Is This Bad?

Went downstairs the other day and noticed this....

Is this a bad thing?

Holy Freaking Mackerel There's Smoke Pouring From My Plumbing!!!

It Filled the Entire Bottom Floor With Smoke.

This is a great shot, of where the abs drain pipe for the kitchen got cracked during demo.
Spooky Ceiling

This is normal right?? Nothing to be worried about? Happens all the time???









I'm kidding of course. They where doing smoke testing of the sewers and because I forgot to plug the holes the bottom floor filled with the smoke.

Though, after this I did race through the house to make sure I had no other plumbing leaks.
I didn't.

I did go outside to see the smoke pouring from my vents though....actually all the vents were pouring smoke except for one....which never smoked....its also on the far side of the house from any plumbing..so I'm thinking that its abandoned.

Wish I hadn't dropped my phone after the above pics...
All the smoke pouring from my neighbors vents looked very steampunk.

The Call Ya Don't Want To Get When On Vacation...

So we took a little family vacation to Monterrey for just a couple of days.

We where having dinner with some friends when we get a call from our friend who is watching our cats....
 'Um....there's water coming from the ceiling in the dining room.'
 'Wha, wha, what!?!?!?!? How much water?'
 'Well, the floor is wet everywhere, your table cloth is wet and theres like an inch of water in the basement...'
 'Wha????????'

So a frantic call to the tenant whose apartment is right over our dining room to try to figure out what the hell is going on. I get ahold of her and here's her story...

She was filling up a watering can for her plants in the kitchen sink and got distracted and forgot about it...The watering can was being overfilled and the water was pouring out of the spout onto the counter tops...By the amount of water this must of been happening for a couple hours...how this could happen is beyond me. Its a 450sq ft two room studio apartment for Pete's sake...hurray for tenants!!!
She had mopped up all the water in her apartment and then without telling anybody taken off for the day...wonder where she thought all that water went?

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

Our very nice friends mopped up the water in the dining room and put buckets under the drips, bless their hearts.

Here's the view that greeted us when we got home.

I guess the floor looks cleaner...

Shot looking at the stove.

The towel that we put under the stove was sopping, sopping wet...unfortunately the stove with liquor cabinet on top weighs like 4 million pounds so our friends were not able to move it. They did turn a fan on to help dry out the area. I hope the floor under here is not F'd up....

Is there damage?
I don't know yet. It looks like the bulk of the water ran along the back side of our lathe/plaster ceiling dripping through what ever holes it could find, the light canopy, maybe some cracks in the plaster. But the bulk of the water seems to of run along the ceiling and down through the walls and into the basement.

There is a pretty good size bubble in the paint in the ceiling.

Some more smaller bubbles.

There are some random cracks in the plaster that I don't think where there before.

The brown staining on the wall here is where some of the water seeped through.

Gotta get rid of that Trader Joe's Cinnamon broom I think its long past its useful life...

And there you have it....

What You Don't Want To See On A Friday Night....

Soooo, been a long week of working...been an especially long Friday of construction....my ailments are a ailing me and I come downstairs after a nice looooong hot shower and discover this....
Click on video below.

Yep, that's water dripping out of our ceiling light in the kitchen....and I was already in my PJ's too.....
I'm thinking a pipe sprung a leak or the tenants toilet or bathtub is currently overflowing or....

Soooo, back on the work clothes and out comes the ladder...
The kitchen has a dropped ceiling that I can just squeeze my non-petit frame into...this is going to be soooo great for my back.

I shine a light around and there is no water coming from any of the copper pipes....thank jeebus.
None of the ABS DWV piping appears to be leaking either?

After much shimmying I can see a couple puddles of water on the backside of the ceiling drywall.
After much more searching about with the flashlight I discover that the water is actually dripping through the floor from one of the studio units!!!

Off I go to knock on our tenants doors...great, nobody home...now where did I put those keys...we are not the most organized landlords....

I get into one unit and start looking around under the kitchen sink...nothing.
This unit has a fish tank which is of course making a loud dripping water noise that is totally throwing me off. But, the tank is not leaking.

