Plumbing and Beauty, the Dummy Version (Again)

mineral buildup in a pipe

Let's be honest: our researchers can be lazy sometimes: say, the Friday afternoon before a long weekend or mid-afternoon on New Year's Eve... and when that happens, they often revisit a dumbass freelancer they haven't seen in a while. That happened recently (dreams of Halloween candy?) when a staffer turned up an article by Tammy Poague of HubPages.com. It's a sister to another article we featured at the dawn of the website, and in the new one ("Help! My Pipes Are Clogged and I Don't Know Why") Tammy reveals herself to be just as clueless as ever...

Now, just why Poague decided that her article is about clogged plumbing remains a mystery. You see, once she'd gotten the word "clog" out of the way in the title, Tammy never revisited it. In other words, this is a bait-and-switch job: Poague had nothing to say about clogged plumbing, instead she wanted to sell her readers on water softeners! Her entire crapalicious "hub" is about hard water, corrosion, ground wires, and electrolysis – the same mishmash of misinformation that had already earned her one DotD award!

Here: let's look at some of Poague's more asinine statements:

"Mr. P. (my hubby) told me that the corrosion on the pipe is the cause of hard water build up. As the water travels through the plumbing, it leaves behind specs [sic] of minerals.": well, Mr. P. is just as dumbass as his wife! "[L]eaves behind specs"?? We presume she -- or he -- means "precipitates"... "Calcium and lime... cling to the pipe walls, building up, until the pipe clogs. When the water begins to leak outside the pipe, calcium/lime deposits are clearly seen building up around the leak.": For one, lime is calcium. For two, correlation is not causation – just because you have lime buildup on the outside of the pipes doesn't necessarily mean the mineral buildup caused corrosion – in fact, it probably didn't. Idiot. In a figure caption, "...hard water buildup on a pipe that was affected by electrolysis...": We tried to explain the last time. It's not electrolysis, it might be galvanic corrosion, but you're talking about corrosion again -- not clogs! On an image of a water softener, as drawn by Poague "...water flows in through a pipe from outside, runs across the mineral bed, and then flows inside the house...": So, Tammy, what's this "salt" thing for, the one you drew out to the side? Tammy's description of how a water softener works is, "When the minerals are flowing through the water conditioning device, the minerals cling to the sand. A salt solution then flushes the minerals out of the sand when the device is full. The minerals are then drained out of the drain pipe. ": So much misinformation, so little time!

We figure that, combined with Poague's hit-or-miss grammar, her questionable spelling, and her bait-and-switch title (where's the clog?); that sort of rubbish is more than enough to earn Tammy a second Dumbass of the Day award. Just wait until the staffers get around to having a look at some of her Bigfoot bullshit...

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