Troll Poo on my Shoe

The Internet is like a beautiful bipolar girlfriend who also has borderline personality and perpetual PMS.

I have a problem with my well water; it may affect the quality of the beer I brew. I had the water tested, and it has 0.68 parts per million of iron in some form or other. This is something like a hundredth of the calcium level, but beer likes calcium and hates iron. I have read that iron levels above 0.1 are bad, and I’m around 7 times that.

I started trying to decide what to do. It’s not simple, and I overthink things anyway, so it’s a puzzle.

1. Buy distilled water. This will actually work, but I don’t like the thought of paying $30 for 5 gallons of beer instead of $20. I have a really great homebrew store, so my grain is very cheap. If I buy distilled water, I will have to buy chemicals to add to it, because beer needs certain chemicals normally present in tap water. I plan to get some of those chemicals anyway, and I already have one of them: salt. My well water needs a little salt, epsom salt, and gypsum. I could buy a still and make my own distilled water, but it would be slow, and it would take maybe 20 batches of beer to make it pay for itself.

2. Get a reverse osmosis (RO) filter. This will suck iron out of my water while not harming the other mineral levels all that much. It’s a can of worms, however. I would have to decide whether to mount it under my sink, turning that area into a bigger maintenance and repair nightmare than it is already, mounting it under my laundry room sink, where it will not be much use for anything but brewing, and having some kind of mobile filter I can put away. RO filters often break, and I don’t want to have water gushing out into my cabinets in the middle of the night or while I’m on vacation.

3. Brewtan B. I plan to try this first. It’s some kind of tannic acid product. It’s made for brewers. The maker claims 1/4 teaspoon in 5 gallons of beer will chelate enough iron to protect the beer from off tastes and other issues related to iron. They claim it will not chelate the good metals enough to cause trouble. You can only use it in beers that are supposed to be clear. It will interfere with the production of cloudy beers.

If I use Brewtan B or RO water, I will have to go through the aggravation of testing again. I will need to know what’s in water that has been treated with Brewtan B or filtered. With distilled water, I would know the water only contained minerals I added.

I thought about this yesterday, and I went to the laundry room to look at the cabinet under the utility sink. I wanted to see how much room I had. When I looked, I found a wet cabinet floor with places where the Chinese melamine film had disappeared. There was some swelling, and the sawdust and boogers the fake wood was made from were escaping into the cabinet, making a mess.

I found out the cheap modern plastic pipes were the problem. The genius who installed the sink appears to have put some kind of sticky substance on the joints, and I think he also used a big wrench to tighten the collars. You’re not supposed to do any of that. The joints should be clean and hand-tight.

I had to take the P trap out, clean off the pipes, reinstall them correctly, and clean the cabinet floor. Then I left the cabinet open to dry, and I put a stainless bowl on a folded towel under the P trap. It still leaks maybe 10 drops an hour, but it will be fine until I get pipes that haven’t been abused. It only leaks when I’m using the sink, so it probably doesn’t leak enough to overcome evaporation.

My cabinets are very nice, for modern cabinets. They have wood exteriors, and they look good. The sawdust-product sides, bottoms, and shelves are sad signs of the times, but the cabinets are what would be considered relatively high end. They would not be cheap to replace.

I now have a water-damaged cabinet floor, and the sawdust will continue to get loose and cause problems if I don’t seal it in. Also, I have zero protection from future leaks. I want to fix the floor so it’s tough and waterproof.

I thought I would get some epoxy paint made for garage floors, but I wasn’t sure it would work well in a sawdust-and-melamine cabinet, so I went to a home repair forum to ask what people thought.

Of course, the thing that always happens happened. I was pounced on by a keyboard-raging numbskull.

If you frequent forums or make comments on the web, you will run into keyboard-ragers all the time, and they will be boring as well as annoying, because the stupid things they say all fall into certain well-known categories. It’s like there is one predictable guy out there, making all the stupid remarks, trying to prove his mental superiority but succeeding only in publicizing a screaming case of Dunning-Kruger.

They’re too hostile to leave people alone. They’re too dishonest to admit it when they’re wrong. They’re too stupid to know it.

I got some good suggestions from helpful people, but one guy said I should just get a piece of 1/2″ plywood. He didn’t explain how this would help. I don’t think he understood the situation.

I explained that installing plywood would mean replacing the whole cabinet, and that would mean replacing all the cabinets, and I didn’t want to spend thousands.

This ought to be obvious to anyone. You can’t just turn three screws, remove the bottom from a modern cabinet, slide a new bottom in, and replace the screws. They’re not made to be disassembled.

