plumbing

I guess I spoke too soon!

/ Re-Farmer / 12 Comments

I’d posted about being able to get our blocked pipe to the septic tank open, at least enough for things to finally drain. I thought we would be good for a while.

I was wrong.

Things were fine, at first. I got my shower in, no problem. Then my daughters took their showers.

By the third shower, I decided to check the basement.

There was more water on the floor again.

It took me a while to figure out where it was coming from. It turned out to be the laundry sink. Water was backing up into the sink, but this sink isn’t properly attached, and the drain opening leaks around the drain itself, so it was trying to fill and drain from the same area, at the same time. As a result, not only was the bucket under the U bend filling, but water was missing it entirely and splashing onto the concrete floor. I let my daughter know, so she could quickly finish her shower, then started bailing water into the floor drain. The water was slowly draining, but the volume from the shower was just too fast.

Which meant we had to call a plumber right away.

Well. Almost.

Since we had no way to do dishes or use the kitchen sinks, my older daughter offered to buy us supper, so my younger daughter and I made a trip into town where she could run do some errands she needed, then we picked up some fried chicken for supper. We even picked up a couple of things at the grocery store, just in case I couldn’t make the trip to the city for our monthly shop tomorrow.

Once at home, I started making calls. I first tried one of the plumbers that had come out to check our well. They were very apologetic, but were so busy, they would not be able to come out for at least a couple of weeks. !! I asked if he could recommend anyone, and he gave me the name of a plumber he thought would have an auger, in another town. I called them, but they were also booked solid. I asked for another recommendation, and got the name of a third plumber they thought had an auger.

Third time’s the charm!

After explaining what was going on, he hemmed and hawed a bit, then said that the earliest he’d be able to come out was 9:30.

Tonight.

!!!

I was ecstatic! We were prepared to have to wait until morning. We spoke a bit more, then he said he would call me back about an hour before he would be able to come out and get directions to our place.

When he got here, the first thing he did was check things out, and I explained to him what I’d already done, the roots that I’d found, and the issues we’d been having in the past. Among the things we had to consider was how old everything was, and the risk of causing more damage. Not that we had any choice. He then went and got his auger and tools.

Would you look at that beast! What a beautiful machine!

Shortly after he started, he broke though the area that was blocking the laundry sink, and suddenly we had water shooting up the pipe and into the basement! Not much he could do to stop it, either. He just had to keep on going and eventually clear through to the tank.

That old garden hose came in very handy! He made a lot of use of it, and it really helped.

Once he got that pipe done, he worked on the floor drain to the pipe.

In the process, he pulled out a clump of roots and crud the size of a small animal!! You can see it in the above photo. He got more roots out after that, too.

Then he worked in the other direction, clearing the pipe towards the weeping tile, as far as he could go.

It wasn’t until the very end, when he was using the hose to wash everything out as much as he could, that the well pump started grinding, so I quickly got him to turn off the hose. When I explained to him about the noise, and that two other plumbers had already looked at it, but didn’t dare replace the pump, he went over to take a look. Right away, he was saying, “I can see why they would be scared to do it!” The risk of something going very wrong and losing us water entirely is very high.

When he was done with the floor drain, I was really impressed by how much lower the water level now is. It doesn’t fully drain; it was grandfathered into the septic system, and there is a slightly higher spot somewhere in the line to the access pipe, preventing it from draining completely. However, it now drains as much as it can, very quickly, and it’s no longer full of silt and sand. He did such a fantastic job!

When he was done, I took advantage of him being there and asked if he could give an estimate on replacing our tub’s taps and faucet. He tried to look at the hot water tap that is leaking so badly, but it’s so corroded inside, he couldn’t get it off. He didn’t want to risk breaking something, so he didn’t want to try too hard.

In the end, he estimated the total cost to replace the taps and faucet would be around $400 – $500, but we would then have to replace the section of tub surround ourselves. Which I would have no issues with. However, he also thinks they can be repaired, which would cost much less. The only issue is not being able to take the tap off! If we replace them, it wouldn’t matter if he ended up breaking the plastic part, but obviously that would be a big issue if he was just going to repair it.

But that will have to wait for another time.

Before he left, he got my email address, then later sent me an invoice. Much to my amazement, it was less than $300! Considering how long he worked on it, plus coming out so late in the day, I fully expected it to be higher.

Worth. Every. Penny!

While he was working on the pipes, and I told him as much as I could about the system, and the problem with the roots. We know that they will eventually come back. With what he did tonight, though, it should be many years before this become an issue again.

I am so very happy with this guy! Definitely someone we will go back to in the future!

Now we have a cleaned out septic tank for the winter, and cleaned out pipes. These are now all set for the winter!

That’s quite a weight off, that’s for sure!

The Re-Farmer

What a drip!