Onto the bathroom...where I discover the source of the leak!
The faucet in the bathroom has a slow drip and the tenant put a pan under it to catch the water which is great as water is included in their rents.
The only problem was is that the pan was full and overflowing onto the counter where it was running off to the caulkless crack between the vanity and the wall.
It wasn't a ton of water and I don't know how long it had been dripping that way but pulling the pan away from the faucet would stop the dripping into our kitchen I hoped.

I checked the other unit just to be sure and it looked fine.

Came back down stairs and crawled back into the dropped ceiling to mop up the puddles.

Success!!!
The next day there were no new puddles and its been dry ever since.

Owww, my back....where's my Scotch?

MC Escher Is My Plumber.

One of the things I've been doing while waiting for the engineer to figure out my earthquake retrofitting problem is trying to uncouple the water supply systems.

Somehow the two units in the basement were plumbed into the same water heater (in the attic 3 floor up) as the main house. My mission, because I had no choice but to accept it, was to figure out how the plumbing was connected and un-connect them.

Here is my super accurate diagram of the existing water supply piping.

Now, there were are a couple of smart-ish things the PO did with the plumbing.
One, was to have a main water supply manifold so that water could be turned off to each unit separately.

The main manifold looks like this.

Except that if you look at my super awesome diagram above the main water line (only 1") comes in at the front corner of the house then travels ALL the way back to the opposite back corner then travels to the various units of the house.
For the main unit it travels from here ALL the way upstairs to the attic where the water heater is, then the hot water flows down from there...

Mapping The Plumbing System
I used a super high tech method to map the pipes.
I turned on a hot water tap and then waited for it to get really hot then turned off the water and starting feeling around the copper water pipes to see what was what, and where it lead.
I did the same thing with the cold water taps but let them run because I could feel the water moving in the pipe with my hand.

Using this method I figured out pretty much where everything went....which is why the map looks so screwy.

Main Manifold From The Inside.

I bought these manila tags from the super awesome Pagano's Hardware Mart. As soon as I figured out where a pipe went and what it was for, I wrote it on the tag and wired it to the pipe.
In the shot above you can see that I've figured out where a couple of the lines go.

One line goes up to the main unit, one is for the basement units (except that they are plumbed with the hot from the main unit also), one is for both studio apartments and one, one is for a hose bib...yep a fancy valve and from there it's a straight run to a hose bib....that doesn't make any sense to me...

Spaghetti Programing

Here's my fav shot. You can see the pipes that go all the way up through a chase to the water heater in the attic. Then you can see the hot water manifold splitting off. As I've said, I've figured out where everything goes except for one line in this shot. The main line for the basement units splits off and goes up this chase and I have not been able to determine to where and for what ...
 
Ladder To Nowhere

That's what I thought when I saw the above plumbing. This is the mess above the laundry room ceiling. The plumbing doubles back on itself like three times in this space...

The most confusing thing for me was this branch pictured below:

It was a hot and cold line that seemed to go nowhere.
I was worried that they went up to the kitchen in one of the studio apartments...which would be super lame, but par for the course.

To determine where the pipes went I had to cut open some drywall to look around.

Nope, still going.

Nope, still going.

Finally in the closet of the small bedroom

I had my answer!

They went nowhere!!! Thank you very much PO for that adventure....

I cut the pipe and removed it from the wall. The water that drained out smelled kinda moldy to me...is that even possible? The pipes did slope downward and they were dead ends so.....

I capped the branch with some super awesome handy sharkbite fittings

Had the water back on in less than half an hour.

Here's the mess of copper pipe I removed from the walls.

This is from the pipe to nowhere and the long branch lines to the bathroom off the kitchen.

The New Water Distribution Plan
Well, I don't have one yet...

But, what I want to do is move the main water manifold to the utility room. It will take like 40' outta the length.
The hot water heater for the basement unit will also be in the utility room and I plan to do a PEX manifold there and run individual lines to the fixtures in the basement.

I also would love to put a small tankless water heater in the utility room for all the fixtures on the 1st floor of the main unit...except that the plumbing for the kitchen comes in from above not below so I can't easily tie into it.
I think it makes sense to try to do this as there will be a kitchen, two full baths and a laundry room on this circuit.
Then, the water heater in the attic would only need to supply hot water for the attic bath, attic laundry room, the master bath and the kid's bath on the second floor.

