Adaptive Curmudgeon

OK the panic is over.  Civilization didn’t collapse.  No chickens died.  The ice rink is still under a quarter acre.  No pipes were harmed in the making of this movie.

Phase 0: I called the one and only plumber in known creation that will actually come to my house.  He wasn’t interested in coming to my house.  I expected this.  All I wanted was a plausible way to keep “water spewing everywhere at 10 degrees” from turning into “frozen solid like cement had been poured in the pipe”.  He talked me down from the ledge where I was going to jump and gave me the idea.

Phase 1:  I evacuated the water from the line as well as can be done in the middle of the night at 10 degrees in a barn.  I think it worked.  No kidding!  I deserve a Nobel prize.  So does my plumber.

I started by shutting off the water supply at the house.  When I bought the house the rusty old valve wasn’t very good.  I’d since replaced it with a Shark Bite ball valve because I’m a dour individual that plans ahead for disaster.  This time it saved my ass.  Yay me!

(Note: If you own a decrepit house you should immediately buy all the Shark Bite fittings you can afford.  If you live in a house without plumbing issues…well screw you Fatty McRich Guy…the rest of us love Shark Bite because it’ll seal tight in the middle of the night in ten seconds.  Seriously…this shit is black magic!)

Anyway I already have the valve and I shut ‘er down.  House life support systems remained on line.  The chickens were facing eminent doom & the exposed pipe was facing deep freeze.  Given the climate and relative value of the house and chickens that’s nearly a success story.

Then I went to the chicken coop (actually it’s a barn) and threaded a air compressor adapter with pressure gauge to the hose bib on the hydrant.  This takes a few minutes if you happen to have the air compressor fitting, Teflon tape, wrench, and the required air compressor quickly at hand.  Shockingly I do!

The chickens went apeshit when I fired a 30 gallon air compressor motor in the coop.  At least the noise of the machine overpowered my swearing.  The stressed out chickens might lay a few less eggs tomorrow.

Then opened the hydrant and blasted all the air I could muster  into the fitting.  Presumably it would force most of the water out of the busted pipe in the field.  I was concerned it might blowback through the Shark Bite into my basement.  I wasn’t sure how it would work.  In theory it made sense.

For once theory was correct.  The valve was as flawless as ever and I suspect I evacuated 80% – 90% of the water in the buried line.  Enough to go to sleep at night.

Phase 2:  The next day I attacked the old abandoned “pipe” (actually 1″ rigid hose buried a good 6′ deep.  First I hacksawed 6″ of damaged pipe.  Then I warmed it with a torch.  (All rednecks have torches and they’re not always used to accidentally burn up a truck.)  That gave it enough flex to shove a hose fitting with threads into the end.

I cranked that sucker tight with two hose clamps and then wrapped Teflon tape on the fittings threads and screwed on a cap.  Yah’ right…and I’m the King of Siam.

I actually crossthreaded the cap and screwed everything up.  Then a swore a lot.  The chickens were scared.

I had to use a Dremel tool, a knife, and more swearing to clear the threads and try again.  Then back to the coop where I pumped 16 pounds into the pipe to see if it would hold air.  Back at the busted pipe a little dish soap showed it was a nice seal.  Ha ha…of course it didn’t.  It blew bubbles like it was an Olympic event.

So I unthreaded it to try again…which released the compressed air in a rather explosive manner.  So loudly in fact that I barely noticed the half gallon of ice cold pipewater that spewed in my face.  Swearing is appropriate in this situation too.

More Teflon tape, more swearing, pump it back up to 16 pounds (a number selected at random), try the soap test.  Swear some more, crank the fitting a smidge and ….

Oh my God.  Can it be?  Yes!!!  Good golly it’s holding air!

In theory this will create an air pocket (that can’t freeze) at the point where the pipe emerges from underground (the spot where a freeze is most likely).  Since the air cant’ escape through the cap I can flood the pipe with water and the air pocket will persist.  I can use the barn’s frost free hydrant to feed the chickens again.  Next spring I’ll have to figure out how to install a frost free hydrant where the cap exists right now.

I wanted to leave it overnight to see if it held pressure but the hydrant has a hairline crack in a brass fitting.  The barn hydrant is for filling buckets and not a precision device.  It never holds pressure and it’s “off” 99% of the time.  No wonder I didn’t notice it.  Nor do I care, the only bad point is that any leak in the system disallows a pressure check to verify the cap I installed.  Even so I’m reasonably sure it’s ok.

Whew.  What a mess.  This is the kind of real life mini-disaster you’ll never see on the glossy homesteading “porn” magazines they sell at the checkout line.  (“I spent $60,000 on solar panels for my McMansion and so I’m eco-green.  Also I have six horses but no job.”  Bah!) I’ll know Mother Earth News is about homesteading the cover has a frustrated hick with a lit torch and torn jacket covered with frozen water swearing at a pressure gauge in a dark chicken pen.

