(no subject)
Jan. 18th, 2009 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickOkay, more about my day yesterday.
Wow, looking at yesterday's half-vast effort, I can see that I must have been tired off my ass.
Usually I do better than... winginging and ansewring. Right. Anyway. The answering machine was full of unhappy messages about frozen pipes. Brother the younger had called me on Friday to ask me about frozen pipes and I said that there weren't any frozen pipes around here, no sirree bob. In fact, I allowed as how we were braving the cold with nary a frozen pipe in sight and that I didn't expect any. Apparently that was enough of a toe over the hubris line to cause some retribution because I now have frozen pipes.
Frozen pipes the first: The house pipes at my house froze a wee little bit in the closet. They were frozen slushy not frozen solid so ten minutes with a hairdryer did for them and they were all better.
Frozen pipes the second: Kitchen sink at 351. These pipes have frozen before. A lot. The corner of the (inconvenient) basement where these pipes go, it is littered with shattered remnants of PVC from when the pipes have previously frozen. The thing is that there's a sort of pathetic and sad imitation of a basement underneath half of the house, the front half near the street. The back half of the house is built without the basement thing. Maybe they enclosed a porch or something. Anyway, to get water to the kitchen sink, the water pipes run inside the basement part of the building along the wall there until they're across from where the kitchen sink is. Then the pipes make a right turn and head into a small hole underneath floor joists (it's about 2" around) and go for thirteen feet through god knows what until they emerge underneath the kitchen sink, which has a convenient trapdoor affair so that you can splice the pipes to the sink and make there be water. As I've said, this has frozen before and we've got a system for it and everything. The reason that the pipes freeze is that the space under the floor joists is not insulated particularly well. It's dirt. It's drafty. When the weather is cold enough (like single digits for a week or so, or less if it's really windy), the pipes are going to freeze. Period. They don't just freeze a little bit. No hairdryer will save you, here. They freeze so that the pipes are in several pieces.
Fixing this: Turn off the water. Cut the old pipes. Drag them out as best you can. Get new pipe. Shove the new pipe into the hole while you yell uselessly at the person who is on the kitchen floor looking into the hole for the other end of the pipe. (I recruited the baby daddy of our tenant's daughter for that part.) Splice pipes together, remembering not to fuck up which one is hot and which one is cold. Turn water back on. Sounds, well, fairly straightforward, right?
We'd been fixing this problem with PVC. Every time it broke, we'd get PVC and put it back together. I bitched about this briefly on the phone with Mike (b/c the tenant said also that the gas furnace there was "making funny noises" and that she "didn't have any heat") and when he popped by to look at the furnace (which was running, +heat, -funny noises) he allowed as how PEX holds up better to being froze and that I should try that.
So, I hied myself to the hardware and bought a fistful of the half inch shark bite thingies and some PEX pipe. PEX is sold in rolls. They unroll the amount you need and cut it and hand you the pipe, which is flexible and plastic but holds its roll shape like a telephone cord. I took my connectors and my pipe and went into the basement at 351. It's dark, so I took a flashlight. Shut off the water, which is diagonally across the basement from where the busted pipes are. Retreat to basement door and duck under the furnace. See, the furnace there hangs from the ceiling. You have to kind of duck under the furnace and the duct work (it's forced hot air) to get to the water-fixing part of the basement. It's good that you're ducked because then you have to kind of crawl (ceiling is too low or floor is too high or something) for you to be upright. Semi-crawl to where the water pipes go. Cut pipes, drag out old ones. Throw them on the pile of dead PVC pipes behind you. (There's also a dead water heater and some other junk. It's not a smooth or obstacle free workspace.) The floor is not level and it's not dry because the pipes have busted and there's water fucking everywhere. Do not fear. There's a sump pump and it works. You will not drown, but you may wish you could.
Drop the flashlight a couple of times. It's tradition. If you're lucky, the tenants will open the faucets in the house so that water can spray out of the cut pipes and soak you. (It's no fun if they do it just once. Let them try every fucking faucet in the house... it's only sixteen degrees out, what are you worrying about?) Once you've had enough foreplay and are sufficiently wet, it's time to lay some pipe.
