Waiting for Good’o…

Water Wars, Part Two
If only I’d stayed burrowed in the envelope! But my do-it-yourselfer genes hijacked me, and the Evil Genie of “this looks simple enough” sang its siren song in my ear… I would have waited, honestly, but at 4pm (just before the holiday) I called the repairman, who hemmed and hawed, and allowed as how he could come by after his prayer meeting at 9pm that night, “to take a look”, figure out what parts he’d need, and “get to it in a day or two” -- the alarm bells started clanging, and I decided I needed Plan B (or was that C? I‘d lost track). I raced out, bought the pieces it looked like he’d need so maybe he could do it that night… and it looked so straightforward, and the wrench was just sitting there… I couldn’t help it - I dove in (almost literally) and started trying to get the bad pipe off. At first it was much too much for my clerical strength, but after running over to a neighbors and getting a much bigger pipe wrench, I must have scared it -- it started to wriggled free - and I discovered the middle piece wasn’t a filter but a “compression connector” put on there to bridge a 3 inch gap in the PVC pipe (why they needed to cut 3 inches out of the plumbing will the be subject of a few nightmares, I’m sure)… so I tried to tighten it -- and when I turned the water back on, it looked like some kids’ water fight! Hurriedly I turned it back off and adjusted again; turned it on - and the motor hummed a moment and clicked off. Dead.

I went through my seven languages worth of curse words, and then reluctantly called the pump company…. by this time it was after hours on a holiday, but I knew I didn’t want to go three days w/o water, so I sucked it up and had them send a guy. The kid that came out could have been my grandson, but I’m guessing anyone with seniority was already enjoying a beer and the fireworks somewhere. The first thing he said after he’d checked the motor was that it wasn’t broken - it had properly shut off because no water was required, therefore no need for motor. The fact that everything was sitting there quietly meant -- have you guessed it? -- that I’d fixed the leak and nothing was wrong now. I think I staggered at that point - he was looking at me like I was his senile granny, anyway. I swore to him on a stack of plumber’s cracks that the stupid pipe had been spraying water not 30 minutes ago! He fiddled with it some more, and allowed as how the shut off value wasn’t real good; it probably needed to be replaced. Since I was paying for him to come out, I agreed. Mistake number one.

He got his tools and glue pots, and found a new valve in the truck, brought it all back, along with a mini searchlight headpiece that did a much better job than the antique worklight I’d found in the garage. He removed the compression connector and began to replace it with the new pipe I’d bought, all the while telling me about the long hours he’d put in that week. A sudden silence, then… “Damn!” under his breath. Only thing worse to hear is an “Aaarrrgh!” of pain because that might be a lawsuit.

Sure enough, he’d forgotten to add a whole auxiliary L-joint of pipes that he’d removed when started to replace the leaky one. No problem, he just cut the new PVC pipe and said he’d add another connector. Got the jigsaw puzzle re-assembled approximately as I remembered it, and then we tried the water. Turned out that the wonderful new seal on one joint made another one leak! Cut the new pipe again, remove pipe, fix another joint. Try the water again. Inside it was great -- the water in the sink was flowing; outside it was a trickle. I didn’t want to ask if he’d glued up the wrong end of the pipe, but perhaps he was thinking that as he cut the pipe yet one more time (it now would have more patch joints than it started with) and he looked at the valve, then played with the pipe for a while, put it back. Then told me to go try the water outside again. Still trickling… Okay - what next, Sherlock?

He did something weird by “flushing the water back through” - connected the hoses in some sort of circle, took the head off one outside faucet and washed his hands a couple times. I was watching the dollars fly away on the summer breeze, and biting my tongue to keep from asking if his hands were clean enough, because it was obvious that he didn’t have a clue what was wrong, and he needed the silence to think in. He did something else inside and said, “Try it again” - and this time it was full pressure! I was very relieved; he said he thought some big bit of rust broke off in the pipe when he was repairing it - apparently I have waterial sclerosis… but it was back to normal, that was the key point, even though there are now four - count em! -- joints along that 1 ft. pipe. And today, when I tried to water the garden... it was back to half pressure. I’m definitely at full pressure though - just about to bursting, actually. Plan Z, anyone?

