't have dielectric unions back then?) we gave the dimensions of the room we had (underneath the bunk) to a local rv dealer and they ordered one... i believe with a pump it came out to 160$. we no longer had the metal taste or the rust (because all the galvanized stuff was gone) but i also agree with everything above for the positives of the pressure tank. if it were me i would still switch it out.
