Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Stuff I had nowhere else to put :-)

DIY - Do It Yourself, Home Repair, Miscellaneous

Want an affordable pool cleaning robot that works? Try the Seauto Crab

We bought our home in 1998 and it came with a 20×40 in-ground pool. Here we are 26 years later and I will tell you that a pool is way more maintenance than you think if you’ve never had a pool. We have tons of great memories of the kids growing up, pool parties with them and family visits that have made it worth it. These days, the hardest thing for me is the routine cleaning of the pool because it takes so long. It could take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours depending on how dirty it was because I didn’t have time to keep it clean continually. I have to balance a day job, my own business and family — that doesn’t leave time for pool cleaning.

This past spring (May 2024), before we even opened the pool, my wife I are started wondering if a pool robot might be worth it because I just do not have the time any more to do it. We’d dismissed this in past years due to the cost. Well, it was time to revisit that.

Prices had dropped a lot and there were tons and tons of options on Amazon. There are pool robots out there with all kinds of price points and we paid close attention to the size pool the manufacturer said they could handle and what angles. The last part mattered because our pool has a 3-4′ shallow end and then about a 9′ deep end with an angle at the transition between the two and angles near the bottom of the deep end. We also wanted it to be battery operated.

After reading a many, many reviews and visiting websites, we decided to buy the 2024 edition of the Seauto Crab [click on this link to open the listing at Amazon in a new tab]. At the time, with a coupon applied and taxes added in, the total was $423.99. It may seem like a lot of money, and it is, but there are far more expensive robots out there and we had to do something. In checking the pricing now, it’s $359.99 before tax with free shipping.

This photo was from June 24th – I just put the robot in the pool. The treads on the left and right of the unit move it. There are black rubber wheels with flaps on them both front and rear that do the cleaning and push debris towards the inlet. The blue LED shows it is on and charged. My best guess is that the two silver “dots” just below the blue inverted “U” are sensors that tell the unit if it is submerged or not. It will not turn its electric motors on unless it is underwater and also tell it when its out of the water when cleaning the side walls of the pool.

Now, most robots get very mixed reviews and the Crab was no different. My strategy was to order it, put it to immediate use and rely on the Amazon warranty. If you have an electronic device, the odds that it will fail are the greatest within the first 30 days statistically so use the heck out of it and find out. Absolutely do not let it sit in the box – put it to immediate use. Amazon will back you up if there is a problem in those first 30 days.

I timed the purchase so we would get it, charge it and drop it in the pool. There was a few day delay when UPS accidentally routed the box to Texas and then set it back to Michigan but it was delivered on June 17th and was first dropped in the water on the 18th.

We had just opened our pool and did the initial vacuuming but it was still pretty messy. I was charging and deploying the Crab 2-3 times per day for the first week. It tapered off to the point where I now do it daily – by the way, I am writing this on August 9, 2024.

The pool was definitely a mess. I’d drop in the crab, let it run until it shut down, charge and do it again. This photo was taken on June 18th at 5:24pm.
This is on June 19th at 7:28am. It was just getting ready to drop it in the pool. It had probably run 1-2 cycles at this point.
June 20th at 12:27pm. Probably 4-6 cycles at this point.
June 26th at 3:52pm. Most of the debris was gone. Some of what you see were patterns on our pool liner. I did not do any vacuuming or use of a leaf bag. This was all the robot. In fact, I have not vacuumed the pool since we bought the robot. I did occasionally use a leaf bag use for small branches or to clean maple leafs off the surface. I also have brushed algae of spots on the wall twice but nothing like the old days.
June 15th at 6:50pm. The pool was in amazing shape. We have a big maple tree nearby and leaves drop in the pool. Eventually they sink and the crab picks them up.
June 24th – one of the funniest things during the first couple of weeks was watching one our dogs watch the robot. This is Hercules – he ignores it now but he just couldn’t figure out what it was. It sure startled him the first time it came up out of the water doing a wall 🙂

I did some math and we’ve used it 53 days now and well over that many times so maybe 75 times on average let’s say. As I am writing this blog post, it’s out there doing its job cleaning the pool and our pool has never been this clean.

The pool is amazingly clean. The bottom has never been this clean – ever. I’m very impressed.