/ Re-Farmer / 8 Comments

The old basement is the heart of the plumbing in this house. It’s where all the pumps and tanks are, plus we have a couple of sets of taps; one for the laundry sink, and one for where the washing machined to be, and pipes with shut off valves leading to the taps outside.

Until the plumber added a shut off valve to the hot water tank, those were pretty much the only shut off valves in the system. Otherwise, there is a main shut off valve at the well pump that shuts water off to the entire house.

One of the things my brother did was install a pool filter to the septic pump system. It has a filter basket that catches larger bits before they get into the pump and sent on to the outflow. It has to be cleaned out every now and then, so he got an extra basket, so one can be quickly switched out for the other, and the pump can be back in action right away, rather than having to stay off while the filter basket gets cleaned. Which is a big deal, since it basically turns black and needs time to soak in a detergent solution after the grit and odd bits of straw that fell into the tank while it was being emptied are cleaned out.

Handily, the laundry sink is right there, and that’s where I wash out the filter basket.

It is also where we shock our hot water tank with hydrogen peroxide every now and then, when the water develops a rotten egg smell. This is done using siphon action by attaching a short hose to the tap. After shutting water off to the hot water tank, then allowing it to drain until the vacuum created prevents more water from draining out, we can put the hose end into a container of hydrogen peroxide, turn on the hot water tap, and the peroxide gets sucked into the hot water tank. Unfortunately, the threads on the hot water tap are damaged, so instead of being able to screw on a short length of hose directly to the tap, we’ve had to use Gorilla tape and a length of aquarium hose. It doesn’t seal as well, but it works.

Those are pretty much the only times that sink gets used.

When I’d switched out the filter baskets at the septic pump, I noticed that the hot water tap had developed a drip. I have no idea how long it’s been dripping, but as I used the hot water to do a rough clean on the filter basket, then set it in a container to soak, it started to drop more. Last night, I switched out the soaking water, and the slow drip because a fast drip.

We already needed to replace both the hot and cold water taps, but until now, that wasn’t much of a priority.

Here, you can see the hot water tap, with the tape holding the bit of aquarium hose. The cold water tap has a length of hose screwed on – without the hose, the water sprays all over. The piece of hose across both taps is what I’d tried to screw onto the hot water tap, only to discover the threads were damaged.

This morning, I headed into town to hit the hardware store, just as it opened. After showing the photo to one of the staff, he found the right size replacement taps for me (I plan to take advantage of the situation and replace both taps). Unfortunately, these taps are soldered on. Which means, to change them out, I need to heat them with a torch, remove the taps, clean the pipes, then solder on the replacement taps.

We don’t have the tools to do that. Even if I wanted to cut the old tap off and put a new one on the remaining length of pipe, I’d still need a soldering gun – and I don’t want to shorten the distance of the taps over the sink, anyhow.

Of course, there are no shut off valves between these taps and the pumps. To work on it means, at the very least, shutting off the water to the hot water tank. To work on the cold water tap means shutting off water to the entire house.

So I picked up a couple of Shark Bite shut off valves.

We have what we need to cut pipe, so we can install the shut off valves ourselves. That will allow us to shut water off to the taps and stop the drip, until we can replace the taps themselves.

I’ve already been able to talk to my brother about this, as he has the tools needed to replace the taps. As for the shut off valves, he had it in his mind to install them in the vertical pipes leading to the taps, but I am thinking of installing them in the horizontal pipes running along the ceiling, so that they will shut off water to the other set of taps as well. Those have never been used since the washing machine was moved upstairs, but considering how old they are, I can see needing to replace them in the future, too.

My daughters are still on “night shift”, though, so I don’t want to start any of this until after they’ve gotten up and had their showers. For now, I just want to install the shut off valve on the hot water pipe, but – as unlikely as it is – if something goes wrong during the install, we wouldn’t be able to turn the hot water back on until it’s fixed, and who knows how long that would be. It’s really a simple job, but I know how easily simple jobs can become major problems, in this place!! Hope for the best, plan for the worst!

One of the considerations for installing the shut off valves; unless we cut out about 3 inches of pipe, they will add to the length of the pipe. That would mean the taps would need to be shifted over by the same distance. Which I wouldn’t have a problem doing, except that parts of the copper pipe have been painted over.

Including the clamps and screws holding the pipes in place. Which is going to make loosening the screws a pain in the butt!

