Nobody wants to see gross, ugly rust stains on surfaces in their otherwise pristine white bathroom. You look at your porcelain tile and all you see are reddish, brownish-orange streaks that never seem to come out no matter how hard you attack them with chemical cleaning products and textured sponges. What gives? Are you just doomed to have a rust-stained bathroom forever?

But even though an automatic ice maker is a fairly straightforward invention, it’s important to have an understanding of how an automatic ice maker works so that if anything goes wrong, or it suddenly stops making ice one day, you can pinpoint where the likely breakdown in the process is.

The sound of rattling pipes can be startling and a little unnerving—after all, when you turn on the faucet to your sink or bathtub, you don’t expect to hear anything except for the sound of water rushing out of it. But suddenly, you also get loud clanks and bangs of your pipes shaking around.

A bubbling toilet is never a good sign. Usually, it means that there is air pressure building up down inside the drain. When there’s no outlet for the air pressure coming into your drain (in other words, you have a clog), that air has to come back up through your toilet into your home.

A new showerhead can give your home bathroom a major boost, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of water use efficiency. Best of all, in most cases replacing your shower head can be a simple DIY project.

If you’ve always had a home connected to your local city water or municipal water source, you might take it for granted that public water like this is the only water source. But many homes, particularly those located in rural areas, are connected to well water. And yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like — water from a well, one that isn’t regulated the same way public water is.

When you think of plumbing jobs, installing a washing machine might not be the first one that comes to mind. After all, most people associate plumbing with sinks and toilets. But there’s much more within your home that connects to incoming sources of water (not to mention outgoing water) and your washing machine is definitely one of those appliances. Think about it — without water coming into your washer via pipes, this appliance isn’t going to work very well.

When you hear the words “burst pipe,” what comes to your mind? You might picture it as a worst-case scenario — you walk in the door to find your home flooded, with inches of water rising on the floor and a steady stream of water pumping out of a wide-open pipe.

After those cooking appliances are ruled out, a dishwasher is the second most common source of a kitchen fire. Apparently, fires start every 63 seconds and cost an estimated $10.3 billion in property damage.

If you understand how the toilet works, you can easily diagnose, avoid, or solve most problems involving a toilet’s operation, so you don’t have to call in a plumber to fix something you could easily take care of yourself with a few tools you probably already have around the house or parts you can pick up from the hardware store.