our water pipe hadn't frozen and burst.
So, major points deducted for not checking the pipe was better insulated &/or keeping a tap running all night. (don't reel back & gasp about water shortages - this is Vancouver, water comes out of the sky pretty much constantly). In my defense, I'll say it again: this is VANCOUVER. Generally we worry about things like: is my house getting moldy? Is that green algae on the deck getting thick enough to swallow a cat? Do I need to redo the drain tiles? Are the gutters & downspouts clogged?
We're all about water & moving it away from us.
We're not about things freezing. That's for the good folks in the rest of Canada, who do things like put antifreeze in their washing machines if they're leaving home for a few days.
And the house is kept heated at night (I've got the thermostat set to 18C overnight - yeah, mock me. I like it warm.) So how that pipe managed to freeze is a bit of a mystery but freeze it did, & then once Roo got it gently thawed, it became apparent that it had burst. The water squirting sideways all over the place was a big hint.
So, OK, burst pipe, no water today.
Points in my favour:
-a large supply of potable water for drinking & hygiene on hand
-a large supply of non potable water for flushing toilet by bucket (yes, I can too take credit for having a creek. Without the creek I'd have even bigger supplies of water. Really.)
-marrying a man who knows how to sweat pipe. He'll come home tonight & fix it so I don't have to worry about finding & paying a plumber. YAY!
I think on the emergency prep scorecard, it's pretty much a tie.
*Who am I kidding? It's MINUS FRIGGING 8C!
3 comments:
Don't you think we must sound like a bunch of wimps to the rest of the people in Canada who are used to this kind of stuff:)? At least this morning the wind has dropped and the sun is shining. Yesterday late afternoon/evening the wind was horrendous.
That's weird about the frozen/burst pipe, unless it is somewhere that there is no insulation. Watch Roo fix it, it's not a difficult job, and pretty neat how that solder sucks in between the two layers:)
Our pipe story goes like this: A leak developed in the bathroom. We had to cut out drywall, and maybe even part of a stud, and then had to protect said stud from catching on fire while the pipe was heated. Fixed the pipe, started to put the wall back together, and put a damn screw right back through the pipe:(
Yeah, I think we'll be taking apart a piece of that wall to see where we need to shove the insulation. It was a silly mistake to not deal with it earlier because we knew it was wonky.
We're in the last stages of a bathroom reno & Roo has been sweating pipe for months & months. We even have one of those big insulating heat pad thingies to hang on the studs & joists around the area so you can wave the torch like crazy & not set the house on fire. The reno has been going on so long that I'm bored & never talk about it so I haven't mentioned it much on the blog :-)
We've not yet put a screw through a supply line, but we did put one through a vent pipe, one which hadn't been properly set yet so it wasn't even at the right height & it needed to be pulled out & fixed. Of course when a wall is open & you can place a 10 foot length of pipe in, it's easy. Once the wall is closed & you try to pull it up or down, it's not so simple in an attic crawl space & an 8 foot basement....there was a bit of head scratching while we figured out the geometry of how to do it without taking the wall apart again.
For the second bathroom, we had stickies all over the walls marking where the pipes were to prevent another such incident.
I'm with you on the bathroom renovation. We've got one here that's been on hold for nearly two years. It was on hold a year before that before we got the toilet and sink operational. Not much fun if you had to get up in the night to stagger downstairs to use the facilities. The joys of renovating older houses:( We say that if we knew what we know now, we would have bulldozed and started from scratch. Of course though you have to live somewhere in the meantime.
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