Basura: The joy of investigating and solving a mysterious noise

“Thank you for your wine, California” — The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street

I was sitting at home, in the den, yesterday afternoon, reading. My lovely and talented wife was reading too, in the living room. The snow was falling in a large, brilliantly white flakes. The fireplace was adding physical warmth and some counterpoint ambience to the winter scene she was enjoying by viewing through the window. I was enjoying my well named La-Z-Boy recliner and my good reading lamp.

“Could you come here a minute?” she called. She’d moved to the kitchen. “I think we have a problem.” I was hoping it was a mouse, lured into our home by the warmth. Mice I understand.

But this was something entirely different. There was a very persistent noise. I was asked to identify it. My pretty and charming wife has some hearing deficits. So do I. Delbert McClinton may have said it best: “I’m not old. But I been around a long time.”  OK, I am old. But there was a definite noise.

I opened the back door. I was hoping that the sound was coming from my next door neighbor’s property. It was still snowing. It was still pretty out. But the noise was ours.

We’d had an electrician out to make some small repairs the day before. One of them involved inspecting a booster fan installed in a heat duct to assist in pushing heat/AC to the upstairs bedroom. Keith, the owner of Wireworks here in Grand Rapids, had assured me that the booster fan would not be disrupted in any way by the action he was taking. He knows his stuff. I have confidence in him, as do others. But still. What was that noise?

My first thought was to call Wireworks and tell Keith about the new noise, and ask him if maybe something had happened to the booster fan in the ductwork. But when I moved closer to the bookshelf where the booster fan was located between the walls, the noise sounded less loud, if anything. That first theory didn’t seem right. I thought it was merely coincidental that Keith had been out the day before, and now we had a new noise.

“Aha,” I thought, “it’s the ice maker in the freezer of the refrigerator.” I told my darling, intelligent wife that I would raise the bail of the ice maker, and see if that helped. This had been her idea, actually, before the booster fan guess, which had taken me into the basement, to the upstairs bedroom, and to a listening post over by the dining room book shelves. I raised the bail, thus stopping the ice making process. The noise persisted. “Let’s give it some time,” I said to my patient and loving wife. “We’ll see if the noise continues.”

It did.

I strode purposely out to the kitchen refresh my beverage. For the record, it was green tea. My delightful and cute wife remained in her favorite chair, gazing out the window at the snowfall, and at the fire, and sometimes even at her latest Elizabeth George novel. I was convinced that the noise was emanating from the kitchen. In my career, I was a trained investigator, but this dilemma required had me stumped. It required further review.

I decided it was not the icemaker, since I’d disconnected it, and the noise was still present. It was, I concluded, the refrigerator going bad, whatever refrigerators do when they go bad. Damn, I thought, we’re going to have to make a decision on repair or replacement of the refrigerator. I’ll call Decker and Sons and try to make sense of which way to go. I expected it might be replacement, but maybe we’d be lucky with just a service call and a repair.

I thought perhaps the sound was coming from the microwave. That would be a cheaper problem to address. I unplugged it. The noise continued. An even cheaper problem would be the Mr. Coffee coffee-maker, possibly still on warranty. I unplugged it. The noise continued. I re-set the digital clocks on the two small appliances.

I wondered if it could be the garbage disposer shorting out somehow. I opened the doors under the kitchen sink. Whoa! The noise seemed a little louder. I felt like I was making progress. I pulled the trash receptacle out from under the sink, to gain better access to the disposer, thinking I would disconnect the power and see if the noise persisted.

Odd, I thought. The noise seemed to be coming from the trash, and the noise got louder when I pulled it out. The receptacle was nearly full, but somehow it was the source of the noise. I said nothing at that point, and emptied and sorted through the trash; old coffee grounds, dirty paper towels, carrot peels, onion skins, and the like.

I found the culprit. It was an electric toothbrush, on ON. It was vibrating against a Geyser Peak Sauvignon Black wine bottle, which amplified the sound by rapidly knocking against the inside of the trash container, essentially making a drum of the plastic shell of the container. This may be somewhat ironic, in that we’re the parents of a professional musician. His instrument? Drums.

I called my generous and kind wife to show her my find. I told her I was a little surprised, but delighted to dodge the bullet of appliance repair or replacement, or at least a service call. She told me that she’d tried repeatedly to turn on the toothbrush that morning, without success. It was a cheapy, bought at the supermarket for under ten dollars. She’d decided to return to manual brushing, and had tossed the faulty toothbrush into the trash.

Might she have turned the switch to OFF before throwing it away? Well, sure, in hindsight. What about recycling the batteries? Our recycling service, and even our local library, no longer accepts batteries. Was there any way to guess that the ON switch was choosing to operate, but with a six-hour delay? I don’t think so.

We were thrilled to have found the difficulty, fixed it (turned the switch to OFF) and saved ourselves the real expense of a service call or the imaginary expense of a new refrigerator. Sometimes we’d look at each other and giggle. We celebrated our good fortune with wine from California, whisky from Scotland, a lovely fire, a beautiful winter’s night, and some nice music from Levon Helm, Van Morrison, and Allison Krause and Robert Plant.