Month: May 2020

I see a fair number of wacky installations in this line of work.  And, here is one more.

A client called and the complaint was, it was hard for this very elderly (90+) woman to operate her hose bib.   She said it was hard to turn the knob to turn on the hose, and thus water her garden.  So here is the pic they sent me:

Now again, I do not do plumbing so this was all a mystery to me.  I figured they had installed a main pipe shutoff valve instead of a spigot(which, it turns out, was close).  So I figured, maybe I can just get a shutoff valve with a longer handle that this lady can manage with her minimal hand strength.  That way I could just remove and replace and use the existing pipe adaptors.

So I wandered down the plumbing aisle at Home Depot and there was a guy standing there and I showed him the pic.  And that’s when I was told, this was not a water shutoff valve, it was a GAS shutoff valve.  Yeesh.

I have this little theory about some jobs, where things are just bizarre: the theory is, the guy made things work, not properly, but just barely, utilizing parts he had “in the truck.”

So I went round and round with the Home Depot guy about other shutoff valves and then he said, “Let’s go look in the garden section.”  And lo and behold, he found a hose bib extension doohickey that had a little 90 degree turn shutoff arm.  All I had to do was put this in between the hose and the beastly thing.  And here it is:

So now the lady can turn that black doodad easy peasy.  Nice and secure with no leaks.  Hats off to that kid on staff at Home Depot!

 

A regular customer called with a pressing issue: they had a water leak.

The leak was in the drain of a basement utility sink.  Normally you would just say “don’t use the sink,” but they had a dehumidifier which emptied– constantly– into the sink, thus the leak was constant.  They had to put a bucket under the sink, and haul it up some rickety bulkhead stairs at least once a day.  Plus it was a wooden floor.  Yikes.

Now as I have said many times, I am not a plumber.  I don’t spend a lot of time learning plumbing skills, as I just don’t like pressurized water, too dangerous.  But, since drains are not pressurized, I am happy to at least give it a look.

I’m not sure if you can see without clicking on the picture to enlarge it but the “tailpiece”– the piece of metal pipe that exits the drain proper– had rusted out, as had the fastening nuts, thus all the brown rust crud running all over.

Next, at the top of this tube was a fastening nut that was just stuck on there.  Perhaps rust, perhaps paint, I don’t know . . . but I want to tell you, I could NOT get that thing to unscrew.

I tried penetrating oil, a banged it, I tried a pipe wrench, I tried heat . . .  nothing.  Finally in desperation I took a hacksaw blade out of the saw frame, held it in my hand, and sawed through it.  Amazingly, that worked.  Once I had a deep enough groove in the nut I was able to split it with a screwdriver.

Removing that nut was actually 2/3 of the job.  For the install, well, it took a lot of watching youtube videos and asking the guy at FW Webb how to do it, but these tubes all fit together like puzzle pieces.  Here you see the top of the new tube not attached yet:

(The fastening nut is down at the bottom)–  it’s pretty cool how they design these things, you don’t need any teflon tape, just use the supplied gaskets and screw them on.

And, here is the final product.

I did an extensive test of running water, and not one single drip came out.  Yay.

I confess, it is just so satisfying to take on a project like this and win, also to do something that expands my repertoire.  You can watch ten youtube videos, but that can never match actually buying the parts and putting them all together.  And it’s especially thrilling when the job solves a really nasty problem for a customer.