*sigh*

Still, it needs to be done, regardless. We’ve had issues with a loud noise that would start after the well pump kicks in to refill the pressure tank. It is very loud, and I can actually feel the floor vibrating under my feet when I am at my computer. It rather freaked me out because, at first, I thought the noise was coming from the well pump, and we’re already on borrowed time with that thing. Eventually, I was able to trace the noise to the pipes. The pipes run under the exposed floor joists, and have a mishmash of supports attached to the joists, holding them in place. In a couple of spots, there is a pipe that has a 90 degree turn and runs under the pipe it had been parallel to. One of those spots is the hot water pipe that runs from the hot water tank to the laundry sink. What seems to have happened is that, as the house has shifted, those pipes no longer have any sort of gap between them. When the pump starts running, it causes vibrations in the pipes, and with these two pipes now hard against each other, that results in the noise and vibrations I can actually feel in my feet. Right now, the vertical pipes are clamped so tight against the wall – with painted over screws – that there is no give at all. So while we are working on the taps and valves, I want to see if I can adjust the hot water pipe downwards a bit, so that they are no longer touching. Hopefully, I’m right that this is the cause of the noise, and it will stop.

If it doesn’t, and we still get the noise in this location, I’m at a loss as to what else the cause might be!

So we’ve got our work cut out for us this afternoon, just to be able to stop the drip until we can replace the tap itself. Once that’s done, there is no longer any sort of urgency.

The Re-Farmer

A little bit of progress

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

First, the cute stuff!

Beep Beep is such a good mama!

The kittens have taken to napping under the couch regularly. Beep Beep can just barely squeeze under there, herself. A little while ago, my daughter saw her squeeze part way there, then start wiggling oddly. Moments later, some sleepy kitties came out. She then flopped on the floor for them to nurse. She actually woke them up for lunch! :-D They’re more than old enough to be weaned, but it’s still great bonding time. :-)

My daughter got the broken flexible pipe replaced. She did just the one for now.

The other has been left for now, partly to make sure the cold water is working fine and there are no leaks. With the hot water, there is at least a shut off valve at the hot water tank. When we replaced the tank shortly after moving here, the plumber added one on for us. When it’s time to replace the other piece, only the hot water to the house will need to be shut off, and not all the water.

For some reason, the copper pipes are painted, including the end of the flexible hose. My daughter tells me the pipes to the old sink in the entry way, which now supply water to the washing machine, were also painted.

Why paint copper??

As for me, I headed outside for a last bit of mowing.

That’s 4 days of mowing, now, and I’m skipping some places!

I did do an extra bit, though.

I mowed a path to and around the old Farm Hand tractor. Next, we’ll be going in there with the weed trimmer. Once we can access the tractor, we need to cut away the trees that are growing through it. We aren’t able to maintain the tractor itself, but we can at least prevent some types of damage to it!

For the last couple of summers, I’d been able to keep an area to the back gate mowed, large enough to drive through. This year, between the rain and the heat, I just never made it that far.

Today, after mowing the area in front of the storage shed, I decided to mow a path to the back gate. It’s our “emergency exit”, so I don’t want to leave it entirely.

A path, however, is all I was up to!

I cranked the mower up as high as it can go – which is higher than the riding mower can go – and only managed a path twice the width of the mower itself. I actually took 8 passes, just to get it as good as this! The first pass, I had the front wheels up almost the whole way, just to get the height down enough to not choke out the mower.

My daughter suggested it would probably be easier to use the old scythe in the garden shed, instead of a mower, for this stuff! She’s probably right. This is hay that’s being cut! Heck, if we had the equipment (well… working equipment), we could probably get a couple of large round bales just in this section! :-D

I’m hoping to at least keep up a path to the back gate. I don’t expect to make the wide “driveway” I’d kept clear last year. I’d hoped to do more, since the area becomes quite the fire hazard, but we just can’t keep up with it all. More time is being spent on the lawn than anything else right now. As much as I love mowing the lawn, there are other things that need to get done! Ultimately, the goal is to have less lawn, with trees in some areas, and raised garden beds in others. Maybe even a greenhouse or two. Other areas, I hope to replace the grass with moss.

Until then, though, there’s an awful lot of grass to cut!

One of the things that is quite visible when the grass is tall, is a path through the grass, worn down by cats, leading from the yard to under the storage shed. While I was working on the path to the back gate, and was turning to make another pass, I noticed Junk Pile cat, sitting in the newly mowed grass in the shade of the shed, watching me. I think her kittens might be under there. When I told my daughter about it, she said she saw them this morning! Junk Pile cat had brought them to the house for food. :-)

I look forward to seeing them more often and, hopefully, being able to socialize them at least a bit. And their mom, too!

The Re-Farmer

The next steps

/ Re-Farmer / 6 Comments

After our incident with the kitchen pipe, yesterday, I headed into town as early as I could. Of my morning rounds, the only thing I took the time to do before I left was to make sure the outside cats had food.

There is an employee at the hardware store that I was very happy to see. Quite a few times now, I’ve been able to get help from him that went above and beyond. For all the times I’ve talked to him, he’s becoming aware of the state of the house we’re in, so he makes the effort to ask extra questions and give extra information.

