Water Disaster 101

[audtatious]

Doing some work in the storage room of the basement there was a water line hanging around that used to be part of the old heater. By looking at it I knew it had been the water line that went to the built-in humidifier from the old oil-based furnace. As it was in the way and not in use I went ahead and decided to put my new pipe cutter to use. As I'm sure you can guess, it was a gusher.

Water went everywhere. Wife grabbed an empty bucket to start catching the flow and was spittin and sputtering as it was flying in her face. CLASSIC. So, I turned off the main water shutoff and it only slowed by 1/2....Guess I need to have a new shutoff valve installed as water was still pouring out of the 1/4" pipe.

I traced it back to the main water pipe and it did have it's own old shutoff valve.....Which the idiots that initially threw in the ducting had blocked off with a metal pipe. 20 minutes of screwing with it and I had THAT shut, but it only decreased the water drain by another 1/2....Oh my!

I went ahead and installed another coupler to the old electric solenoid that I had removed from the pipe and the water leak was gone. What a pain in the butt!

So, I guess we are going to contact the guys who put in the new heater as they should have removed that line and patched the pipe. If they don't take care of it I will have to bill them for another plumber. Will have to get the main shutoff taken care of as well.

Fun fun fun on a Saturday night

[Q451990]

Nothing like the helpless feeling of having water spraying out of somewhere that it shouldn't!

I had a water heater blow a hole in it's side (basically a 3 or 4" split) and spray water halfway across my attic over my kitchen. I'll never forget coming back inside seeing my wife standing under the track lighting trying to catch water with a pot!

Yes, we do strange things here, like put water heaters in the attic!

Heath

[audtatious]

Yeah, I don't like how some homes have washing machines on the 2nd floor as well since those eventually cause a problem as well.

[Looneybomber]

A while back, when still in high school I think, I was getting ready for bed and need to go downstairs. I got down to the last step, hit the basement floor (mind you it's entirely finished) and splash. There was between 1-2" of water covering nearly the entire basement floor.

Apparently the water faucet for the hose froze, split, then thawed out. That was a late night of running shop-vac's and dumping them outside and trying to get expensive stuff out of the water and dried off. Luckily the pool table and bear skin rug made it through ok.

We're working on remodeling the 5th room still. It's been a slow process.