A Patriotic Red, Black and Blue

Coming up on the long holiday weekend -- that mainstay of all emergency repair guys -- the pump to my well sprung a leak. I had been antsy about it because I’d been warned when I bought the place that using the sprinkler would turn the pump motor “on and off”, shortening its life, and of course with the heat wave, I’d been using the sprinkler a lot. So when I could hear it turn on/off even when the water was all shut off, I started wincing even before I finished clearing away the lumber, boxes of photos and other doodads from in front of the pump house door. As dark as it was in there, I had no problem interpreting the sound of rapidly dripping water on a subterrean lake. Looked like it was rising almost to the level of the motor - talk about life-shortening! I panicked very efficiently, and tried to simultaneously turn off both water shutdown valves while tearing away at the heavily duct-taped bubblewrap with which I’d insulated the pipes shortly after I moved in. Only partly succeeded at either. Time for Plan B.

I need to describe this “pumphouse” so that you can get the full effect:
A lean-to or bump-out off the garage, about four feet by 8 feet, with the doorway about 3 feet off the ground on the garage side… and about 4 ft above ground on the pump side! Someone had installed a bathtub handle on the left wall, testifying to years of insanity trying to get in/out of this damn crypt to fix problems! There is an open (!) juncture box on one wall, and the pump is propped on plywood about 6 inches off the dirt floor (more on that later). The walls had been insulated, but due to the Night of the Living Carpenter Ants last winter, that had all been torn out (rather quickly and inefficiently, I might say), but otherwise, it’s studs and exterior siding. No light, of course, and the choice to work within is either to lean over on your stomach on the doorsill, or step awkwardly into the 1x2ft space on either side of the large pump and primary pipe. If, in that position, you try to bend down, you will bump your head on the pump tank and simultaneously rip your jeans on the rusty stud nails. Has this become clearer? All you need to add is a few thousand dead ant bodies, enough spiderwebbing to decorate Castle Dracula, and you’ve got the photogenic situation facing me.

As far as I could tell, the water wasn’t draining nearly as fast as it was dripping, which puzzled me since it was plain dirt under there… but I raced to the main fuse panel and flipped off the pump switch, then called Bob, an 80-something repairman who had helped me when the toilet had shattered, and when the bathtub was discovered to be draining directly out onto the subflooring. He asked how big and long the piping was, and what kind - I had to confess I hadn’t gotten all the duct tape off yet. He says he could come out and fix it sometime that day or the next, but knowing pipe specs would help. So I went back to the flood and this time attacked it with scissors - finally pulling off enough insulation to see that it was another pipe entirely that was leaking… about 12 inches of “klassic kludge” - there were three (count em!) joints along that one stretch, none of which were needed, that I could see… of course, that triples the chance of leakage… but on the other hand, a short straight length of PVC pipe would easily fix the issue. Hurray!

Then I tried to figure out why the soil wasn’t draining… and dear readers, you will never guess -- that four inches below the soil was the most amazing hard surface, which after a bit of nasty, filthy digging revealed itself to be the concrete pump house floor! At this point, I stopped, too flummoxed to continue. What plumbing textbook would recommend dumping four inches of dirt over an entire concrete floor?? Was this some sort of crude insulation? Was this - perish the thought - a leftover from some flood of decades past? Could the carpenter ants have banded together with the mice to create a mini Club Med? I couldn’t wait to ask Bob. But meanwhile, since I couldn’t see the sense of it, I began to dredge Lake McGuire with a dustpan -- a trowel was about as effective as a teaspoon, and I wasn’t really enjoying hanging over the doorsill reaching into a dark, wet, smelly unknown. I actually cleared down to floor on the side that I could reach, and found the place where the main pipe came through the floor - and water started to gurgle away. I left it to gurgle and tottered back inside. Overheated and bruised from having to balance on sensitive bodily areas, I was approaching the requisite coloration for the holiday.

Meanwhile, I’d started to copy some files to disk, and had obviously totally forgotten about that! I took a break and checked on it… and watched with growing fear as it sat there with “5 seconds remaining” on the screen for a good 5 minutes! When the system wouldn’t even shut down, and had to be cold rebooted, I started thinking in terms of voodoo curses. But more likely it was just the “long holiday sensor” that has been designed into every piece of power equipment since the first Model T. I got the CD glitch to repeat - and since it was a 25 minute save-to-disk operation, that was one hour gone - so now I can’t save anything. There are days when you push the envelope, and days that you sensibly hide as deeply in the envelope as you can burrow. Today you will have to do quite a bit of digging to find me.. I’m burrowed in and waiting for the experts.