Let’s Get Into Some Details

The unit arrived fully assembled and consists of the Seauto Crab unit, a charger and a retrieval hook that goes on your pool pole – assuming you have a standard full size pool pole. All you need to do is charge the unit for the first time. The top LED will turn blue when charged and then turn off after a few minutes.

The manual is a quick read – no huge insights but it does help you learn more about the unit and what the color codes of the top LED mean.

When you plug in the charger, a light on the unit turns red and goes out when it is done. The unit will run about 2-2.5 hours on a charge. The overwhelming majority of the time at least, it gets near a wall and shuts itself off. I don’t know if it’s by luck or design but I can only think of one time out of 75+ cycles where it was towards the middle of the pool. It makes retrieval with the pool pole and hook very easy.

This is how I find it most of the time when I go out and check after a few hours. The LED on top has changed from blue (charged) to red (discharged) and it usually stops by a wall. I have to think this behavior is programmed as it almost always stops by a wall – not the same spot but by a wall somewhere in the pool.
I’ll find it in the pool with the red light on. I’ll pull it out, spray it off, clean the filter basked and then hook it up to charge in our pool shed.

There is an app for it and it let’s you set the speed of the robot and whether it just does the floor, walls or both (All cover mode). When we first started cleaning the pool, it was pretty dirty on the bottom so I set it to slow and floor only with the app each time – it doesn’t recall the setting.

The app connects to the robot via Bluetooth and it doesn’t take very much water to block the signal so I would set it before I put it in the pool. Now, I just drop it in the pool in all cover mode.

I should point out a reason you need the app – once or twice it has automatically downloaded and installed a firmware update to the Crab. Obviously there’s some type of computer in there.

It actually does a really good job cleaning. Debris is sucked into the bottom and filtered through a very fine mesh basket. If there is something that will not fit in the bottom slot, it’s not going to be able to pick it up but that thing vacuums up all kinds of stuff. If the baskets gets plugged up, I imagine it would no longer be able to clean but I didn’t encounter that – maybe at the start but not that I can recall.

I honestly did not know what to expect. Did it have sensors? Would it move in a grid? Did it know where it had gone? Well, it does its job through random motions. It can’t do our entire pool and the walls in one charge. When the pool was really dirty, I could see it was making progress each time. Now, it is maintaining everything.

It’s fascinating how it does walls. It has a thruster (enclosed propellor) on the top. It turns on, the Crab engages it’s tracks and it goes right up the pool wall. There are sensors on the top that tell it when it has gone out of water and it goes back down. When it first did it, one of our dogs just did not know what to make of it and stood on the edge of the pool a few feet away just watching it.

The robot is using its thruster and going up the wall while scrubbing it. Another perk of all this activity is that it really keeps the water moving around and we have fewer spots of warm vs cold water plus the chlorine gets around better. It seems like we have less algae than in the past. I had to solar copper ionizers last year also. The only difference is the robot. I still have to put a brush on the pole but it happens a lot less – maybe only twice so far this season have I needed to brush off algae starting in some spot.

Somehow, the thing remains upright. I carry it by the handle and place it in the water. It sinks down and engages its thruster – maybe its orienting itself I am not sure. If it is clipping right along and goes down the decline into the deep end, it actually pops a wheelie with the front of the crab lifting up slightly as the unit propels itself downward with the rear tracks and flap wheel.

I will set it down in the water and it slowly sinks evenly to the bottom. Once there, it kicks on its thruster – maybe as a test or something – and off it goes. I have never found it upside down in all the cycles that I have run it.
June 19th – the crab only had this happen once. It was cleaning the steps and got stuck. It you notice, the top is pointing at a back and downward angle. I want to say the app downloaded and applied two firmware updates since we bought it – definitely one for sure – and this has never happened again. All I can guess is that either Seauto discovered this situation and fixed it themselves or they got feedback from customers. It still regularly does the stairs so it’s not avoiding them – it just seems to be able to navigate them correctly now. Hercules, our dog who was the most curious about what was going on, had no idea what to make of the robot.

I should point our locomotion is via a rubber track/tread (like a bulldozer or tank) on each side. There are flap wheels in the front and back that are cleaning the surface and funneling debris towards the inlet where the filter basket is at.

