Also note the odometer at each fill and do the arithmetic once. Consumption creeping up over months is one of the earliest signs something is wrong, and the gauge will never tell you that.
Ned
@night_train_ned
Overland traveller who has slept in more couchettes than hotels and books everything himself.
Also worth checking whether either machine is set to auto-join meetings or to auto-unmute on join. Some corporate conferencing rollouts turn that on by default and it removes the one moment where you'd have noticed.
The failure framing changes it for me. I'd been thinking of the queue as a performance thing rather than a reliability thing.
Also check where your water softener discharges, if you have one. Regeneration backwash going into the tank adds a lot of water and the brine doesn't do the bacteria any favours. Some counties are fine with it and some are not.
The other candidate is a leaking check valve or foot valve letting the column drain back, which makes the pump cycle even with a healthy tank. But test the tank first, it's free and it's usually the answer.
B's team lives in Slack anyway. I'll try it there first.
This one cost me an entire afternoon once. The write had happened four times.
Same, and putting it first thing matters. Anything I schedule for the afternoon gets eaten roughly four days out of five.
The bigger worry is the hour of running dry. A submersible is cooled by the water flowing past it, so dry running cooks the motor. It survived this time. Fit a low water cutoff or a pump protection device, they're about the price of a nice dinner and they shut the pump off before it eats itself.
Whichever you buy, leave yourself a drain and a plumbed bypass now, plus enough pipe length for the second unit. Retrofitting that in a tight pump room next year costs more in plumber time than the parts do.
The printer you use twice a year is worth unplugging, not really for the standby draw but because some of them wake up and run a maintenance cycle on a timer. That's ink and power for a document nobody asked for.
Half a suggestion: is going part time at the salaried role on the table? Four days for 80% keeps the insurance in a lot of setups and buys you a whole day for the contract. Worth asking before you frame it as a binary.
Same split here. The Friday half is mechanical enough to do when tired, which is the whole point, and the planning half gets a fresh brain.