I'm not 100% positive but I think that the hot water supply for the master bath starts in the attic (one floor above) then travels down to the basement and then back up...cause it takes FOR EVER for the water to get hot...

Yay!!! Plumbing!!!

Steamy Goodness!!!

We Have Steam!!!!!!!!!!!

Good thing we're in the middle of an October heat wave....

Finally got around to replacing the bashed on steam generator for our silly shower in the master bath.

Here's a shot of the unit before installation.

Its the only 120V model Jacuzzi makes...... it seems pretty budget...

The spot on the wall where the old unit was.

Step one new unit mounted to wall.

Had to use anchors...there's never a stud around when you need one is there?

Cold water supply hooked up.

That white tube on the bottom is a water filter.

See the brass rt angle on top of the unit and the half a union coming out of the wall? I had to figure out a way to hook the two together...

The old push button in the shower was destroyed so I had to replace it with the new one that came with the kit....

Except for some crazy reason..the hardware on the original was not water proof...

Those screws are totally rusted!

I had to chew out the plastic to get rid of this old mounting bezel.

Bezel gone.

You can see right through and into my closet!

New switch has no complicated clamping mechanism.

Just 100% Silicone caulk on the back side.

Union Adaptor Widget.

To hook up the steam generator to the steam delivery tube I had to fab up the above adaptor...ya I know my soldering skills suck...but it didn't leak. I had to go around to EVERY place that sold plumbing in the area to find the exact same 3/4" union...of course the PO bought it at Home Despot...

Here's how it all looks put together.

And now lets push the button and see what happens....

Steam!!!

It took about four minutes to fill our little shower with steam.

Its a great thing that I got this all done during an October heat wave!

Hope it stays warm and sunny through Halloween!!!

Though, we can't wait for it to be Coooooold so we can try the steam shower.

Next Up, Halloween, for sure this time.

fun with plumbing

The last couple weeks have been filled with late nights at work, along with Dan working up revisions to drawings and plans to resubmit them for permits. We now have most of the permits we need for the next batch of work, but there are couple more we're still waiting on a decision for.

Today's fun activity was taking apart the plumbing for our shower drain, which hasn't been doing much in the way of drainage for a week. We've snaked it, poured baking soda and vinegar down it, we even tried drano as a last resort, but no luck. This morning it was time to pull the p-trap and see what was inside.

Except that upon inspection, there was no way of removing the p-trap short of taking a sawzall to the whole dwv assembly. This whole maze of pipes was assembled as a single unit, clearly before it was installed up in the joists.

There was one point connecting to the vent that was held together with a no hub coupling, so we loosened that and removed a section of the vent pipe from outside to try to run a snake from there to the trap. Only instead of the coupling releasing the pipe, the fitting the coupling was connected to broke off at the end, leaving the threads still threaded into the next pipe in the chain

And here you can see both why the metal might've been a little extra rusty at that point, and also why the tub hasn't been draining. It's a nice solid mass of hair and gunk. The blackish ring just inside the rusty ring are the threads that are stuck in there.

The problem was that there was a change in pipe diameters at this point, and the coupling used was designed to go from a larger to smaller pipe, not from a smaller to a larger pipe. I know it doesn't seem like much of a difference, but this same problem cursed us at our Oakland house until we finally found it and swapped it out with the correct part. The difference is that the smaller to larger coupling has a slanted wall so the inside change in size is nice and smooth. The larger to smaller coupling has a stepped wall so anything coming down the drain has a perfect ledge to hang onto. Then a little more sticks, and a little more, and eventually you've got this mucked up pipe right here.

After scraping the schmutz out into a bucket, we have some reasonably cleanish (look, they're 100 years old, they're not going to look like new) pipes.

This is what came out of the pipe. It was less than I expected, but still sufficiently gross. I was tempted to post it as a trichobezoar on craigslist, but it was much more satisfying to throw it away.

The new coupling had to stretch all the way around the fluted end of the pipe because trying to remove the broken threads was just making things worse, so Dan softened the rubber up along with some hot water in the microwave.

Not the most by-the-book fix, but we'll be redoing all this plumbing in another year, so this just has to hold out till then.

And here's everything all put back together, and here I go to take a nice hot shower!