The pump is pulled…the heaters are installed; the waterfall is now silent and drained. There are still things to be cleaned up, but the water faucets are all disconnected, the solar lights are wrapped and stored, our occasional fairies and seagulls are boxed and safe…and I’ve gathered up all the tools.
We got soooo tired I suggested we go to Long John Silvers for lunch; and we then went down to Lowes in search of winter-shells for our basement windows. We also got a pressure-gauge for our house water pressure, which has gotten worse since the city fixed the water lines: we had it at 80 and dialed it back to 60, but the thing turned out to have fallen to 50. Well, so the cure for that is, first you attach this to an outside faucet to read what the house pressure is, then to go to the adjustment thingie on the house water supply, you know, where your house cutoff is; and screw it clockwise to raise it, while your partner, with a cell phone, is talking to you to tell you when to stop. Piece of cake. Futzed with it and got it to 70, which should make certain jobs a bit faster…
But it’s not raising the pressure in the sink, which is affecting our dishwasher.
We got under there, figuring, well, maybe we’ve got a problem in the valves down there.
What we’ve got, for one thing, is a leak. We also think we may have a clog in a pipe. It makes several right turns including the one to get from the basement to the kitchen in the ceiling access down in the basement.
This time we may just call a plumber. We’ve done so much ourselves, but if we’ve got a clogged supply pipe problem—sigh—at a certain point I just wanna know and have it fixed. We’re real tired. We’ve got so much to do. And Jane and I just want somebody to make this work.
Where and what is leaking? A valve? A joint? Heaven forbid, a pipe proper? How far up the line is the suspected clog? If you have the old-style galvanized steel pipes, then they may have indeed corroded to the point of being stuffed, and ought to be replaced. I’m surprised your house doesn’t have copper supply lines, though, considering the vintage. Copper is much less prone to clogs and corrosion in general. I haven’t worked much with the newfangled plastic pipes that are supposedly almost as bulletproof, and are easier to connect.
Oy! Sympathy! My apartment complex is old, and when I moved in my first joyous discovery was that there was almost NO water pressure. Bathing was an ordeal and a half. About a year later they’d made several repairs and we finally had pressure. It was glorious.
Hmmm….near the dishwasher where leaks have been before. Not a fun day. I vote for call the plumber and let someone else fuss with it so you both can focus on other winterizing things.
Saw this today and just knew you both and the rest of the gang would appreciate it! Way too funny. http://demots.co.uk/demot/437
Lol!
You two just had a problem with leaking there, didn’t you? Seems to me you had to tear out flooring. I’d vote for the plumber, too, unless you are energetic.
dhawktx, when I was stationed in Italy, I lived in a small upstairs apartment in Formia. You couldn’t get enough water out of the hand held showerhead, much less enough hot water. Don’t even bother trying to fill the bathtub, because it would take until the next day, and by then, it’d be too cold. Fortunately, the ship had showers I could use.
What I AM seeing is that there’s a quarter inch pipe representing the garbage disposal or something, spliced into what looks like one of the half-inch ‘up’ lines for the sink. I’m not sure: I’m so tired and I haven’t been able to wear my contacts for nearly 3 weeks because of an eye infection, so the whole world is out of focus and given to multiple images. I’m going to put in my contacts tomorrow—I think it’s safe now—and see if I can figure how the water flow is going. I’m used to plumbing—all these fish tanks and the pond, eh? If that really is in the ‘up’ line, I want to know why and what it is. OTOH, maybe it’s just going to the sewer from the garbage disposal…
You’re right, this has been leaky before; and I think if I have to get into this I’m going to use hose and clamps, or at very least PVC, which is easy to cut and fix. Plumbers sniff at hose, but the right kind is better than pipe with right-angle bends, imho.
Hmmm. Normally I’d think that the 1/4 inch supply line is going into your dishwasher. The outflow for the dishwasher then goes into/though your dispos-all; there’s a punchout for that (I thought you had mentioned dealing with this previously). If the dishwasher outlet doesn’t go into the dispos-all, it should route through an airgap, then into a t-fitting under your sink drain.