Like I said earlier, it runs until power gets low, seems to almost always stop by a side and I fish it out. You take the clear top cover off and then the cover of the filter basket. I use a hose and water to clean the mesh filtering basket and spray the debris into a bucket. I then toss the water and debris into a corner of the yard. It takes less than five minutes to clean everything. I do like to rinse the unit off so the chlorine contact is lessened. Chlorine is an oxidizer and it will take its toll on plastics and rubbers over time.

These next photos may make it look like it takes a lot to dump the filter and clean the crab but I can pull it out, clean it and start it charging in less than five minutes. The first thing you do is flip out and down the grey tabs on each side of the clear outside housing. By the way, these next photos are from a few different cleanings taken at different times so there are different amounts of debris in them.
Next you are looking at the actual clear cover of the filter. Yes – two covers – the outer one and the filter one. To remove this, lightly press on the black tabs on the left and right that are sticking up and lift up. Sometimes I have fine sand sitting in the depressed areas on top of this cover and I just hose the cover off. Actually, I always hose the unit off during each step of disassembly to both get rid of any debris and to get the chlorine off the plastic.
This was on July 16th. We had quite a storm and there were a lot of leaves that had fallen in the pool and sunk to the bottom. The unit can scoop up quite a bit assuming the debris can fit in the intake slot on the bottom.
This is from a cleaning on July 15th. I wanted to point out the rubber flap on the bottom. Water and debris are pushed up and the rubber flap bends open to let them in. When it stops, the rubber flap closes trapping the debris inside. There have been a few times, not a lot, where something had prevented the flap from fully seating so when I pulled the unit out of the water I could see some debris sinking down as the water drained from the unit.
The filter basket is a fine mesh. It even traps sand.
I rinse the filter basket out and have the water and debris drop into an old chlorine bucket. It doesn’t take much to get it all out. I cleaned the bucket before cleaning and then after so you could see the sizes of various debris it picks up. I’ve had a few times where a small end of a branch with leaves on it falls in and the unit can’t pick that up but it’s the exception thankfully.
Some fine sand gets caught inside and I just rinse it out while I rinse off the unit overall. The yellow you see on the burgundy deck stain is sand from prior cleanings.

I did find one small issue – the clear top outer cover doesn’t readily just go into place on our unit. You never want to force or whack plastic into place because eventually it will snap. I found a workaround – If I put the cover on and stop just short of all the way down and lightly pull the left side outwards, it goes right on without forcing. It might just be our unit that has that issue but that’s the only “trick” I can think to pass along.

I then put the unit in our pool shed on a plastic bin that just happens to be there and plug the unit in to charge. I think it charges in about three to four hours – I’ve never stopped to really time it.

That’s it. I’m perfectly happy with it and so is my wife. She’s actually given it a pet name of “Flounder”. I usually call it the pool robot still but she and the kids now call it Flounder … ok, whatever works 🙂

In looking at reviews on Amazon, I’d take them with a grain of salt. I never expected artificial intelligence, a miracle worker or a $400 robot compared against a $2,500 robot. I also knew that I needed to put it to immediate use and that it might fail – it didn’t. If it had, I would have worked directly with Amazon to get a refund. I didn’t need to.

How long will it last? I honestly don’t know. I will rinse it down and store it indoors when Winter comes and we’ll see next Spring. We still have until late-September when we close the pool for the season. If something changes, I’ll update this post.

Would I recommend the unit based on experience? Yes, I definitely would. You have to understand something – our pool has never ever been this consistently clean. I still have to add chlorine, keep the water chemistry in check, clean the copper ionizers and the skimmer but my time vacuuming has gone away – I haven’t vacuumed once since we bought the crab. I have used a leaf bag on the pool pole a few times but boy did I free up time and get a clean pool.

I use it once a day now to maintain the pool and the results are amazing. I’m so busy that if I do anything it comes at the expense of something else. I can make the time to put it in the pool (2-3 minutes) and then pull it out, clean it and hook it up to the charger (less than five minutes) for results like this.

Summary

Our experience with the Seauto Crab 2024 edition has been great. I would even use the word “amazing” to describe the unit. If you want to cover yourself, buy it off Amazon (I did), run the heck out of it and if there is a defect, it will probably happen in the first 30 days while Amazon’s warranty coverage is still active.

If you’re looking for a $350-400 price point pool robot, it’s doing a great job for us. Hopefully you will have the same experience as us.

