Plumbing, epilogue: Retrench!
After returning from one of my business trips, your usual narrator mentioned (at midnight) that there was a lot of water in front of the house just under the front hose-bib. Assuming I must have not installed the front hose-bib correctly I figured this problem would be easily corrected in the morning and elected to sleep.
In the morning I looked over the problem and used my nifty Manabloc to shut off the water to the front hose bib to let the water drain. In the evening I again looked at the front of the house and noted that there seemed to be more water than there had been in the morning. I then ran to the water meter which was a blur, spinning as fast as it could go. At this moment all of the clues we had noticed over the last week came together.
- Sound of running water when nothing was running. (Pex is supposed to be noisier than other piping systems, but it turns out, not as noisy as we were hearing)
- Water in front of the house. Well, duh — water turning the front of the house into quicksand is too much to simply be a slow hose-bib leak.
- The extreme drop in water pressure from the first day after the new plumbing was installed.
It was now clear that the remaining portion of original plumbing in the house could not take the pressure draw from the new plumbing and was dumping water under the house. The meter had not been worked on since it was put in originally and I could not turn off the valve. I called the city and asked them to turn off the water as an emergency.
The crew showed up around 8:00 and installed a new shut off valve. By this time I knew I was going to have to replace the water line. I first called a plumbing outfit and learned that they charged $300 for the first hour and $57 for each 15 minutes after that. I decided that at that rate, I could at the very least dig out the union between the city water and my water line. The crew helped me dig for the union, but could not find it either. After they left I dug right next to the meter to find the water line. Code requires the water line be down at least two feet. I found the water line down almost five feet.
Sunday morning, the ox was in the mire, (at least we had a mire in front of the house), so I started digging along the water line from the meter toward the union and found the union about eight feet from the meter, 4½ feet underground. Then I dug out the trench for the new water line 2½ feet deep for twenty feet. The ground is soft and I was able to use a broom handle to push a hole under the concrete walk. I then taped the pex line to the broom handle and pulled it through.Now I made the trip to the home supply store for supplies, but first I had to change clothes and wash off all the dirt that covered me. Without running water we had to use the buckets we filled to clean me up enough to sit in a car.
When I returned, I ran the line in the house from where I planned to drill through the foundation up to the connection between the old water line and the new plumbing. A neighbor came over with his hammer-drill and drilled a 7/8″ hole through the foundation (8″ long). 3/4″ pex has an outside diameter of 7/8″ so it fit perfectly. I now connected up all the pex except at the connection to the old water line. Now I needed to disconnect the city water from the galvanized pipe and connect it to the pex. This was tough to do because I had to kneel down in a 4½ foot deep hole and work with pipe that had not been touched in fifty years. I was able to turn loose the union on the galvanized side and then turned the city’s copper union side. After a very long time using a hack saw to cut off the galvanized pipe to make room to work, all while falling forward into the hole, I could get ready to attach the pex adapter to the city’s union — only to discover that while the pipe was ¾”, the city union was 1″. I had to make another shopping trip for a 1″ to ¾” adapter. I quickly started working on making the connection. It was very difficult to connect the pipes, but I thought I had it done. Then I connected the new pex water line to the pex water line I put in three weeks ago. I held my breath, turned on the water …
It worked. No leaks! Oh wait, is that a puddle forming under the union? I tightened the union more … it began to spray … I tightened the union some more … it sprayed more … This was the low point. It was now about 6:00. I called the city and asked for someone to come out and replace the city’s union because this was the side that was leaking. I thought they wouldn’t come until Monday morning. Since this leak was substantially less than before we left the water on and I took a shower. We then had dinner and planned on turning the water off before bed.
At 9:00 p.m. the city water crew showed up and replaced the union, I had to come out, cut off the 1″ pex connector and put on the ¾” connecter. They put them together and we had water and NO LEAKS!!! The next morning I called the city inspector to approve the line. He did and I spent Monday afternoon back filling and replacing sod.
We typically use less than 10,000 gallons of water in a two month period of time. However, since our last bill at the end of August our meter shows we had 56,000 gallons pass through our water meter. Fortunately the city, when you have the line inspected, will forgive usage due to a leak.