I’d suggest sleeping on it, then make sure your eyes weren’t being buggy before trying tracerouting the plumbing. Given your experience with plumbing, I’d think you had as good a chance at fixing it as a plumber; it comes down to choosing your battles.
Something else I just thought about. Do you use the sink above the disposal for anything other than pushing scraps down the disposal? It’s possible with all of the usage of the disposal that it’s come loose from the mount under the sink. It happened to my parents, and it required an extension bar from a socket wrench set, and a hammer to tap the ring tabs on the mount into the fully seated position. I can’t imagine what a quarter-inch pipe is doing running into the disposal, and the drain should be a larger pipe than that. I agree with chondrite, sleep on it, wait until you can put in your contacts. I hope you’re able to fix the problem with a minimum of trouble.
BTW, halfway through “Yvgenie”, hard to put down, but I have to sleep sometime!
Are we still sharing blog urls? Mine is http://theowlunderground.wordpress.com/
Visitors Welcome.
Mine is more of a pottery gallery/blog, and it still needs a lot of work in the gallery area, but here it is. The blog is “Musings of a Mad Potter”
http://whistlingfishpottery.com/
Careful putting the pressure too high – our bell valve went bad, and we had too high pressure in the house, which took out (eventually) all the toilets, two faucets and the water heater…
Lol—thank you for that, Spandrel! It was 80 when we bought the house, the plumber lowered it to 60, and we were fine for a while; but then the city re-lined the pipes and monkeyed around with the water supply on Ash, and we lost pressure. We discovered we were down to 50. So we brought it to 70—an instant’s over-rotation of the screw brought us to 85, but Jane phoned no, and I brought it down again to 70, where we are now. I bled off some water just in case, and had no trouble resetting it. So I think we’re good. My reverse osmosis filter for the fish tank was real happy with 70: it ran quite nicely. And for the rest—until I understand the piping down there, I just don’t know Jack. Plumbers may be in the future, however, because when it comes to monster pipe wrenches and assessing what’s going on in the long pipes, equipment and experience are a good thing. Either it’s pretty obvious something needs revision — which we can do — or we ask somebody who can look into it. One thing that did occur to me is to wonder if the upped pressure might have knocked a little deposit loose—but the slowness of the sink faucet is the original problem we went in there to fix in the first place. So why hasn’t it changed along with the rest of the house plumbing? Says to me it’s got some separate choke point, and adjusting its valves doesn’t seem to affect it except to make it stop altogether. Hmmf.
Has the sink always been slow, or has it gotten slower over time, or was it a sudden problem? For troubleshooting, could you take photos of the space under the sink and look at them on the computer? Cameras can fit in lots of places that people can’t!
On the other hand, having it fixed and finished by a pro is a very nice feeling.
It’s gotten slower. We installed a new sink/faucet, but it’s a complex situation. a) the city lowered water pressure, and our dishwasher’s been clogging because of it (no air gap, relies on water pressure and the garbage disposal being clear; and the faucet that came with the sink is a shade flimsy. So I’m rather thinking our problem is there. Bathroom and basement sinks and shower have good pressure. It could be that the pressure hasn’t been enough to clear the disposal/dishwasher and that’s caused a problem. I’ll see about a picture if I can solve the upload problem.
In my admittedly limited experience, the dishwasher has a separate pump that sucks the dirty water out and shoves it out the outlet. You shouldn’t need to worry about whether the incoming pressure is high enough, the only factor is if the water is filling the dishwasher. What vintage is your dishwasher? Maybe the pump is pooping out.
Maybe your kitchen faucet, being a shade flimsy, developed a stuffage. Do you have hard water? Ours forms stalagmites and stalactites with a little encouragement, and requires vinegar and CLR to remove hard water rings. A new faucet might give you much more satisfaction, although cramming yourself under the sink with a wrench, the dispos-all, the drain pipes and the dishwasher lines is not for the faint-hearted!