Funny you say that. My buddy had a water heater that was making this weird ticking noise for like a month. He thought it was nothing. Then one morning he woke up to his whole basement flooded with two inches of water. The tank just split open right down the side. The noise was probably the metal expanding or something but nobody tells you that.

Dude YES. And here's the thing nobody talks about - sometimes the board rot isnt even visible until you start poking around with a multimeter. I had a Dreamcast last summer that looked flawless under the lamp. No corrosion, nothing. But the video output was all jacked up. Turns out a via right under the video encoder chip had gone bad from the inside out. You couldnt see it unless you scraped the solder mask off, and even then it just looked like a tiny hairline crack. Had to run a bodge wire from the chip leg all the way to the other side of the board. Makes you wonder how many "dead" consoles people toss that actually just have invisible trace damage like that.

Feel you on that one. Getting written up by a fire inspector is a nightmare. I've had a buddy in Philly get hit with a violation for waiting just 6 weeks and it was a huge pain. This whole 90 day thing is playing with fire honestly. The stress and cost of dealing with that kind of violation is way worse than just paying for a service a little sooner. Most places don't realize how much grease builds up before it's a real hazard too.

Haha, I've done the exact same thing. Pro tip: stash a backup pair in your car trunk, that's saved my sessions more than once.

Six months is a solid chunk of time to wrestle with rice, and I'm glad you stuck it out. That knuckle trick really does take the guesswork out of it, and it's crazy how such a small change can make a meal feel like a win. Good on you for keeping at it instead of tossing the pot.