I hope this post helps you out. To be clear, I wasn’t paid to write this and have no affiliation with Seauto. I’m sharing our experience with the crab and if you want to buy it from one of the Amazon links on this page then great – I’ll get a small commission and want to be clear that I wouldn’t write this if it was a disappointment.

Click here for the listing on Amazon.

Note, I have to buy all of my parts – nothing here was paid for by sponsors, etc. I do make a small amount if you click on an ad and buy something but that is it. You’re getting my real opinion on stuff.

If you find this post useful, please share the link on Facebook, with your friends, etc. Your support is much appreciated and if you have any feedback, please email me at in**@*********ps.com. Please note that for links to other websites, I may be paid via an affiliate program such as Avantlink, Impact, Amazon and eBay.

Miscellaneous

My WordPress Contact Form Was Drowning Me With Spam Until I Got CleanTalk

I want to share a WordPress plugin that made a huge difference for me. I was getting spammed via my contact form many times every day and it was getting very frustrating. I absolutely hate spammers and needed to find a solution that could be installed by a non-technical person.

I started by searching on the new WordPress plugins page for “contact us form” and started reading. I thought I would need to get a new contact form with some kind of security mechanism like CAPTCHA.

I put a lot of emphasis on number of installs and reviews. A ways down the list I found “Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk” and started reading the details. CleanTalk’s own website is linked to here.

They were at 2,861 reviews with five stars (that’s a heck of a feat to pull off all by itself) and 2,646 of them were five stars. The plugin also had over 200,000 installs. A plugin can’t get scores like that unless it actually works.

The following bulleted list is off the WordPress plugin page:

Anti-Spam features

  • Stops spam comments.
  • Stops spam registrations.
  • Stops spam contact emails.
  • Stops spam orders.
  • Stops spam bookings.
  • Stops spam subscriptions.
  • Stops spam surveys, polls.
  • Stops spam in widgets.
  • Stops spam in WooCommerce.
  • Real-time email validation. Is email real or Not.
  • Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users.
  • Compatible with mobile users and devices.
  • Compatible with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU).
  • Blocking disposable & temporary emails.
  • No Spam – No Google Penalties. Give your SEO boost.
  • Mobile friendly Anti Spam & FireWall.
  • Stops spam in Search Form.
  • Disable comments.
  • Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood.
  • Spam FireWall: Anti-Crawler.
  • Hide «Website» field for comments.
  • Block messages by languages, countries, networks and stop words.
  • Email Address Encoder – protection for email addresses published on your site.

So, I installed the plug-in and in the settings page, told it to automatically get the key. That was pretty much all I had to do and it started working.

Wow… the spam instantly went away and that was a week ago. What a relief. Now, when I get a contact form email, it really is a customer and not a single spam has snuck through since.

I was so relieved I immediately paid for the plugin for both my blog and WooCommerce sites (yes, I run two separate instances). It was my way of saying thank you — all the bogus spam was very frustrating.

If you have a WordPress site, are drowning in spam and want a simple and very effective way to get rid of spam — get CleanTalk.

If you find this post useful, please share the link on Facebook, with your friends, etc. Your support is much appreciated and if you have any feedback, please email me at in**@*********ps.com. Please note that for links to other websites, I may be paid via an affiliate program such as Avantlink, Impact, Amazon and eBay.

Miscellaneous

Quick Post: Do you need to download Amazon Order History for taxes? There is a cheap fix

As a small business, I order a lot of tools and supplies from Amazon each year. Of course, when tax season rolls around, I need to start pulling stuff together for my accountant. Guess what? Turns out Amazon discontinued the order history report that I have used for years to download all of my orders so I can then work things out.

I read a ton of posts and Amazon changed order history to now be a special request that they say will be processed in days. You can do this if you have the time – go to your account, scroll down to the bottom and look for “Manage Your Data” and then find “Request Your Data” — or click here. One of the options is “Your Orders”.

Well, it’s been a day and still nothing. I don’t have time for this BS and if you search there are plenty of other ticked off people but for whatever reason, Amazon will not relent.

Now, here’s the tip – there is a legit Chrome extension called “Amazon Order History Reporter” by Philip Mulcahy. Now, you do need to use Chrome to use this – click here to read more and install it.

I thought I would be a manly man and not read the instructions. I quickly found out that it has a different way of working – not bad, just different so I went back and read the instructions and it works fine. Click here to read them and follow the steps – everything was smooth after that.