Take the suggested PEX pipe, which you have been carrying in its coiled-up form, like a spiral hula hoop. Wrangle one end of it out of the spiral. Start to shove it into the 2" hole. Shove. Shove. Note that shoving is now more difficult than it really should be. Pull pipe back. Examine end. It's muddy. Perhaps you've got it bent so that it is shoving down into the mud? Right. Rotate pipe ninety degrees, try shoving again. Pipe shoves in much better. All the pipe (you have twenty feet) is now shoved in and your spotter can't see shit, or at least that's what you *think* he's saying. Really, he sounds like Miss Othmar, but in a negative sort of way. Anyway, so you think with your amazingly large and capable brain that perhaps the bendy pipe went all curly between the joist you can see and one further down. Pull pipe back out. Shove back in. Pull out. Shove in. Pull out, attempt to straighten, shove in. (Lather, rinse, repeat. I spent about an hour and a half doing this fucking shit before giving up. Pony lady says that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results...)
I went back to the hardware. I bought the 10' sections of PEX which were straight. (If you need more than ten feet, you buy the roll. For less than ten feet, you can buy 10' straight pieces.) I shoved in the 10' piece, stuffed a connector on it, joined the other piece to it, and shoved it more in the hole. Spotter grabbed other end and yanked. Success. I repeated the process with the other line. I went up and joined the sink pipes to the other pipes. I went back down into the basement and cut the ends off to the right length and joined them to the supply lines. Success. God, I love these damn connectors. They're great. (I'd bought enough to fix this problem and also the pipe problem at 216, so I had eight connectors. Four for the two pipes at 351 and four for the two pipes at 216. I was not counting on having to splice fucking pipe, damn it all. The proper hardware that carries these connectors is not open on Sundays, btw.)
I turned the water back on. The meter was spinning like sixty. I figured a toilet might be filling (Tenants always flush when there's no water. For the non-plumbing-inclined, toilets have one flush in them when the water is shut off. That's what the tank on the back is for. It holds the water for flushing.) I waited for the toilet to fill. The meter kept going badly. I shut the water back off. I went back in the apartment and looked. The pipe for the cold water had frozen and split at the elbow where it turned up to go into the sink supply line. I hadn't seen it previously because the ice was holding it together. When there was water pressure, though, it blew the thing apart. *sigh* Use another connector. Another piece of pipe, a small one. Pex is pretty bendy, so no elbow needed. Everything back together. Turn water back on. Meter looks good. Yay!
Not. I went back in the house and turned on the cold water. There was cold water. I turned on the hot water. There was no hot water. Fuck. I got a hairdryer and went to melt out the foot and a half of not-replaced hot water pipe. I put warm water on the pipe. I felt for breaks or leaks -- the whole damn portion of the line that has not been replaced is visible to me. I can see nothing wrong. However, the hot water faucet just drips and drips. It doesn't turn on. The FUCK. I've got the hot water pipe warm to the fucking touch from the splice to the faucet connection. No dice. No water, either. Buh? I gently and slowly unscrew the fucking supply line from the fucking faucet. Water pressure, shitloads of it. I tightened up the fitting again and bemoaned the fact that there is no way to fuck with the fittings that hook onto the faucet without getting an armpit full of water. I have no idea what the fuck is wrong with the hot water faucet but the pipe is fine and it's damn near eight at night.
I told her to let the cold run in a tiny stream all night (we pay for the water) and that I had no damn idea what was wrong with the hot water but that I'd be back tomorrow to fuck with it some more... after I got done with the busted pipes at 216. The kitchen sink there is also frozen solid. I looked at it briefly yesterday in the sixteen degrees and couldn't see where it was broken -- the joint at the corner where it goes up through the floor looked fine and as far as one hand can reach under the vinyl siding that is the porch roof, that part's fine, too. I didn't want to take down the whole porch roof in that weather when I could do it today in thirty degrees instead of sixteen. So, today's project is taking apart the porch ceiling at 216, fixing those pipes there, putting the ceiling back together, and then investigating the fucking hot water mystery at 351. Hooray.
