Having justified my emergency turn off by Groundskeeper Willie I was quite surprised by the deluge when I sawzalled the galvanized pipe just before the problematic valve.
I had already scheduled the "turn on" for after the valve replacement ( you can see the new valve with the hammer drill a couple posts ago) for the following Friday. The same middle-aged valve that let me down in the house, also was now letting me down on the city end of things. A deluge of water was disappearing into a mysterious place below my slab. Fortunately, after 20 minutes of pouring water, and kind conversations with Willie's partner in this business, we hit a sweet spot and the water stopped.
I will plumb the house with PEX - a plastic tubing. This will eliminate the galvanized pipe in the house - here is a cross-section of the half-century old plumbing. Check out the iron stalagtites.
4 comments:
That looks remotely similar to those damn pharmaceutical ads regarding plax in all our arteries. LOL
So when you say:
"was disappearing into a mysterious place below my slab."
did you have a leak in the pipe? If so, how are you gong to replace it under the slab? More trench warfare? :-)
back in the 50's they only built on well drained ground - so all that water dissapeared into the water table - the pipe between the city valve and the new one I installed is still the galvanized. A mexican standoff, so to speak, to see which end of this 16 foot will fail. This will determine if utilty or homeowner pays for the replacement...
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