So, click here to read the instructions and the only thing I would add is you navigate to Amazon Order History – where you see all of your orders. Then, run the Amazon Order History Reporter extension – it will as you for what year you want the data and slowly create a table. It’s not a speed demon but that is fine – it was did in 10 minutes what was going to take me 2-3 hours if I had to do it manually.

Once the table is drawn, there is a an option button in the top left to download a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file that Excel an import.

It gave me all I needed – date, what was ordered, total and what credit card I used plus a number of extra fields that I didn’t need but others might.

Get it. Like I said above, I even paid the requested $7.95.

Conclusion

So, Amazon, this was a really uncool move on your part. Philip, thank you. You saved me a ton of time.

If you are reading this because Amazon’s move has left you in a jam, take a look at this extension — it works and is totally worth $7.95/year. I’ll be using it again next tax season I am sure.

If you find this post useful, please share the link on Facebook, with your friends, etc. Your support is much appreciated and if you have any feedback, please email me at in**@*********ps.com. Please note that for links to other websites, I may be paid via an affiliate program such as Avantlink, Impact, Amazon and eBay.

Miscellaneous

We Have A New Online Store!!

July 18th Update: Hi everyone! Our new website is up and running and have the bugs worked out.. The old one was called “Quick Shopping Cart” and was shut off – literally – by the provider at the end of June so we had to change.

A couple of other things:

  • I decided to not move over all of the products. We had stuff on the old site that would sell once or twice a year and we just discontinued them.
  • The one regret is that all of the links to products have changed. That means all of the many posts people have done over the years on AK Files, AK Forum, AR15, other forums, my blog and what not no longer work. The website does come up with a notice and a way to search for the item the person seeks but I am sure that will frustrate some folks. If you hear of somebody looking for something and the old link is broken, please let them know about the change – I would really appreciate it.
  • Paypal is now handled manually – you select that option, finish checking out and then I need you to Paypal the funds to in**@*********ps.com and be sure to list your order #. Orders that aren’t paid in two hours will be cancelled. By the way, the reason for this is that the PayPal integration was real flakey and customers were having a ton of problems and the manual process works great.
  • Unrelated to the move but it happened at the same time, the USPS has now created a new ground service called “Ground Advantage” that combines a number of offerings into one — including first class packages. If you are wondering why you don’t see a first class mailing option and see Ground Advantage instead, now you know why.

The link to the site is the same: https://shop.roninsgrips.com/ and just http://roninsgrips.com will go there too.

If you have any questions or need to report a bug, please email me.

Miscellaneous

Visited Japan and saw the Japanese D51 #408 Steam Locomotive in April 2019

I grew up with my dad taking me to see steam engines, steam trains and all kinds of machinery. I’m sure that’s why I find these things so fascinating today. My day job has a fair amount of travel and sometimes I get to see some really cool stuff. I was visiting Tokyo with my wife in April 2019 and we met up with a friend from her childhood, Spike, who showed us around.

One of the places Spike took us was the Ikuta Ryokuchi Park in Kawasaki — I think it was about an hour and a half from downtown Tokyo by train. Ryokuchi is a big park with different sections. We had a great time walking through a exhibits of traditional farms (Minka-en). Outside of the planetarium sat a very nicely preserved D51 Japanese steam locomotive.

There are a ton of pages that can tell you about the D51 “Mikado”-class locomotives – they where built for the Japanese Government Railroad (JGR from 1920-1949) and later the Japanese National Railways (JNR from 1949-1987) by Kawasaki Heavy Industries Rolling Stock, Kisha Seizo, Hitachi, Nippon Sharyo, Mitsubishi and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Construction happened in two periods 1936-1945 and also 1950-1951.

In total, 1,115 D51s were built. They had a 2-8-2 wheel layout, were just over 64 feel long, and the locomotive weighed approximately 84.7 US/short tons. Maximum speed was about 55 mph.

The trains were retired in Japan in 1975 though they were used in the Soviet Union until 1979 and 1983 in Taiwan. [click here for more information on Wikipedia plus this is a very interesting page in Japan]

The following is a photo gallery from the visit that you can open and scroll through:

The park is very much worth visiting and it was very cool to see this D51 up close.

