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?

3 comments

3 Comments

thomasm412mo ago

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

wyatt5132mo 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.

the_morgan12d 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.