This morning, I told him about what happened last night (I am extra glad I bought that box fan yesterday, because that was set up last night to dry the floor under the sink!), then showed him a piece that had come off my daughter had given me, just in case there were other types and sizes.

He’s never seen that part broken off like that before!

So he went over the different types of flexible pipes available, and I ended up getting a pair of 24 inch ones with built in shut off valves. We’ll just go ahead and replace them for both taps. He then asked if we had copper pipes, which we do, so he brought me over to a display sample in another aisle that had copper pipe in it, describing to me how to cut off the end, while popping the display piece apart to show me how it should look after abrading it…

Cut off the end. Of course, we have no cutter!

He found one for me.

Once I had the necessary bits and pieces, I picked up some other things my daughter put on the list for me – some of it are for the next time something like this happens! :-D

The down side is having to go into our contingency fund, to pay for all this. :-( But at least we have one!

Now, it’s up to my more able bodied girls to do the installation! They’re just going to wait until everyone is done using the water for a while, before shutting water for the whole house down again.

Once home again, I finished my rounds outside which, today, included using more of that anti-wasp stuff. I’d found a wasp nest in a corner of the house. We’d found one there last year, too. I’d hosed it away, and I thought they were gone, but last night I hosed it one more time, just in case.

Wasps started coming out again.

Somewhere in there is a crack, and I think they’re getting into the roof above the old kitchen.

When I checked it this morning, there was no sign of wasps, and no sign that the nest was being rebuilt, but that’s what I saw last night. I sprayed it anyway. Sure enough, wasps started falling out of… somewhere.

Thankfully, this stuff will contact kill, so any wasps that are somewhere in the crack would not be able to get out without coming in contact with the spray. I made sure not to use up the whole can so that, if I need to, I can spray again. At least a little.

Of course, in my rounds, I checked on the garden plots.

More squash are blooming. :-)

The size difference between some of these plants is rather remarkable! Some are still so tiny. I don’t know how much of that is due to the different types of squash, or to any health problems or weather damage. The first squash bed has just a few survivors, struggling to grow. This is the one that got frost damaged, even though we covered them for the night. The rest were all transplanted at the same time, so it’s more likely the differences there are due to type, not damage.

It should be interesting to see what we get out of these.

The Re-Farmer

Well, that sucks… and why is that there?

/ Re-Farmer / 7 Comments

Not too long ago, I wrote about my daughters installing a new kitchen faucet. One of the issues was, we have no shut off valves. There is one main shut off valve that shuts off water to the entire house.

Today, that became a problem.

One of my daughters had gone into the basement to clean out the litter boxes, when she discovered water dripping from the cold water pipe leading to the kitchen sink.

No, the pipe was not leaking. The water was coming from above, and from the damp state of the floorboards above, it had been leaking a while.

My younger daughter started clearing out under the sink to see what was going on, while her sister and I started cleaning up in the basement.

Suddenly, the drip started dripping even faster!

Which is when the water for the house had to be shut off.

My daughter had tried to tighten the flexible pipe between the copper pipe and the tap, and it started spraying all over.

Did I mention there are no shut off valves for the sink?

It ended up falling apart, and try as they might, the girls couldn’t even rig something up to hold overnight, so we could turn the water back on.

While they were fighting with that, I went hunting in the basements. There are so many parts and pieces around, surely there must be something we could use to at least plug the pipe, so we could turn the water back on?

When we were cleaning out the basement, some things never made it to the barn. Including a box I’d shoved under the stairs. It’s full of parts and pieces of taps and faucets and pipes…

… and balls, and parts of shower heads that have never been used, and other unidentifiable things.

I also found this.

Actually, I found the box with an eyedropper and what appears to be the instruction sheet inside. I found the bottle that should have been in it, buried in the bottom of the box.

You’d think, by now, I’d no longer be surprised by the things I find in the strangest of places, but … really. Why? Why was this here??

I’ve since tucked it into a place the cats and kittens can’t get into.

Meanwhile, the girls were able to seal up the top of the cold water pipe in the kitchen, allowing us to turn the water back on to the house.

Tomorrow, I’m off to the hardware store, as soon as it opens!

I figure, we may as well replace both of the flexible hoses, which I’ve seen in kits for both hot and cold water.

And maybe get some shut off valves, too.

The Re-Farmer

Well, today has been an adventure (updated)

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

We’ve had a steady rain, all day today.  A perfect day to be indoors, with a hot cup of tea.

But nooo…  That would be too easy!

Late in the morning, as the girls were heading upstairs, they discovered water.

The bathroom floor had water all around the toilet, and with our uneven flooring, it also flowed into the hallway and around the doorway into my office.  Continue reading →