If you find this post useful, please share the link on Facebook, with your friends, etc. Your support is much appreciated and if you have any feedback, please email me at in**@*********ps.com. Please note that for links to other websites, I may be paid via an affiliate program such as Avantlink, Impact, Amazon and eBay.

If you are interested about Japanese transportation, check out Alisa Freedman’s book “Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Roads”

DIY - Do It Yourself, Miscellaneous

The Japanese Beetles Are Awful This Year – Use Traps To Save Your Plants

There seems to be a ton of Japanese Beetles this year – these fat little buggers can really do a number on plant leaves – eating them leaving holes or just ragged parts of leaves. Spray is one option and I know folks who use Sevin and others but another option that does not involve spraying is to put up traps that are made just for them.

Here’s one example of the damage the Japanese beetles can do.
Here’s another.
This close up photo of the culprit. It’s from Wikipedia (1) shows a Japanese Beetle. You can easily catch them eating leaves during the day to confirm whether they are the actual pest or not. You can also sometimes spot them flying away from plants as well by the way.

Personally, I use the Spectracide Bag-A-Bug Japanese Beetle Traps. I kind of fell into them years ago – I don’t even recall how. I think someone recommended them to me and I have used them ever since. They are very easy to assemble and definitely do the job.

The package has the the plastic frame that holds the bag and the bait (that brown disc in the sealed aluminum package, and a long wire tie to suspend the trap and two bags. It does not come with a stand. You can buy one, make one or hang it off something that you already have – the target height should be with the bottom about a foot off the ground. The bait/lure is supposed to be good for about 12 weeks – enough for the season.
These are bushes near our garden. The recommend putting the trap 30 feet away from plants you care about because you don’t want to attract the beetles and have them decide to stop and eat your plants vs. going to the trap. I have four traps up this year protecting areas where we have plants and vegetables and have caught literally hundreds of beetles in less than a month.

The way it works is kind of interesting. You put the bait block on the trap and the rather clumsy beetles fly for the bait, hit the walls of the trap that are smooth and have nothing for them to grab onto and they fall down in the trap. Once in the trap, the walls are also smooth and they don’t have enough room to fly so they are stuck there and perish.

This is the top of the trap. The beetles are attracted by the bait, hit the walls and fall down. It really works.
There are probably 2-3 dozen beetles in here after a few days. The most stunning situation I had was putting a trap out not far from rose bushes we have and I had dozens of beetles trapped in less than four hours.
They do make and sell a purpose built stand that comes in sections. I bought a few of them but I just make them now out of 3/16-1/4″ steel rod. The sections are easy for storage but you do need to avoid losing pieces. I lost the top hanger of one and made a replacement.

In Conclusion

The Spectracide Japanese Beetle traps work great and I have no hesitation recommending them. I have read reviews/posts where people complain about the bag ripping but I am not sure why they had a challenge. I only have two recommendations – don’t put them in amongst the plants you care about because they will absolutely lure the beetles right where you don’t want them and the second is to make a couple tiny slits at the very bottom to help water drain out.

These traps definitely work and I hope this helps you save your plants!!

Note, Amazon sellers tend to be very expensive. EBay tends to have far better prices for these traps and accessories like bags and stands:

Photo source (#1) is By Beatriz Moisset – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78747216

If you find this post useful, please share the link on Facebook, with your friends, etc. Your support is much appreciated and if you have any feedback, please email me at in**@*********ps.com. Please note that for links to other websites, I may be paid via an affiliate program such as Avantlink, Impact, Amazon and eBay.

General, Miscellaneous

Recharging The R134A Refrigerant In A Glacer Bay VWD5446BLS-2 Water Cooler

Years ago we invested in a water filter unit that sits on top of a regular water cooler. This lets us have clean good tasting cold water – at least it did until about a year ago. My wife was the first to notice that the water wasn’t getting as cold and finally it got to the point where it was only just a tad cool first thing in the morning. Because this thing was older, my first thought was that it was low on refrigerant because we’d had this happen before with old fridges.

Refrigeration systems are sealed but over time the seals age and slowly the refrigerant leaks out. At some point, there isn’t enough left to effectively cool whatever it is in questions – a fridge, freezer or a water cooler.

