I ignore the obvious and waste several days on complicated solutions to a simple problem

I have been working on my under the sink water filter. I broke down and ordered a different on-demand 110v pump which I put in front of the water filter to pressurize the system. 

It was very noisy. It ran all day.

I decided the pump was not getting enough water so I drove in to Lowes to get fittings to go to 3/8" tubing instead of 1/4" tubing. 

A the stoplight to turn into Lowes I saw the hay customer I had forgotten about and I discovered I had left my cell phone at home. So I turned around.

After selling three bales of hay I returned to lowes.

This was an exercise in frustration as is every encounter I have experience at Lowes.

Everything is now push on and PEX fittings and nothing was right. Finally a very nice you man asked me if I needed help, and then kept trying to help me until I we actually found a brass t-fitting that should have worked. 

The problem is that I need a female to female ferrule type thread adapter. The t-fitting for the water filter has a female swivel on one end and male threads on the other and the center fitting goes to a valve and direct to 1/4" tubing and a different ferrule than I can find.

The replacement T-fitting had male 3/8 ferrule type threads on all three ends which required more adaptation. 

Then I discovered the fitting on the filter was no removable and that fitting was 1/4".  So I decided to cut some of the extra feed line off and at least fit things in better.

Which is when I made my most important discovery. I ofter wonder what is wrong with my mind. I can do in depth trouble shooting, but I often miss the obvious. I am probably getting dementia.

The feed line was plugged with sediment.

Of course I did not have a new ferrule for the valve end so I cut if off short, cleaned the line, spliced a clear 1/4" line to the filters. 

I could have done that two weeks ago...

This is what the inside of the 1/4" feed line looked like when I cut it open.

In other news...

Someone has been actually reading old posts from this blog. I can see it on the analytics page. It must be someone with a national service provider as I can't actually tell what city they are from. It could be someone in Ireland. It is actually kind of neat to see what they are reading. I used to post a lot more and I think I did more interesting things back in 2011. I think life was better back in 2011.

If you are reading old posts I want to say thanks and I hope you enjoy them!