FRIDAY SURPRISE: The rest of my plumbing story

Friday, May 25, 2007 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Completely irrelevant
Someone reminded me that I promised to tell you the story of my little plumbing adventure. Personally I don't think it's all that interesting, and there isn't even a moral to the tale. It is, however, interesting in the same way that highway accidents are!

It started, innocently enough, with a knock at the door. Standing on my porch was a nice gal from the city's Public Works department, who said something along the lines of "we think you have a problem!" The Finance Department had called them with the news that our water bill had jumped during the month from our normal $73 to a whopping $233, and that maybe they should come out and have a look.

She did, and didn't see anything. She did suggest that I call a leak detection company to locate the source, after which a call to a plumber might be "a good idea."

(It's worth noting that normally I take care of such matters myself, having grown up on a farm where we never hired such work out. However, I've got so many other things to do right now I just couldn't tackle the project. As you'll see, it was probably for the best.)

The leak guy came out and did his little magic (pumping the lines full of helium and listening for the popping sounds of the gas escaping from the leak site.) Nothing. He did the test again - same result. We were both standing in my side yard, wondering where this leak could be, when I heard a sound.

"Pop-snap-crackle" (trademark concerns, you understand.) We walked around in circles, trying to find the source. At one point I decided on a likely direction and followed the sound into....the middle of my neighbor's back yard, where a tiny geyser was erupting!

We theorized that at one point back in the 1940s both houses shared a common water service, but sometime later the neighbor got their own service. At that point they apparently cut the tie at their house and capped the now-unused stub, which finally rusted out and started leaking.

At least, that was the theory.

The leak guy traced what he thought was the offending pipe over to the leak site, marked everything, and left. That's when I started calling plumbers - and calling plumbers, and calling plumbers. An even dozen, in fact. I called half on Thursday and the other half on Friday, and none of them returned my calls. Finally, on Monday I found a plumber who actually answered his phone, and one of his crews came out to start digging.

The plan was to dig down 32 inches, where the line was, to the 't' fitting where the stub line originated, then cap the stub off at that point.

They got down to the point, and found only an elbow going into my house. They started digging a trench - 32 inches deep, by hand, mind you - in an effort to find the stub and it's fitting. The dug 8 feet of trench without finding that connection, and would have followed it clear to the water meter, were it not for one little problem: the garage was built on top of the water line, and the pipe went right under the cement floor!

At this point things got really expensive, as we elected to have them bring in a horizontal drilling rig and install a whole new service line. A couple grand later, and it was in - and the leak, naturally, ceased. I'm now glad I didn't try to tackle this myself.

On the plus side, those boring machines are pretty cool. They put a hole from the water meter, down under my garage, up the hill and into the end of the trench that had been dug - and got within a couple inches of center. The actual drilling probably took them 10 minutes, but the setup and takedown kept them here about an hour. Quick and easy, as long as one has a full checkbook!

There you have it. Hope it was as exciting as you were expecting!

-=[ Grant ]=-
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