So, step one was to pull the cooler out and look at the manufacturer’s sticker on the back. Glacier Bay is a Home Depot house brand – no surprise there. The refrigerant used was R134A – definitely needed to know that, which was nice because I keep R134A around for use on cars. The sticker also told me the unit was made back in September of 2014 — yeah, this thing was just over six years old and we bought it new way back when.

This is the manufacturer’s sticker off the back of the unit.

Note: If you need R134A refrigerant, go to your local discount car parts store. Odds are you can get a can cheaper there than mail ordering one.

Now there’s one thing I have learned – do some research on things that need to be repaired before you make the wrong assumptions and really screw things up. Boy, I’m glad I did that in this case because these small refrigeration units work at way, way lower pressures than a car or truck.

Watch this great video

What helped me out the most was an amazing video that a fellow put together about how to recharge small fridges. It was exactly what I needed to know and I only made a few small adjustments to his recommendations:

What I did

The first thing I had to figure out was how to get to the low pressure line to attach the bullet valve. While you may think to come at it from the back, which was my first thought, it will be a nightmare. It turns out that you remove the water tray by pulling it straight out and you are then looking at the one screw you need to remove to then pull off the front lower cover – voila – you are looking right at the lines.

I got my bullet valves off Amazon and you definitely need to back off the valve or it will pierce the line when you clamp it on. The gentleman mentions it in the video and I just want to reinforce you better make sure it is backed off.

This is the way the tap looks when I first disassembled it for installation. You can see the hardened steel point is extended. If you don’t first use the supplied hex wrench to back the valve out, this point will pierce your copper line while you are trying to install the valve and you don’t want that.
Seriously, this is a wickedly simple elegant valve. Everything you need to tap into the line is there with the exception of using sand paper or a brillo pad to clean any oxidation off the copper line where the piercing tap and the green rubber o-ring seal will go.

The line you need to attach the valve to has the insulation on it. I slid the insulation out the way, installed the valve assembly so it was just barely snug and then did the final positioning so I had easy access to the valve hex screw and could also attach the refrigerant line.

I moved the valve around until I found a good spot for it where I would have easy access to the valve screw where the hex head wrench is in the photo and also be able to easily get to the refrigerant line. Make sure your copper line is clean. I’d recommend using very fine sandpaper to make sure there’s no oxidation that will interfere with the seal.

The compressor was drawing a vacuum and it appeared to be working and holding the vacuum so I did not use a vaccum pump to draw down the whole system. For me, this worked.

The fellow mentioned these things run at 1-3 PSI on the suction side so I opted to slowly fill it until it was at 2 PSI. Note, I did purge my manifold line before I opened the valve so as to get rid of any air first.

Now when I say slowly fill, I would add a bit with the cooler’s compressor running and then wait a few minutes to see what happened. I did this over and over for almost 30 minutes until the pressure gauge read 2 PSI. Don’t try to do it all in one step.

This is the Master Cool model 66661 air conditioning manifold gauge set that I use on cars and the low-pressure blue side started with a low enough marked increments on pressure and vacuum to work. You can definitely use what the fellow has in the video – I just used what I had. The red hose was not needed in this case.
The blue gauge shows vacuum in inches of mercury (In Hg) colored green down in the lower left and then it switches to pressure in PSI in black above the 0. Again, you just need 1-3 PSI and I stopped at 2.
If you don’t have air conditioning tools, there are tons of them for sale on Amazon. There are whole kits with everything you need to start – vacuum pump, manifold with gauges and more. Click here to see them.
The cooler is working great once again and it’ll be easy to add refrigerant again if needed.

In conclusion

It’s been two weeks and the water cooler is still working just great. I have a spare bullet valve should I need it but other than those, since I already had the gauge set and the R134A, the repair didn’t cost me anything. Even if I had gone with complete repair kit, it would have been cheaper than having a repair person visit.

Note, I have to buy all of my parts – nothing here was paid for by sponsors, etc. I do make a small amount if you click on an ad and buy something but that is it. You’re getting my real opinion on stuff.

If you find this post useful, please share the link on Facebook, with your friends, etc. Your support is much appreciated and if you have any feedback, please email me at in**@*********ps.com. Please note that for links to other websites, I may be paid via an affiliate program such as Avantlink, Impact, Amazon and eBay.