Eureka!

I’ve discovered the leak that OBVIOUSLY had to be somewhere.  In my world that’s good news.  How low can the bar get?

About 100 yards from my house, beyond the frost free hydrant in the chicken coop, there is another pipe.  I hadn’t realized it was actually connected to the system.  A mistake that’s more reasonable than you’d think; this place has been modified by a zillion generations of farmers who built things at random, let some of what they built fall down, and generally considered building maintenance a sign of weakness.

It’s just a hose sticking out of the ground near a fallen fence.  Stuffed in the hose was a stick.  (I’m not making this up.)  Somehow the stick ejected.  Presumably this was caused by freezing and cooling cycles but it’s been stable for as long as I’ve been here so why now?  I prefer to think that zombie squirrels did it.

The good news is that the ice rink it created is not inside my house.

The bad news is that it’s 10 degrees (unseasonably warm but still cold enough to freeze the line clear to the center of creation), it’s already dark, and my magic wand is out for repairs.  I’ve got to invent a solution.  Now!  Adios folks; during times like these I can’t be dinking around with the internet.

I’ll save this post with settings to hit the blog later.  If I’m found frozen to the ground in spring; you know what happened.  (But don’t overlook the possibility of zombie squirrels.)

For no apparent reason, the water pressure in the shower was about 1/3 what it should be.  This is serious.  Let me be clear, I don’t care if Gaia weeps and hippies fall down dead at the thought of it, I need a long hot shower…every goddamn day.  Warm water is the only reason my body’s muscles actually function.  Hot showers and indoor toilets are just about the best thing ever created by civilization…and, like most men, I consider indoor toilets only partially required for the good life.

I pondered the lack of pressure.  Must be a frozen pipe.  Except the weather hasn’t been that cold.  (Also I insulated the shit out of the pipes that lead to the shower.)  But…

I performed some experiments, flushed every toilet in the house, and consulted my limited experience of plumbing.  Frankly I was baffled.  My plumbing diagnostic skills fit with “yes water/no water” decision trees.  “Some water but less than usual…”  Mystery.

Must be frozen.  So I traced every pipe I could find.  Nope.

Finally, I determined (through experiment) that the water pressure was low for the cold line in one bathroom…and not the rest of the house or hot water.  Huh?

Clearly the cold water was going AWOL and should be filling to the basement rafters right now.  Either that or there’s a 80% blockage on one pipe that won’t melt.  (Like Dick Cheney’s heart.)

I’m utterly clueless (which is nothing new).  So I’m “crowdsourcing” (or whatever the hell they call it) by deploying the “poll feature”:

Furthermore I’m not sure what to do about it:

My house is an archaeological exhibit of multi-generational half assed construction.

I’ve postulated a timeline to explain that which is otherwise insane.  In phase one the house was built by hicks that didn’t own a level because they didn’t need one.  Long ago.  Before electricity.  Likely before indoor plumbing.  They probably hewed the wood from the raw land using axes and their bare teeth.  Huzzah!

Then it was expanded by the next generation of hicks that retrofitted for modern conveniences like lights and shitters.  They didn’t own a level either but the workmanship looks good even if the materials are museum age now.

This generation of stuff was retrofitted again (which makes sense as the early generation of utilities was a mite…crude).  These were slightly less clever folks.  They expanded and moved plumbing around using the “just keep adding bends in the pipe till you get there” approach.  Their stuff is mostly solid if you overlook their wild misuse of fluid dynamics in the plumbing.  The didn’t own a level either.

The next generation was a gaggle of monkeys.  They rerouted everything and retrofitted whatever they got their hands on.  They doubled the size of the house…presumably with a blueprint that was sketched on a pizza box.  I assume all work was done with a beer in one hand and maybe brain damage.  They had a level but they used it as a tire iron.

Some of earlier generation of stuff was left and some was removed.  Occasionally a bit is still in use even though it serves no modern purpose.  I hear the Roman Coliseum has the same issues.

With each passing generation they appeared to have more time and less money.  The newer something is, the less likely the materials are anything but jerry rigged repurposed quasi fabricated crap.  Anyone who will spend a day tinkering with bits of wood because they won’t spring for a couple new 2″x4″ studs had better be either dying in the final chapters of “The Road” or they should be banned from owning a hammer.

Finally the place was bought by an arrogant bastard hick who is trying to fix what is broke, retrofit what is shoddy, and basically impose order on organic chaos.  Undoing stupid and making up for delayed (i.e. no) maintenance is a long process.  I’ll probably die before it’s done.  But by God I ‘aint leaving shit for the next generation (which will probably bulldoze it and install a house trailer).

Why am I mentioning this?  Because the pluming is performing in a way that appears to violate laws of nature.

More in part II.