Plumbing on Alkahest

hooray for water!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:58:32 +0000

The plumbers finally got out late Monday, in time to find out that the well pump needed replacing, and no they don’t keep a 3/4 hp pump on hand… why do you ask? After the supply store opened back up, they came by around 9:30 this morning and replaced the pump. The bad news? Ouch, replacing a well pump is expensive. The good news? It was $800 less than I was dreading. :-/

and the weekend started off so well...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:24:11 +0000

It started off as a good weekend. I swear it did. I was up late Friday (technically, early Saturday) talking to a friend from high school, catching up on this and that. Woke up late, played a bit with the dogs and went out to Celebrity Dairy’s open house. I got to pet the baby goats [note: need to add pictures here] and look around the inn. When I left, I had 3 logs of goat cheese, a pint of blueberry preserves and a half pint of hot pepper jelly.

Always with the water

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:05:00 +0000

Welcome to my Amish rural paradise, water problems are no extra charge.

In this month’s exciting installment, K and I note that we are lacking in water pressure on Saturday night before we go to bed. Sunday rolls around and sure enough, no water. My guess was that either the well pump or the pressure switch had gone bad. We weren’t going to be too happy if it was the pump, since we replaced it less than three years ago. I went out and bought some drinking water, checked the rain barrels to see if we had water for toilets and called the plumber.

Always with the water problems

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:33:06 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that I (we? maybe it’s K’s fault!) seem to be cursed with water problems. Since we like our current house, and the well is drawing very acidic water, we’ll probably continue to have water problems. Two of the more recent ones:

Two months ago, we started noticing that the average daily water usage (as shown on the water softener) had gone from 60 gal/day to over 100 gal/day in a very short period of time, maybe two days. Needless to say, K and I were more than a little concerned with where all that water was going. So I ducked under the house and heard the water pump quick cycling: on, off, on, off… Well that’s not supposed to happen. It’s supposed to kick on when the house pressure drops to 30psi, and turn off when it hits 40. We called a plumber, because I’ll do a lot of plumbing, but anything like the water pump that combines water, electricity and problems underground is way out of my league. Turned out that we needed a new pressure tank (my guess: the acidic water ate away at the inner lining of the air bladder). Joy.
The next month, the power bill came in very high. Our first thought was, “well, the pump was on a lot last month, so maybe that’s the problem.” It came in high again the next month. We started looking for the source, keeping a log of power use and finally, on Sunday resorted to shutting off all power in the house and adding the breakers back one at a time. I should have guessed - the pump was using a lot of power. Went under the house, watched the pressure build to 40psi, the pump cut off and all the pressure drained back out of the lines until the pump came on again. The cycle repeated on maybe a 30 second period with a 50% duty cycle. Yay! my pump was running half the day. This time, the plumber found that there was a leak at the pump itself and all the water was being dumped back down the well. On the bright side, we weren’t wasting water - just power. :-(

One fun thing did come out of all of this, we bought a digital, in-house electricity meter.

Another successful repair

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:07:08 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, we were having problems with the water softener and when your well water is as hard as ours is (“how hard is it?” “that’s a rather personal question sir” “no you git, how hard is the water?”) the water softener is pretty important.

So the venturi gasket looked okay, but I ordered a new one since it’s a bit sensitive. I also ordered some new internal gaskets that go in the valve. The parts arrived on Saturday. Replacing the venturi gasket didn’t help, so I opened up the valve and found that I had the wrong sized internal gasket :-( . Turns out that all of the brand name softeners (GE, Sears, Kenmore, Home Depot, etc.) all use the same valve, but in two differrent sizes, a common smaller size and then the rarer large size. I’ll give you one guess as to which we own. Of course, if I had paid attention, I would have noticed that the gasket had two sizes, but oh no… Anyway, so I figure I’ve got to return the gasket, but then I google around a bit and find that in addition to the gaskets (which ironically allow the softener to suck), sometimes the symptoms we were seeing are caused by a blocked drain plug or blocked rotor. I pull out the drain plug and sure enough - it’s blocked. But even after I clear the blockage it still doesn’t suck - but in an entirely different failure mode. I clean the rotor - now it works. I still had some issues with leaks, but reseating the rotor and the whole valve has fixed those. I think we’re back in business.

