Plumbing Supplies for DIY Dummies

The parts of a toilet

On the reference shelf of the Antisocial Network headquarters library you can find a copy of an interesting reference work, "The McMillan Visual Dictionary." Instead of long, wordy discussions of hundreds of everyday items, this dictionary includes thousands of labelled drawings. Some show the different parts of an item; such as the parts of a single-hung window; while others show varieties of an object, such as the many different types of shoes. Something like this must be how Elizabeth Punke "researched" her Homesteady.com post, "How to Identify Plumbing Parts."

Like many a topic at the old eHow.com, this "title" makes almost no sense. What did the OQ really want? It's likely that some homeowner found him-or herself elbow deep in a leaky toilet tank and wanted to know which thingy is the float and which whatchamacallit is the flapper. Unfortunately, we'll never know. We do know that any primer on plumbing that starts out this way is probably gonna be pretty useless:

"Often, plumbing joints are easily confused by one another and must be understood to prevent leakage of any kind."

That's pretty divergent from A) our experience and B) the claim by some dummy at HubPages that plumbing is just "a ladies [sic] craft project" and like working with Tinkertoys. You gotta wonder who's right? Punke's approach, unfortunately, can only be described as a shotgun version. Here: see what we mean (the weird construction, with an "action verb" in each sentence, by the way, is the fault of Demand Media):

• Of your bathtub, Elizabeth says to "See the drain pipe as it extends from the hole in the basin of the tub and curves at a 90 degree angle into a larger pipe."
• Then there's "See beneath the toilet to identify the flange, the opening for which waste water is extracted to the sewer."
• Or perhps, "Notice the U-joint that resembles a U-shape. Recognize the S-trap that holds a pocket of air within the line."
• And we liked "See the faucet arrangement, commonly made of two separate handles one for hot and the other for cold, and the faucet spout."

Yeah, we really wish Punke had included pictures, but that was never the DMS way. Whatever the case, all she did was list a few features of plumbing. She said nothing about actual parts – e.g., valves, washers, or pipes (not a word!); said nothing about copper, PEX, PVC, black iron; didn't talk about washers, flappers, or floats. No, all Liz did was list a few random features of plumbing fixtures. We don't find that useful or helpful, especially since some poor schmuck was probably typing "how to identify plumbing parts" into a search engine with some unknown piece of some unknown fixture in his or her hand. Punke could have easily sent someone to blowup diagrams of common fixtures, but that was – again – never the eHow way. Instead, our Dumbass of the Day just listed a few pieces-parts and collected her fifteen bucks with the collusion of an equally dumbass content editor.

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