We’ve been hearing a running water noise now for a while, and were unsure of what to do about it. But its been getting really loud and really noticeable and so we asked a church-friend and professional handyman to come and look at it for us.\par
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I was kind of hoping for a quick and easy (and cheap) solution.\par
Well… first he said he thought that a pipe had burst underneath the foundation. A hot water pipe. So a lot of our hot water is flowing out under the house wasting hot water and gas. And undermining the fundationg. Not so good. So he was going to try to cap off the water to the basement (shutting it off in the basement bathroom) and then run new pipes in the basement bathroom, bypassing the leak. Well, after cutting a nice neat hole in the wall in the big bedroom downstairs on the other side from the waterheater, he discovered that all of the hot water for the whole house goes down, not up. So the basement can’t be isolated from the whole house – in other words, the only way to keep that water from flowing is to turn off the hot water heater. At that point we had two options – to tear up the basement floor, including concrete, and try to find the place where the pipe was broken (the floor near the shower is warm, so it’s probably (although not certainly) under there somewhere, and fix it. But who knows what would happen in a year, because all of the other pipes would still be old and rusted. So the other option was to replumb the whole house. I guess that’s what we’re going to do, and in the meantime we’re going to try to manage our use of the water-heater, but only turning it on when we need hot water (showers, dishes, etc.). I’m thinking of trying to play Ma Ingles and keep a vat of hot water on the stove for doing dishes and such…
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Hmmm. Home ownership is expensive. But it could be worse. We could not have a house….(which is sounding rather appealing right now)…\’c3\’82\’c2\~or, well, anyway, we could be living in a hole in the side of a hill in the middle of the winter of eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death. Right?
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This is a nightmare, Elly! Keeping our homes in one piece and functioning certainly is expensive. Hope the replumbing job goes smoothly for you.
Go Elly! You can do it! \par
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It IS a nightmare, but it’s do-able. We lived in our house for two weeks without any gas hookup, meaning no hot water whatsoever. AND – I didn’t even have a stove. (I became very thankful for the electric tea kettle that Alex’s Oma gave me. It made doing dishes and mopping the floor possible!
So, as long as you’ve got that vat of hot water, you’re set!