"C" is NOT for Caliente!

The "3rd party installers" were here yesterday, to hook up the washer and drier, unpack the flat screen TV (but not re-connect all the cables) and reassemble my particle board / cherry veneer office desk that were all taken apart and packaged for shipping from Phoenix.  The craft labor did a good job assembling, unpacking, and photo-documenting their work, but apparently, there was a language issue that I did not notice, until today. 

I did a load of dark laundry this morning, and strangely, it was steamy hot when I took it out.  Luckily, there were no bright colors to run.   I thought "maybe the cold water is HOT in California, like it was in Phoenix, for some reason?"  So I did a load of whites, and sure enough, it came out cold at the end.

"C" does NOT stand for Caliente.  "C" stands for "Cold". 

Every contractor who has come to my home in the last 2 days has been Hispanic.  About 1/2 of them speak English fluently.  The other half, struggle with English but speak muy rapid Spanish that I have difficulty keeping up with.  I can understand the general gist of what they're saying, but not the nuance.  They're each taken aback when I respond to them "entiendo". "peligro" or "si, un poquito".  The individual who hooked up the hoses to the washer was far from fluent in English.  

He also used a pair of pliers much too harshly on my new (new as of last July) metal hoses and scored up the knurls pretty severely, but that's ok.  They're not ruined, and I was able to reverse them fairly easily with my Craftsman channel locks, treating them much more delicately. 

In California, apparently, as much as this state shakes with Earthquakes, they install a manual cut-off valve for the washer hoses.   It's a handy little device that kept me from spraying pressurized water all over the back of the washer.  This is the first residence where I've ever seen one of these installed.  It appears to be robust and practical.

Now that the hoses are corrected, the whites come out warm, and the colors come out cold.  Good.  And if you didn't replace your washer hoses every 5 years (for the rubber ones, 10 years or so on the braided metallic ones) you're asking for trouble, breakage, a massive soaking.  JustJoeP strongly recommends applying preventative maintenance techniques to avoid such wet events.