New House Blog: Episode LXI - Plumbing Woes

It's funny how things are interrelated.  Especially in old houses with old pipes that have been connected to each other for over 40 years.  Change just one thing sometimes - by replacing a hose bibb for example - and something else downstream, or upstream, is affected.  Sometimes one replaced part can lead to a multitude of replaced parts.  This is a tale of just such happenings.

Woe #1

You remember when we changed out our front yard hose bibb, and at the same time removed the extraneous plumbing that was cluttering up the place?  It's chronicled in this Episode, and at the time it seemed like all was well post-bibb-replacement.  However, I noticed that the ground immediately around the water main never dried out after that repair, and for a while I told myself that it was just residual water and that our clay-like dirt retains water for a while - it would be dry in a few days.  For a couple of weeks I told myself this, hoping it was true.  Alas (you've probably guessed what I'm going to say), it was not ok, and it did not dry out, for I had inadvertently cracked the aged, decrepit water main.  And I had cracked it below the house's shutoff valve, which further complicated the matter.  Here's a picture after we dug up the dirt around the water main.

The crack is toward the top of the picture, and it was really more of a hairline fracture - just big enough to allow for a good bit of seepage, but not big enough to be catastrophic.

Notice how corroded and decrepit the pipe is (40+ year-old galvanized will do that); and that's just the outside - try to imagine the condition inside that corroded and decrepit pipe.

At this point, after the dirt was dug up and we saw the condition of the pipe, we knew that this a job for a trained professional plumber, and we were pretty sure it would probably require re-piping all the way from the water meter (out by the street) up to the house.  We called our go-to plumbing company, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, and Robert came out to assess the situation.  He agreed that a full water main re-pipe would be best, and we scheduled the work.

Robert was friendly and courteous, and he and his crew did a fine plumbing job and their work passed the city permit inspection on the second attempt.  The first attempt failed because they had not yet installed a grounding electrode (basically an 8-foot copper rod that grounds the house).  As you can see, the new water main is PVC, not corrodable steel.

Notice the new shutoff valve and pressure regulator.  Note also that the new shutoff valve is below the ground's level.

 This is the new water main out near the water meter.

They were able to re-use the existing hose bibb.

 Robert installed a nice wooden box around the new water main, and as you can see we have ample access to the shutoff valve.

We reinstalled the brickwork and adjusted it to fit the new wooden box and grounding electrode.

We don't want a big hole right there for dirt and small animals to fall into.  This is one possibility for covering the hole using some bricks.  We may change it up a bit in the days to come.


Woe #2

Plumbing woe #1 lead to Plumbing woe #2.  As Robert was inspecting our in-garage plumbing he pointed out to us some serious corrosion we had not noticed before.  Archaeological evidence shows that sometime in the past the pre-Bishopians had a water softener in our New House.  Said former water softener was somehow connected to an old loop of pipe that we mostly ignored after we moved in.  Said old loop is where the serious corrosion was.  It sounds complicated, but pictures will show how not-complicated the situation really was.

 This is an overview of the old loop.  The main corrosion spots are in the top left corner of the loop and in the right-hand spigot.

This is a close-up of the corrosion in the right-hand spigot.  I was going to show a close-up of the other really bad corrosion spot, but it's just too nasty and gross to post.  Suffice it to say it was worse than what you see here.

The good news in all of this is that replacing this old loop was within our plumbing abilities, and we were able to do so with no hassle or trouble.  Well, except for having to go to Home Depot a second time because someone (that would be me, Bish) read the tape measure wrong and thought we needed 1/2" piping instead of the 3/4" piping we actually needed.  And except for Home Depot's plumbing section being a mess that day and not having any usable 3/4" 90-degree elbows.  We had to make do with what they call 3/4" 90-degree elbows with side outlets and 3/4" plugs for said side outlets.  Behold the finished new loop.

We are happy to report that the metal where the old pipe connects to the new is in really great shape and shows no signs of corrosion, despite how dirty it looks on the outside.



Woe #3

We're not sure exactly how woe #3 originated, or exactly how the interplay of woes #1 and #2 contributed to it, but we know for sure that it came about after the first two woes were addressed and resolved.  In a nutshell, the cold water was coming out as a rusty trickle in our 1/2 bath - the 1/2 bath with the cool water pump-looking tap.  The hot water was unaffected and normal, but the cold just would not clear up or increase in pressure.  Our suspicion was that the tap itself was where the trouble lay, and some testing with a spare tap proved this to be the case.  We disassembled the tap as far as possible and did not discover any blockages, but the tap refused to provide a clean healthy water flow.  Time to replace the tap.

 Because we like the design so much, we decided to replace the faulty tap with an identical new tap.

 This worked out well, because we didn't have to replace the base of the tap.  This is the old tap, uninstalled.

This is the new tap, providing a clean, healthy flow of water.  We don't know exactly what caused the old tap to fail, but replacing it resolved the issue.

This is the old tap, just before it was unceremoniously dropped into the recycling bin.  How can you be sure that the tap pictured above is in fact a new tap and not just a picture of the old tap?  True, there are no photos of the two taps together; but if you look really closely at the picture of the purported new tap above, you will notice that the connectors for the inlet hoses are slightly different from the connectors you see in the picture on the right.




Thus concludes our tale of woes and
       bIsh