OneAndOneIs2

So, I moved in a while ago, and the plumbing was (and I'm being kind here) installed by blind, fumble-fingered, brain-damaged monkeys. Badly-trained ones, at that.

It's all been ripped out and replaced since. One of the bits of plumbing that didn't work that well was the ball valve in the hot water tank. In fairness, this wasn't down to the plumber who fitted it though. No, it was more due to the fact that it was very old, and had been exposed to something that's apparently strange and unusual.

It was exposed to tapwater.

Sigh.

The thing about our tapwater here is, it's rather hard. Lots of limescale. Lots.

It's not meant to look like that...

So purely for the hell of it, I decided to fix it. Being lazy, I opted not to scrub it or chip away the limescale.

No, I switched the kettle on and shortly after I plunged the valve into boiling hot acid.

It fizzed a bit as hydrogen was given off by the reaction.

In fact (and I went to the effort of finding out how to upload movies to YouTube to bring you this) it fizzed like this:

And afterwards, because the copper of the valve had leeched out a little bit into the water, I was left with some rather lukewarm, mostly-neutralised, and somewhat green salt water.

Pretty, innit?

But the valve itself?

Well...

Ta-da! :o)

Isn't science wonderful?