The Pipes, The Pipes Are Calling
by Peter B. Steiger
11/30/03

As a certified workaholic, I'm known never to take vacation unless three
people drag me away from my computer by force.  I accumulate unused vacation
time the way normal people accumulate coffee stains on their mouse pads.
Unfortunately, my employer has the good sense not to let us carry over more
than 160 hours to the next year, so if I don't use up some time before the
end of the year I lose it.

This is how I ended up taking Thanksgiving week off, with the dual goals of
completing our move to a new house (a project now three years in the making)
and loafing like nobody's business.  Friday evening I shut down my work
computer and prepared for a week of soft living complete with leftover
turkey sandwiches and pumpkin pie.  Little did I know that was the last time
for a week I would spend more than 8 minutes in an upright position.

The first pumpkin pies actually went to the needy of Cheyenne.  My church
runs a Thanksgiving food delivery where we show up bearing boxes of donated
food to provide a complete Thanksgiving dinner for needy families - biscuit
mixes, canned vegetables & cranberry sauce, mashed potato mix, pumpkin pie
filling, pie crust mixes, and a certificate they could redeem for a free
turkey.  So I managed to rouse myself at the unbelievably early hour of 9AM
Saturday and headed over to the church to fill boxes and drive around
aimlessly.

By a delightful coincidence, winter arrived the same day.  Friday the
temperature was a high of 60-something and a low of 40-something; by
Saturday the high was 19 and dropping fast and we had 8 inches of snow,
which was about 129 times more snow than we have seen all year up to this
point.  I rushed through a quick bath and somehow got my little Korean
rollerskate car to stay more or less on the road all the way to the church.

I wasn't about to risk more slip'n'slide action so I invited myself along
with another guy with a much sturdier truck, and we went through a truckload
of boxes while freezing our various toes and fingers off ("I should really
wear my boots," I thought to myself as I got dressed, and then left the
house in my $7 Wal-Mart [tm] sneakers).  Before we could get back for
another load, I got some exciting news on my phone: All the water was off at
our house from frozen pipes.

I should explain that one of these days, I should live so long, we are
moving to a new mobile home in the country; in the meantime we're still
livin' large in a house that predates the pyramids in a trailer park that
doubles as a refuge for the criminally insane.  One of many structural
problems on the old house is that the protective sheet that holds insulation
under the floor, the insulation, and in some places the floor itself have
broken away completely.  There are a few places where if you don't know to
step over that lump in the carpet your foot could end up on the ground
outside.  This is relevant to the story because it means that the pipes on
the unprotected half of the house are prone to freezing and we all know that
any time the temperature drops below 30 degrees we should leave the faucets
dripping.

Now, remember back when I said I rushed through a quick bath?  By now you
have probably guessed what I forgot to do as I ran out of the house that
morning.  So far, and I doubt we will ever discover the full extent of the
damage, that bath caused a split in the hot water pipe leading to the
bathtub, a break on a connection that has been loose for years and just
waiting for a chance to finish the job, ruptures in both faucets at the tub
itself, a break in the vertical pipe leading up to the faucets, and numerous
leaks in the p-trap under the bathtub drain.

That marked the end of my turkey delivering career, and the end of la dolce
vita.  For the next five days I spent several hours a day on my back under
the house in 7-degree weather (wind chill factor: minus 238 degrees) with
water spraying out of cracked pipes on my face that froze into little ice
shrapnel before it reached me.  I got to know every plumbing expert in three
hardware stores (yes, Cheyenne has that many) and knew where to look for
them if they ran to hide when they saw me coming.  I learned to tell ½ inch
from 5/8th inch pipe and what a compression fitting looks like.  And my
fingertips got really, really cold.

For the split in the hot water pipe, one guy recommended this magic tape
that he said was infused with resin and other "mysterious" qualities that
would cause it to bond to the pipe and become rock-hard eliminating the need
to replace that pipe.  I'm still not convinced I was right to trade him the
family's last cow for the magic tape, but it more or less worked although
there's still a very slow drip that oozes out through the tape.  That may be
because it's not really magic like he said or it may be that trying to wrap
wet tape onto frozen pipes with wet gloves on in 7-degree air while lying on
your back with ice and snow blowing on your face isn't the most efficient
way to apply the tape.  I guess the people who made it and came up with the
goofy instructions for wrapping the tape around pipes imagined that all your
breaks would occur on a sunny spring day and you could sit in your favorite
easy chair with the pipe in your lap while you watch TV.