Wow, looking at yesterday's half-vast effort, I can see that I must have been tired off my ass.
Usually I do better than... winginging and ansewring. Right. Anyway. The answering machine was full of unhappy messages about frozen pipes. Brother the younger had called me on Friday to ask me about frozen pipes and I said that there weren't any frozen pipes around here, no sirree bob. In fact, I allowed as how we were braving the cold with nary a frozen pipe in sight and that I didn't expect any. Apparently that was enough of a toe over the hubris line to cause some retribution because I now have frozen pipes.
Frozen pipes the first: The house pipes at my house froze a wee little bit in the closet. They were frozen slushy not frozen solid so ten minutes with a hairdryer did for them and they were all better.
Frozen pipes the second: Kitchen sink at 351. These pipes have frozen before. A lot. The corner of the (inconvenient) basement where these pipes go, it is littered with shattered remnants of PVC from when the pipes have previously frozen. The thing is that there's a sort of pathetic and sad imitation of a basement underneath half of the house, the front half near the street. The back half of the house is built without the basement thing. Maybe they enclosed a porch or something. Anyway, to get water to the kitchen sink, the water pipes run inside the basement part of the building along the wall there until they're across from where the kitchen sink is. Then the pipes make a right turn and head into a small hole underneath floor joists (it's about 2" around) and go for thirteen feet through god knows what until they emerge underneath the kitchen sink, which has a convenient trapdoor affair so that you can splice the pipes to the sink and make there be water. As I've said, this has frozen before and we've got a system for it and everything. The reason that the pipes freeze is that the space under the floor joists is not insulated particularly well. It's dirt. It's drafty. When the weather is cold enough (like single digits for a week or so, or less if it's really windy), the pipes are going to freeze. Period. They don't just freeze a little bit. No hairdryer will save you, here. They freeze so that the pipes are in several pieces.
Fixing this: Turn off the water. Cut the old pipes. Drag them out as best you can. Get new pipe. Shove the new pipe into the hole while you yell uselessly at the person who is on the kitchen floor looking into the hole for the other end of the pipe. (I recruited the baby daddy of our tenant's daughter for that part.) Splice pipes together, remembering not to fuck up which one is hot and which one is cold. Turn water back on. Sounds, well, fairly straightforward, right?
We'd been fixing this problem with PVC. Every time it broke, we'd get PVC and put it back together. I bitched about this briefly on the phone with Mike (b/c the tenant said also that the gas furnace there was "making funny noises" and that she "didn't have any heat") and when he popped by to look at the furnace (which was running, +heat, -funny noises) he allowed as how PEX holds up better to being froze and that I should try that.
So, I hied myself to the hardware and bought a fistful of the half inch shark bite thingies and some PEX pipe. PEX is sold in rolls. They unroll the amount you need and cut it and hand you the pipe, which is flexible and plastic but holds its roll shape like a telephone cord. I took my connectors and my pipe and went into the basement at 351. It's dark, so I took a flashlight. Shut off the water, which is diagonally across the basement from where the busted pipes are. Retreat to basement door and duck under the furnace. See, the furnace there hangs from the ceiling. You have to kind of duck under the furnace and the duct work (it's forced hot air) to get to the water-fixing part of the basement. It's good that you're ducked because then you have to kind of crawl (ceiling is too low or floor is too high or something) for you to be upright. Semi-crawl to where the water pipes go. Cut pipes, drag out old ones. Throw them on the pile of dead PVC pipes behind you. (There's also a dead water heater and some other junk. It's not a smooth or obstacle free workspace.) The floor is not level and it's not dry because the pipes have busted and there's water fucking everywhere. Do not fear. There's a sump pump and it works. You will not drown, but you may wish you could.
Drop the flashlight a couple of times. It's tradition. If you're lucky, the tenants will open the faucets in the house so that water can spray out of the cut pipes and soak you. (It's no fun if they do it just once. Let them try every fucking faucet in the house... it's only sixteen degrees out, what are you worrying about?) Once you've had enough foreplay and are sufficiently wet, it's time to lay some pipe.