Too good to last

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:00:43 +0000

It’s been a while since we’ve had plumbing issues. Okay, sure, we replaced the RO faucet in the kitchen six months ago, but other than that…

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that yet another water oriented appliance has broken down. This time it’s the water softener, again. When we first moved into the house, five years ago, the water softener didn’t seem to work. The first problem was a salt bridge that kept it from operating correctly. Once we figured that one out, it was easy enough to fix. Then a year or so later, the tank filled up and wouldn’t drain. That one turned out to be the venturi gasket - part of a clever device that uses pressure differentials to move water around. That one was a bit more annoying since you can’t just order the 1.5" gasket, you have to replace both the nozzle and gasket which costs about $20 + shipping.

New faucet

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:11:42 +0000

I picked up a new kitchen faucet at Lowe’s today. As usual with this sort of thing, removing the old faucet was the worst part. The nuts holding the old faucet on to the sink were standard plastic nuts – attached to badly rusted screws. After 30 minutes of trying: first by hand, then with a towel by hand, then with a wrench, then oiling the screw and trying the wrench, I gave up. Thinking about it for a few minutes I realized that I have a 1″ drill bit for putting holes into a sink. I got the drill and just drilled through the plastic nuts. Victory!

Time for a new kitchen faucet

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:28:25 +0000

It’s been 7 months since we’ve done plumbing renovations, so we’re apparently due. This time I have to replace the kitchen faucet. It’s started leaking badly. “But wait, you say, “a leaking faucet doesn’t require replacement, you can just replace the gaskets. Unfortunately no.

I’ve mentioned before that our water is acidic with a pH of about 5.5. We’ve got the acid neutralizer in place, but many things have corroded over the years. In the case of this faucet, the weld/join between the base of the faucet and the spigot itself has developed pinhole leaks. You turn on the faucet and you get shot in the eye with water.

Drought update

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:30:13 +0000

(odd: i thought i had submitted this last night. i guess i just saved it in draft)

It’s been raining today which is good. The forecasters are predicting rain tomorrow and Friday which is even better. However, I’m still worried. It’s been over a month since the last real rain and close to six months since we’ve had normal rainfall. Raleigh i s down to about 3 months worth of water supply in the reservoirs – Atlanta’s not any better. What happens when cities actually run out of water? Do they evacuate?

Weekend update (updated)

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:49:03 +0000

Not a whole lot going on this weekend. A little shopping, a little work around the house, etc. Saturday, Bryn’s husband, Adam, came by and took a look at some trees that were worrying me. Having a master arborist tell you that, while they are dying, they won’t come down immediately was reassuring. I had this fear that they were going to come down any minute. We’ll probably still want to take them down this fall, but at least we get to pick the times 🙂

New blog category: plumbing

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:53:45 +0000

It felt like I was griping a lot about plumbing here, so I thought I would make it a new category and go back and classify old posts as “plumbing if they were water related. So far, I’ve found 14 posts on plumbing problems – more than I’ve written about photography :-(. That’s depressing.

No water for you!

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 02:51:09 +0000

Yep, it has been a few months since we’ve had major water issues, so we were due. We had water before dinner, but when I went to rinse the dishes, we had no water. It seemed like the pump wasn’t working. I checked the breaker box, the breaker was fine. I went under the house with a multimeter and found that the pump controller was working and was sending power to the pump. So either the power is not reaching the pump, e.g., a root grew through the power line; or more likely, the well pump itself died.