The broken compression fitting took three trips to two hardware stores
before I got a replacement that was the right size and stayed on the pipe
after my son and I both applied all our might to tightening the connections.
I figured, why should I be the only one to suffer in agony as a result of my
own carelessness?  That's what child labor is for.  I also had him run 30
feet of "heat tape", this slightly warm cord that you attach to pipes in the
frozen tundra where we live, to the entire length of exposed pipes and
surround that with foam insulation tubes.  Aren't kids a joy and a blessing
to have around?

That was the end of my troubles under the old house... or so I thought.  For
the next three nights my wife woke me up around 2AM to inform me that yet
another pipe had burst and was spraying water everywhere.  That meant middle
of the night trips out to the main water valve to shut everything off, or
under the house to bang on the pipes some more, or to the closet panel where
the bathtub connections are hiding.

One day when I thought we had it under control, my daughter (whose closet
contains the secret access panel to the bathtub connections) came in to
report that water was spraying out of one of the hoses.  I went in with a
wrench and started tightening the connection, only to have it come
completely off the pipe and send all the water in the house and possibly our
entire neighborhood shooting straight into my face like a cartoon plumbing
scene.  I had to hold the water down with my thumb while I screamed to
number-one son to run outside and turn off the main water valve; by the
time the water pressure was off my thumb had a pipe-sized hole halfway
through it and water was shooting out my ears.

So far, we have tamed the various cracked pipes under the house and leading
up from the ground to the bathtub, but the tub faucets and drainpipe are
still broken so the YMCA has become our bathing facility of choice.

But, you say, all that is the OLD house.  Why not just use the bathrooms at
the NEW house?  I wouldn't have the reputation I have if that wasn't also a
long story.  Out in Green Acres, we don't have fancy city water supplies
coming right up to our back door; we have a well pumping water 360 feet out
of the ground through a bizarre system of pipes and valves that makes the
mess under our old house look easy by comparison.  When we bought the land,
the well was in place with the only outlet a pipe above the ground, which
works great in the summer but as you may have guessed doesn't hold up so
well on 7-degree winter nights.  Every fall since we bought the place we
have drained out all the water from the above-ground pipes and waited for
spring before we tapped into the well water again.

The solution is to put in what they call a pitless adapter, some fancy way
of saying that water comes out below the frost line, which in our case is
halfway to China.  We had a guy come out two years ago to dig a 7-foot-deep
trench from the well to where we planned our new house to go, but money not
being in constant abundance we did the rest of the work ourselves - we
bought the appropriate water pipes and have spent many delightful summer and
fall afternoons in idyllic bliss gluing together sections of pipe and
shoveling dirt back over the 7-foot trench to fill it in.  We are maybe
halfway done and we still don't have a pitless adapter, so the interim fix
is to wrap more of that heat tape - that sure comes in handy, doesn't it? -
the entire length of the pipe from the well to where it goes into the house.

Because our temporary lines weren't ready to hook up to the house yet, we
told house installer guys not to mess with the plumbing while we had them;
we figured again to do it ourselves when we had all the pipes going from the
well to the pressure tank to the house and everything wrapped in heat tape.

So during my "vacation" week fixing pipes under the old house, we also went
out to the new house to finish the various electric wiring and pipe
connections to get water inside.  My lovely wife, who has handled most of
the electrical work, flipped the switch - and water sprayed everywhere under
the new house.

It turns out that the problem is in how you interpret "new".  The house we
bought was a demo model that was sitting, unused, on the lot of the dealer
for two years.  In theory the pipes have never been used or put to any
strain.  In practice, I'm beginning to wonder if every time a working house
had plumbing problems they said "just grab a new part off the model house
and put the broken parts on the model."  There's this long chain of plastic,
brass, and copper pipes and fittings leading from under the insulation to
where our homegrown pipes connect, and some of those fittings are more rust
than metal.  I took one in to the plumbing guy the same day he had helped me
with some of my problems under the old house and explained this was a
plumbing problem at the new house; he just looked at the rusty part in my
hand and started laughing.  I'm sure those folks will be telling stories to
their grandchildren for years to come about the week the whole Steiger
family camped out in the plumbing aisle.

I replaced all the rusty connections under the new house, once again
recruited my son to play immovable object against my unstoppable force, and
we tightened the living daylights out of every pipe connection we could
find.  We turned on the water and it worked perfectly... for about a minute
and a half.

My vacation is now officially over and we still have no working faucets or
drain in the old house bathroom, and no clue why the pump turns on for a few
minutes and then turns itself off at the new house.  Every day we lug gallon
jugs of water from the old house to the new one, and whenever we need a
shower we run out to the YMCA and try to break their plumbing.  If anyone
can, I figure we can.

Now I need to get back to my office and rest up from that vacation.  Can you
spare a cup of water?