minorthird

so…I walked in the door on Monday night and Erika greeted me and said, “I didn’t make anything for dinnner. I think you’re going to want to order Chinese food after I tell you this.”

She has only met me at the door saying this one before. She was pregnant then.

She is NOT pregnant now.

It seems that I pipe might have burst in the basement and there was a considerable amount of water filling up the back room.

Or at least it seemed that way.

After closer inspection it turned out that there was no broken pipes, but a shit-load of water! (not shit-loaded water, thank God, Buddha, and/or Allah). Where was the water coming from, you ask? Every radiator on the first floor!

I called the plumber, who wanted to come by the next day. After explaining the situation (one-year-old in the house, 20 degrees outside, no heat), and what I was seeing, he told me to check the fill value running to the boiler…maybe the washer gave way on it, and it was running. It wasn’t really running — it wasn’t completely closed, but there was no sound of running water. He told me to drain the system, and shut the water main before going to bed and he’d come by the next afternoon to replace the valve. Well…I can replace a valve. And, I’m not convinced that there is a need to right now…so we parted the closest of friends and I cancelled the pending appointment.

I did drain the system, and from what I can tell, the fill value was ever-so-slightly open — open in a way that if you were turning it on, no water would flow through it, but turning it off to this point would still result in a tiny trickle (with my sketchy math skills and knowledge of physics, I think it would have had to be open for days and days to result in the problem, but what do I know…like I said, my skills are sketchy, at best). I think the water had stopped flowing into the boiler by the time I re-closed the fill valve because the pressure coming from the system was greater than the water coming from the street…yeah, that’s a lot of water…

How much water?

Well, I drained 45 gallons of water from the boiler. The water had backed up into the heat pipes running to the radiators on the first floor, and began leaking from the stop valves. There are eight radiators, and the footprint of the house is 26′ x 40′…that’s a lot of pipe. Last time I drained the boiler, I think I only pulled 16 gallons of water from it, so there might have been about 30 gallons of water sitting in the pipes.

Oh, wait…did I forget to tell you that Erika called me during the day to tell me that the house started shaking when the heat came on in the afternoon? Yeah, she said it sounded like someone was in the walls, banging around and shaking the room.

Nothing like a little water hammer to telegraph a problem. The steam from the boiler must have been shooting geysers of water up to the second floor, under the pressure of all that water sitting there.

So far, so good, though. We have heat, and the boiler doesn’t seem to be taking on any extra water (hard to tell when it’s on and off all day). The water damage in the basement was isolated to a 8 foot area in the back room (Hey Rich, you’ve always wanted the carpet from my basement…you can have all you want…it’s only slightly damp!), and I was able to suck up a gallon or two from it…I just need to move a few things to pull it out and toss it’s damp ass to the curb. One of the things that needs to get moved is the beer fridge — I might need to throw an “empty my fridge” party though…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under the joys of homeownership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.