Weekend update

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 02:20:48 +0000

Finished up a lot of little things this weekend. Nothing too terribly exciting:

Planted some herbs and covered them with hardware cloth to keep the squirrels out. Basil (lots of basil), thyme and rosemary. I was looking for sage, but couldn’t find any.
Fixed the water softener – the backwash drain hose was so old that it was leaking onto the floor every time the water softener ran. Unfortunately, I can’t find where the new hose should connect under the hose, so for now it’s draining into the utility sink.
Finished painting the upstairs hall. Back in October/November, K and I pulled off all of the 80’s-style wall paper. It’s been sitting bear for months, but for the past two weekends, I’ve been smoothing out the wall and painting. I’ve got the switch plates back up and it looks pretty nice. K’s already planning where she’ll start taking down wall paper next.
I’ve discovered a Heisenberg-like principle of plumbing: you can accurately identify either the source or the effects of a water leak, but not both at the same time. This week, I identified a musty smell and the mold that was causing it. Unfortunately, I could only identify the dishwasher as the source of the water. After running the dishwasher without the sound proofing at the bottom, so I could see the leak, I found that it didn’t seem to be leaking. My new theory is that a small leak, not near the mold, was creating excess humidity due to the heat of the dishwasher that was trapped by the sound proofing – but how to test? It’s like Schrodinger’s Cat.
Finally, I realized that my laptop hadn’t updated for DST, which is rather uncool. Poking at it a bit, I found out that yum was bombing out before completing the upgrade. The reason is that I did a ‘yum update’ instead of a ‘yum upgrade’ in order to go from FC5 to FC6. So I had a lot of FC5 packages lying around which then broke dependencies. After doing a bit of manual cleanup, I was able to run ‘yum update’ only to find that I had over 600 MB worth of packages that needed downloading. On the plus side, I went ahead and upgraded to the latest development version of yum which has a lot of the new optimizations. That at least made the 363 packages worth of dependencies saner to check.

Work is also okay. I ran a proposal for a lightweight authentication mechanism by the technical team and nobody found any major holes in it. It’s nice to have your ideas validated by the experts 🙂 . Next week kicks off my month with internal audit. I’m not really looking forward to that one, but then I suppose somebody needs to keep us honest. Besides, anything they tell us can only help get support for the policies we know we need.

Miscellany

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 02:25:36 +0000

The acid neutralizer has been in place for over a week – no problems yet. That said, I did manage to break a holding clip on my water softener while trying to figure out why there was extra water in it. Not a big deal, new clips are on order and the broken clip holds for now.
Spinach Quesadillas! My standard quesadilla recipe calls for shredded Mexican cheese with a filling stuffed into a folded over tortilla and pan fried. I just tried a new filling: I took frozen spinach, defrosted it in the microwave and squeezed the water out of it. I then took a few table spoons of butter (okay, smart balance) and lightly sauteed some garlic. Then I added the spinach and used the result as the quesidilla filling. Yum!
I’ve got a couple of extra posts coming tonight: sorry for the drive by blogging.

Tempting fate

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 03:52:10 +0000

So, I’m going to tempt fate here and follow up on a post I made a few weeks ago. Last week, I received the replacement tank for my acid neutralizer. It didn’t look quite like the same tank I had, so I emailed the company. Turns out they had upgraded the tank to the slightly better molded polyglass as opposed to the wrapped resin tank. The big advantage is that the threads are machined, not made by wrapping around a mold.

bah! - updated

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:20:26 +0000

so Saturday night around 11:30pm, the acid neutralizer I just installed, exploded. Okay, it didn’t really explode, but the top popped off again. Spoke to the customer support, looked around a bit more and it seems that the threads on the tank were stripped. I’ll call tomorrow and see about getting a replacement tank

Update: I just received a call from the folks that sold me the acid neutralizer (I didn’t even have to call them back). Two interesting things: 1) apparently, the tank head they sent is a down flow head and the system I’ve got is designed to be upflow. Not a big deal, except that I have to reverse the inlet and outlet plumb lines as compared to what’s labeled on the head. Normally they send a note along those lines – this time they didn’t. 2) Given that one of the threads is stripped, they’re going to send me a new tank and an RMA to return the old one.

the right tool for the job

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:17:28 +0000

Back in September, I was doing a fair amount of plumbing. I installed a water filter, new hot water heater and an acid neutralizer. I never mentioned it, mostly because I couldn’t bear to think about it, but the stupid neutralizer never did work right and I finally just bypassed it in the water line. The problem seemed to be that I couldn’t get the fittings right, so they leaked and filled the neutralizer completely up with water. The instantaneous pressure in the line caused by turning off faucets in the house would then create a huge amount of pressure in the neutralizer and the top would pop off.

looking on the bright side

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:48:50 +0000

Turns out that there is at least one advantage of having constant plumbing problems – you often have the part you need. I had been noticing a leak under the kitchen sink. In checking it out, I found that the nut holding the drain in place was lose. As I tried to tighten it, the nut broke up in my hand.