Take the suggested PEX pipe, which you have been carrying in its coiled-up form, like a spiral hula hoop. Wrangle one end of it out of the spiral. Start to shove it into the 2" hole. Shove. Shove. Note that shoving is now more difficult than it really should be. Pull pipe back. Examine end. It's muddy. Perhaps you've got it bent so that it is shoving down into the mud? Right. Rotate pipe ninety degrees, try shoving again. Pipe shoves in much better. All the pipe (you have twenty feet) is now shoved in and your spotter can't see shit, or at least that's what you *think* he's saying. Really, he sounds like Miss Othmar, but in a negative sort of way. Anyway, so you think with your amazingly large and capable brain that perhaps the bendy pipe went all curly between the joist you can see and one further down. Pull pipe back out. Shove back in. Pull out. Shove in. Pull out, attempt to straighten, shove in. (Lather, rinse, repeat. I spent about an hour and a half doing this fucking shit before giving up. Pony lady says that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results...)
I went back to the hardware. I bought the 10' sections of PEX which were straight. (If you need more than ten feet, you buy the roll. For less than ten feet, you can buy 10' straight pieces.) I shoved in the 10' piece, stuffed a connector on it, joined the other piece to it, and shoved it more in the hole. Spotter grabbed other end and yanked. Success. I repeated the process with the other line. I went up and joined the sink pipes to the other pipes. I went back down into the basement and cut the ends off to the right length and joined them to the supply lines. Success. God, I love these damn connectors. They're great. (I'd bought enough to fix this problem and also the pipe problem at 216, so I had eight connectors. Four for the two pipes at 351 and four for the two pipes at 216. I was not counting on having to splice fucking pipe, damn it all. The proper hardware that carries these connectors is not open on Sundays, btw.)
I turned the water back on. The meter was spinning like sixty. I figured a toilet might be filling (Tenants always flush when there's no water. For the non-plumbing-inclined, toilets have one flush in them when the water is shut off. That's what the tank on the back is for. It holds the water for flushing.) I waited for the toilet to fill. The meter kept going badly. I shut the water back off. I went back in the apartment and looked. The pipe for the cold water had frozen and split at the elbow where it turned up to go into the sink supply line. I hadn't seen it previously because the ice was holding it together. When there was water pressure, though, it blew the thing apart. *sigh* Use another connector. Another piece of pipe, a small one. Pex is pretty bendy, so no elbow needed. Everything back together. Turn water back on. Meter looks good. Yay!
Not. I went back in the house and turned on the cold water. There was cold water. I turned on the hot water. There was no hot water. Fuck. I got a hairdryer and went to melt out the foot and a half of not-replaced hot water pipe. I put warm water on the pipe. I felt for breaks or leaks -- the whole damn portion of the line that has not been replaced is visible to me. I can see nothing wrong. However, the hot water faucet just drips and drips. It doesn't turn on. The FUCK. I've got the hot water pipe warm to the fucking touch from the splice to the faucet connection. No dice. No water, either. Buh? I gently and slowly unscrew the fucking supply line from the fucking faucet. Water pressure, shitloads of it. I tightened up the fitting again and bemoaned the fact that there is no way to fuck with the fittings that hook onto the faucet without getting an armpit full of water. I have no idea what the fuck is wrong with the hot water faucet but the pipe is fine and it's damn near eight at night.
I told her to let the cold run in a tiny stream all night (we pay for the water) and that I had no damn idea what was wrong with the hot water but that I'd be back tomorrow to fuck with it some more... after I got done with the busted pipes at 216. The kitchen sink there is also frozen solid. I looked at it briefly yesterday in the sixteen degrees and couldn't see where it was broken -- the joint at the corner where it goes up through the floor looked fine and as far as one hand can reach under the vinyl siding that is the porch roof, that part's fine, too. I didn't want to take down the whole porch roof in that weather when I could do it today in thirty degrees instead of sixteen. So, today's project is taking apart the porch ceiling at 216, fixing those pipes there, putting the ceiling back together, and then investigating the fucking hot water mystery at 351. Hooray.