DIY - Do It Yourself, Miscellaneous, Tools

Replacement Gaskets For Harbor Freight ‘sCentral Pneumatic 2-1/2 Gallon Paint Tanks

Folks, I’ve used Harbor Freight’s Central Pneumatic 2-1/2 gallon (10 liter) paint pots (HF Item 66839) for years to pressure cast grips. You may know them as “paint pots”, “pressure pots” – they are the same thing. I read fear-mongering stories on the Internet where folks are scared of them blowing up. You know what? They’re safe as long as you stay within their pressure rating and I know what I’m talking about. I’ve used my tanks through thousands of duty cycles at 60 PSI with no major problems.

There is a headache though – the cheap gaskets the tanks come with either don’t last or are a bear to seal. It used to be you had to make your own replacement gaskets or try to repair what you had but now there is an awesome ready-to-go quality gasket you can buy.

Here’s the lid of one of my modified tanks. You can see remnants of blue RTV everywhere from past fixes. The OEM gaskets are thin and don’t always seal very easily. I keep a wrench by my tanks to crank down the lids the last bit if there are air leaks after pressurizing because the original gaskets are so crummy.
There’s a failure – see the groove/tear in the middle of the black gasket? In the past I would have filled that with RTV and let it cure for 24 hours. I don’t do that any more – I replaced this old gasket with a new one I will tell you about shortly.

Enter TCP Global with a solution

I periodically search for stuff I hope somebody will create and sell. That includes these gaskets. It’s been a while since I last looked and the above gasket’s splitting prodded me to check again. It just so happens that TCP Global had, realized there was a market and was making gaskets better than the original.

How are they better? They are thicker and the durometer (firmness) of the gasket is such that there is a bit of give to get a really good seal. The gasket measures 10-5/16″ for the outside diameter and 9-5/16″ for the inside diameter. It’s also a 1/4″ thick which is great and the dogs (the bolts on top that secure the lid) have enough adjustment to accommodate this thicker gasket.

To cut to the chase, these units fit my pressure tanks perfectly. No more gluing, cutting, etc. These work right out of the box and are way, way better. They also fit a number of other thanks including:

  • TCP GLOBAL Brand 2.5 Gallon Pressure Pot Tanks Systems. Part# PT8310, PT8312 and PT8318
  • Binks or Devilbiss Brand 2.7 Gallon Paint Pressure Pot Tank Systems that use the Devilbiss Part# PT-33 Gasket. Binks Tank Part# 83C-210, 83C-220 and 83C-221
  • Other brands of tanks as well – many are made by the same Chinese factories and use the same size gasket.
Look at the difference! The old gasket has the blue RTV on it and the new one is the much thicker all black gasket.

Installation is a breeze

Literally, pull the old gasket out and push this new one in place. I did not need to do any trimming. When I put the lid back on the tank, I did have to back off the toggle bolts in the dogs (clamps) so that they could pass over the edge of the lid given it’s new taller height but that was literally just backing the off a 1/4″ more or so. Then when I turned the bolts down, the clamping pressure fully seated the gasket and the job was done. I spent more time taking the pictures than I did replacing the gasket and adjusting the bolts!!

Here’s the tank with the new gasket installed. You can see the dogs (clamps) have plenty of adjustment. When I took this photo, I clamped the top down by hand with no wrench and pressurized the tank to 60 PSI – no leaks or problems. Seriously, these gaskets rock.

Here’s the gasket on Amazon:

If you click on this link, I will get a small referral fee but that is all I get – I had to buy my own gasket and wouldn’t be writing this review if I honestly didn’t think the product was fantastic.

Conclusion

These TCP Global replacement gaskets are awesome. The seal works wonderfully and I can just tighten the lid down by hand now – no more wrenching. If you have a tank these gaskets will fit, I highly recommend them.

August 24, 2024 Update: They have held up great. I am now using them in all four of my pressure pots.

March 6, 2022 Update: These are still working great. I’ve slowly replaced most of my original HF gaskets with these and have no problems to report.

Note, I have to buy all of my parts – nothing here was paid for by sponsors, etc. I do make a small amount if you click on an ad and buy something but that is it. You’re getting my real opinion on stuff.

If you find this post useful, please share the link on Facebook, with your friends, etc. Your support is much appreciated and if you have any feedback, please email me at in**@*********ps.com. Please note that for links to other websites, I may be paid via an affiliate program such as Avantlink, Impact, Amazon and eBay.