Resigned to not having one of the dual kitchen sinks, I put a bucket under it and blocked it up. After dinner, we went on our walk and on the way back in, it occurred to me that I had a spare drain segment with a plastic nut. Installed the new nut and no more leak!

memo to K

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:24:37 +0000

Dear K,

In the 13 years that we’ve been married, there has been one constant in our life – plumbing problems. Last night’s 3am catastrophic water heater failure coupled with the emergency reinstallation I had to perform this morning was the final straw. This memo is to inform you that if we ever buy another house, it is my intention to find a structure without indoor plumbing.

I recognize that this may limit our choices and may not be preferable from your perspective, however, after 13 years of water troubles, I see no alternative.

i'm still here - sort of

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:27:24 +0000

Not much blogging over the past week. Mostly because I’m still dealing with slight water issues

After I hooked up the pH neutralizer, I found that it leaked. I had a 1 drip per 5 second leak where I connected the QEST gray connectors to the neutralizer. I tried tightening it. That didn’t work. I shut off the water in order to re-tape it and disaster. When I turned off the water, the transient increase in preasure blew a seal on the neutralizer. Not happy. How the heck do you return something w/ 150# of rock in it.

mmmm, pH neutral water (and it's filtered)

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 01:16:44 +0000

It actually worked. I mmanaged to install a shutoff valve, sediment filter and pH neutralizer without too many trips to the hardware store (only 2). So far it seems to be working, the pH is somewhere between 7 and 7.5. Now maybe I can replace the hot water heater and have it last for more than a year or two.

water world

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 03:03:54 +0000

I think I need a whole new blog category for water troubles.

The pH neutralizer arrived today, along with 150# of premium chalk and 25 pounds of “clean gravel. I guess I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow – first stop Lowe’s, then home to install it. Fortunately, it doesn’t look too bad.

Too much water in my name, part 3: too much acid in my water

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:57:47 +0000

Since we’re on the subject of water (again), had yet another fun experience. Earlier this week, K noticed a couple of inches of water in the pan under our hot water heater. Yep, it seems to be leaking. This is the water heater that I installed one year ago. It was a replacement for a water heater installed 4 years before by the previous owner.

The tendency of our appliances to rust, particularly the water heaters led me to test the pH. Ideally, it should be between 7.0 and 8.0 (or just neutral to slightly basic). Ours was around 5.5 or somewhat acidic. This is a reasonably common problem for people with well water and it causes all of the symptoms we’ve seen (including the degredation of all brass plumbing fittings).

Too much water in my name - part deux

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:46:00 +0000

We had a batch of thunder showers come through last night. We got about 2, maybe 3, inches here. Sometime during the evening, K and I ask each other, “what’s that noise? Turns out we had a leak in the roof that was dripping down (and through) the second story wall, onto one of the logs making up the first story and into the breakfast room. From there it was splashing onto the door to the deck and making the noise we heard.

Too much water in my name?

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 18:05:17 +0000

In graduate school, I had a Chinese friend who used to say that he was destined to have plumbing problems because there was too much water in his name. Both his family name and his given name referenced water. This excess of water meant that he would always have plumbing problems.

I sympathize with this notion. A few years ago, when I moved into my house, I installed a reverse osmosis filter in our kitchen for drinking water. When we came back from vacation, we found that the connection to the water tank was leaking. I spent a bit of time tightening up the connection, but it still leaked. This weekend, I got back to trying to fix it. So far, I’ve been to the hardware store twice, replaced the compression fitting three times and still it leaks. I’m heading to a larger hardware store this afternoon to find a replacement for the entire fitting – we’ll see if that works. If it doesn’t, then I may have to replace the entire tank.