Last autumn I went to my house and prepared it as well as I possibly could for the cold winter ahead since the house was going to be sitting empty for the season waiting to be put on the market the following spring. \u00a0 \u00a0The pipes were drained, the furnace lines too, anti-freeze was added to toilets, sinks, tubs, and anything else that had any known residual water in it or was otherwise in posession of a U-bend. \u00a0It took quite a while to get all the ducks in the row for the winter, and when I was done, I figured I would be in pretty good shape.<\/p>\n
Over the course of the winter I returned to the house at random intervals to verify that it was still standing, do a quick check inside, sometimes to do some chores, and to grab the latest mailbox-full of junk mail. \u00a0Each time I went, everything honestly seemed fine. \u00a0No floods, no fires, no problems. \u00a0 \u00a0You know what they say about best laid plans though.<\/p>\n
After the cold passed, I returned to the house to start turning things back on after the winter and to do some final preparations for sale. \u00a0I turned on the water, opened the valve, and all seemed ok. \u00a0For about six seconds. \u00a0Then the ceiling of my basement in a section thankfully not immediately over my head sprung into an odd flow of water a bit like an ill conceived cross breed between a fire sprinkler and a waterfall. \u00a0I immediately cranked the valve closed again and the amount of water coming out of my house into my basement slowed quickly to a stop again.<\/p>\n
A couple more ons and offs later, I had a reaonable idea of where the water could be coming from and all the evidence I needed that I had a split copper pipe somewhere up in the walls of my house. \u00a0I uttered, “this is not how this was supposed to go” sadly to my wife and got on the phone for a plumber and an insurance claim.<\/p>\n
The next day the plumber arrived, confirmed my theory on where the leak was coming from, and repaired it. \u00a0A pipe had simply popped out of a 45 degree angle connector. \u00a0Once that was patched up, I turned the water back on, and the waterfall began anew. \u00a0More trouble shooting for what was obviously a second \u00a0broken pipe in the same vertical section of house, based on the fact that the first fix was no longer leaking but the water was coming from the same place in the basement, revealed the need to poke through more walls on the main floor of the house. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Sure enough a second vastly more obnoxious problem was discovered, this time a split pipe in a nearly impossible spot to get to without swearing about it a lot. \u00a0To back up that theory, the plumber did a fair amount of complaining as the spot with the problem proved to be nightmarish. \u00a0Once that problem was fixed we turned the water back on and allowed ourselves a moment of hope as no waterfall resumed immediately. \u00a0False hope is the worst kind indeed.<\/p>\n
A slow leak all over the kitchen floor inspired the water to be shut down quickly again and more research into the next problem. \u00a0The water this time appeared to be issuing from behind the refridgerator, which pointed at the ice maker water line initially. \u00a0That is until the water appeared to be leaking from somewhere within the refridgerator itself instead of the cheap copper line. \u00a0The specifics of this problem remain unknown but obviously something that carries water inside the fridge wasn’t meant to freeze. \u00a0A funny thought considering the primary purpose of the water in the fridge is to actually make ice. \u00a0With the tap for the fridge in the basement turned off, the water was once again returned to service.<\/p>\n
And shut down again. \u00a0This time the water was coming out of the dishwasher. \u00a0The front panel was removed to show a pretty obvious leak out of the flow control solenoid. \u00a0So we shut that down as a lost cause too and turned the water back on again. \u00a0This time no obvious water problems, but it was time to move onto the hot water systems. \u00a0The valve on the furnace was turned on, and within very short order revealed that we weren’t done. \u00a0Now water was issuing from under the kitchen sink.<\/p>\n
Don’t ask me why, because I honestly can’t come up with a good reason, but there was an extra hot water pipe under my kitchen sink. \u00a0I would be forced to guess that it was destined for the dishwasher, but an alternate tap off of the sink’s hot water tap had been created instead. \u00a0The result was about 15 inches of pipe under the sink ending in a welded on pipe cap. \u00a0On its own that wouldn’t result in any trouble, and in fact it didn’t for six years in the house, but today all bets are obviously off. \u00a0The cap itself split open. \u00a0The effect was a glorious sprinkler like one that only revealed itself when there was pressure in the hot water system.<\/p>\n
Finally, things seemed to be patched up, almost $800 later and the plumber was on his way. \u00a0Drywall needs to be replaced to fill in the holes and repainted to make it look nice again. \u00a0This is far from done, and to avoid unknown problems the water was shut down again before I left. \u00a0Better to turn it on again and find a problem later than leave it on and come back to find your house is a lake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last autumn I went to my house and prepared it as well as I possibly could for the cold winter ahead since the house was going to be sitting empty for the season waiting to be put on the market the following spring. \u00a0 \u00a0The pipes were drained, the furnace lines too, anti-freeze was added to toilets, sinks, tubs, and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home_owner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}