If I put plywood in the cabinet, I would have to remove the sink, counter, and doors. I’d have to remove the drawers and sides of the cabinet. If, by some miracle, the bottom of the cabinet was still intact and could be removed in one piece, I would have to take it out, cut the plywood to fit, install the plywood, sand the plywood, and seal the plywood with some kind of plastic coating like the garage paint I described above. If I managed to put it all back together, I would then have a cabinet fit for Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack. It would be a monstrosity. I would have to remove it entirely and replace it. Then I’d need a new counter and wall cabinets to match. I’d have to paint the whole room.

It’s just a stupid idea. I was nice to the guy who offered it, but it was a really stupid idea, and it’s obviously stupid. This is a nice house. You don’t mend expensive cabinets with Home Depot plywood unless there is some way to conceal the repairs. That’s not possible in this case.

Epoxy paint would be invisible when the cabinet was closed, and it would look good when they were opened. It would look better than a new cabinet. A big slab of plywood would be right out there in view, making the house look like Jethro Bodine’s double-naught spy bachelor pad.

The keyboard-rager could not let it go. He asked how buying a cheap piece of plywood was like buying a new cabinet. Everyone else in the thread understood completely. It’s like saying, “Why would you repaint your car if all you need is a new clear coat?”

If you can’t understand why you would need to repaint the car, you should never try to tell anyone anything about body work, because you don’t know anything.

I think he understood, too, but keyboard-ragers have to do their thing. He wanted me to spend the day arguing with him, so he could dismiss a long series of proofs he was wrong, anoint himself victor, and congratulate himself on his imaginary brilliance.

I told him he was wasting everyone’s time, and I offered no explanation. I should have ignored him, but this stuff has a way of wearing on you.

He picked the wrong day. Earlier in the day, I actually thanked God for creating hell, because I was thinking of all the stupid, dishonest, arrogant, cruel people in the world. Like the people who lie about Israel and defend the Hamas baboons. There are millions or billions of people who are simply intolerable in the long term. I thanked God for creating hell so the rest of us would eventually get a break.

I don’t know if the keyboard-rager lives in a converted chicken coop or what, but he seriously wanted me to write an essay explaining why you don’t use plywood to make a new bottom for an expensive cabinet. I refused to engage. I had a surface I could restore and improve pretty easily. If I went insane and tried to replace it with plywood, I would have a major eyesore, and it would have to be sealed up, just like the surface I have now.

The Internet is as frustrating as the world that created it. The more you engage, the more abuse you have to swallow, for no good reason at all.

Nobody defended the keyboard-rager, even though he has been on the forum longer than I have. That shows what they thought of him. Traditionally, Internet forum members have always attacked newer guys, regardless of who was right. When they let the newer guy win, it means they already think the other guy is a jerk.

I use forums all the time to get good information and save myself research. Sometimes I have good experiences, but every once in a while, I rattle a troll’s cage simply by walking by. One of the great things about heaven is that there will be no Internet there and no trolls.

I learned some good stuff from the forum. They now make silicone mats you can put under sinks. They have vertical edges so a mat will hold a couple of gallons of water if there’s a leak. Some have little gadgets on the front sides that let water run out onto the floor outside the cabinet. This lets you know you have a problem. It’s supposed to keep the water off the bottom of the cabinet, but I don’t think it will work, because it will run down the side of the mat and go under it. Depends on the geometry of the little hole where the water is supposed to come out. It has to project past the bottom of the cabinet without interfering with the door.

Anyway, a silicone mat will probably take care of nearly all leaks your sink develops. The problem, other than the poor protection from really big leaks, is that they start at about $20. I would need 8 of them, I think.

At present, I think it’s a bad idea. I could order a mat and see what it’s like.

Independently, I and a forum guy came up with a great idea: vinyl flooring. It’s easier than applying epoxy. You cut a sheet of vinyl to fit the cabinet perfectly. You stick it to the bottom of the cabinet with 3M 77. You use silicone to seal the corners where the vinyl meets the sides of the cabinet. When water leaks, it can’t get into the sides. It will run out the front, onto the floor. The vinyl will look great and last for eternity. I use vinyl flooring to hold up heavy, oily CA-sized lathe tooling, and it looks new after maybe 10 years.

I think I should put vinyl under all my sinks, and I should also put it in my drawers and on my shelves. I could do the whole house for maybe $150. Beats the snot out of shelf paper, which is worthless and a scam. Home Depot sells vinyl for a dollar a square foot.

Epoxy would work. I’m sure of it. But it would be a pain to apply.

But for the brewing water problem, my sink would still be leaking, so it wasn’t just a curse. I got a blessing out of it.

I have some Brewtan B on the way. Hoping for the best.