Frozen Assets

Sorry I was away for a while -- a short trip, and sudden winter shifted my focus from this blog.

Last week was the first hard freeze… that’s when you really find out what you’re up against in the country. I was up against the pump house door at 10pm one night, frantically trying to check on whether the pipe insulation would be sufficient! This is when Jack Frost stops painting little ferns on your window and throws pipe bombs into your plumbing bill.

The “pump house” is actually an extension on the garage. It had been snugged in with six inches of fiberglass when I got here, but the exterminator discovered that this was the Marriott of carpenter ants, and that all got torn out in a hurry. As he commented wryly, “It’s not a good idea to insulate where there‘s lots of moisture.” No, really? A pump house? Who’d’a thunk it? So I had gone back and insulated around the pipes, as soon as I could breathe after he’d sprayed with industrial Raid. But lack of expertise and a need to breathe more deeply kept me from finishing the job -- until the thermometer dropped to 17 degrees.

With a “doorway” that is two feet off the ground on both sides, and “ground” that differs by several inches on either side, the pump house is Terra BananaPeela, meaning that unless I want to break a leg, I have to step very carefully as I’m going in and out. There are about four inches of “pipe-free” ground inside the pump house to stand on, and -- due to the movers helpfully stacking boxes five deep in front of the pump house -- no inches on the outside. I had removed a few layers and was standing on one of the boxes to get in, until it collapsed and threw me sideways into a Jenga-stack of other boxes… I managed to keep from being crushed, but there’s another Trophy bruise on my leg -- something akin to those little German plane-stamps that the Allied pilots stenciled on their nose caps. No matter. With the little flashlight firmly in my mouth, I examined the few inches of pipe that I had failed to cover up (because -- of course -- it was the trickiest part), and tried to see how I could quickly (ie: before my fingertips froze) seal them up enough. The foam pipe insulation had run out, and the bubblewrap had tip-toed off to visit the shipping boxes or somesuch… I was left with wads of newspaper and tape. Even with my “third hand” holding the flashlight, I found myself fumbling and thrashing with the tape and paper -- you can‘t tear the tape with your teeth when you‘re swallowing a flashlight. I couldn’t get paper wads close enough to that little elbow pipe to keep its damn toesies warm all night without getting paper jammed against the motor, which -- I feared -- could catch fire. About halfway through, I recalled what the exterminator had said about the wolf spiders (“Always wear gloves in there”), but I was hoping they were sensibly hibernating in their mini wolf-dens. There was no way I could add gloves to this equation and succeed before my insulation failed and my pipes froze. I cobbled something together, propped the pump house door open, propped the garage door open, and left the studio oil heater on all night… hoping that those warm, lively molecules of heated air would wander out to see what was jumping in the pump house. Had I been twenty years younger, I might have camped out and spent the evening wafting the air through the doorways, but the concept of Adventure transformed somewhat as I hit fifty.

Next step was to do the usual precautions inside the house, since I had no idea how the pipes in the crawlspace were covered. I was stunned to discover that I couldn’t get my kitchen sink faucet to drip! In an old house, that was not a problem I had anticipated. But somehow it’s torqued such that trying to open it just a bit causes it to spring back and stop dripping. Normally I’d be ecstatic about that… but now, as I tried to keep the pipes from freezing, I had to actually leave it running rather than dripping… and that kicks the pump motor on and off, which I’m told can burn out the motor. At that point I gambled that it was too cold in there to burn kerosene, let alone a small motor.

Now the temperatures have warmed up to freezing, and my pipes have survived, and I’ve added three or four to the army of post-it notes on my fridge (the Honey-Do list without any Honey to do them). I still don’t know if all that was truly necessary (how does one find out except the hard way?) but I have my fingers crossed that we have passed the Winter portion of the year (hey - if Summer is only four days, then Winter should be, too!) and we are well into the next phase, which involves the grass growing in the rain, faster and thicker than we have any hope of mowing. That’s Spring in these parts. Or will be, once the snow has melted.