NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for pervasive crude humor and mild strong language.
Introduction
This post is
about how to handle a simple plumbing emergency if you’re a dummy. Actually, you could be a really smart person
who just doesn’t know anything about plumbing and this might still be
helpful. Or, you could be really smart and knowledgeable about plumbing and
might just enjoy surveying the hapless coping techniques that a dummy has
stumbled upon. Or, you could just be anybody
with a taste for schadenfreude who would enjoy a story containing the phrase
“geyser of raw sewage.”
Rule
#1: Figure out where the unwanted water
is coming from
Shortly
after buying our first home, my wife and I went on vacation. We were touring Bay Area B&Bs, and on the
way from Half Moon Bay to San Francisco decided to stop at the house. (I know, it’s not really on the way, but we
were giddy new homeowners.) I was in the
garage, perhaps for no other reason than to bask in its existence, when a crazy
thing happened. There is a open-ended
pipe near the far wall, where the washing machine would have been had we gotten
around to buying it, and the purpose of this pipe is to carry wastewater away
from a washing machine. For no apparent
reason, raw sewage suddenly began gushing out of this pipe.
(Why is it always “raw” sewage? Isn’t sewage always raw? Who ever heard of boiling sewage? “Don't worry, this sewage is potable. It’s been boiled.” I don’t know the answer to this question. You’d have to ask somebody more knowledgeable about plumbing.)
So, back to the garage plumbing crisis. My first impulse was to yell “NO!” and reach toward it, but of course all of this happened in super-slow-motion so my “NO” was several octaves lower than my real voice and really slow, to match my movements, so it was more of a “NOOOOOOOOOOOO......”
(Why is it always “raw” sewage? Isn’t sewage always raw? Who ever heard of boiling sewage? “Don't worry, this sewage is potable. It’s been boiled.” I don’t know the answer to this question. You’d have to ask somebody more knowledgeable about plumbing.)
So, back to the garage plumbing crisis. My first impulse was to yell “NO!” and reach toward it, but of course all of this happened in super-slow-motion so my “NO” was several octaves lower than my real voice and really slow, to match my movements, so it was more of a “NOOOOOOOOOOOO......”
Now, that
water could have been coming from anywhere, but the sewage factor led me to a
lucky guess that the toilet was involved.
Fortunately (in this case and this case only) we have only one bathroom,
so I ran up there. Sure enough, there
was a terrible hissing noise coming from that room. I can’t remember if it was from the toilet
itself or the related plumbing—it could have been coming from my wife or even
myself, I mean this was a long time ago—but the toilet-related plumbing was the
culprit. At least I was in the right room.
Rule #2:
Don’t panic
I know,
“don’t panic” is easy enough to say, but something about a plumbing emergency
makes it really tempting to panic. If
you were to tell somebody, “The entire house was flooded and I—I panicked!”
they probably wouldn’t hold it against you.
But still, you shouldn’t panic.
Take something as simple as a toilet on its way to overflowing the rim. If this isn’t happening in a motel room where
a previous guy’s digestive output could be in play, you’re a coward if you don’t keep your wits about you and take immediate
action. One action of course would be to
grab a plunger if it’s handy, but the better action is to quickly remove the
toilet tank lid and lift the floating thingy in there. (I could call it a “floater,” but in the
toilet context that term has already been taken.) Sometimes this floating thingy is a big ball,
sometimes it’s a hollow cylinder, but the point is, as the water level rises in
the toilet tank, the thingy floats upward until it maxes out and shuts off the
flow. So if you grab that bad boy and
lift it, the toilet will instantly stop overflowing. Then you can yell your head off for somebody
to run in with a plunger, towels, etc. before anything has hit the floor.
In the case
of the garage sewage spew, I looked for the line that feeds water into the
toilet. These lines have little handles
on them and if you crank down the handle (clockwise) it’ll shut off the water
supply. This is what I did to stop the
gushing sewage in the garage (but not before several of my bicycles were
covered in putrid water with flecks of half-dissolved toilet paper and lots of
other gross stuff).
Rule #3:
Get help
Getting help
isn’t the first step. It’s something
that should be done concurrently with getting the water flow to stop. Unless your next door neighbor is a plumber
who telecommutes, you want to first do what you yourself can do, as soon and as
fast as you can. When the immediate
crisis is averted (i.e., no more water going where it doesn’t belong) that’s
when you bring in the plumber and whoever else is needed to put your life back
together.
My brother
Max lives in Boulder, Colorado and during their recent nightmarish flood was in
the process of baling water out of his flooded basement when the next-door
neighbor came running over. This guy presumably
did a great job with Rule #1 (he astutely observed that the water was coming
from FRICKING EVERYWHERE), but he completely fell down on #2. He came running into Max’s house yelling his
head off. “Oh my god, you gotta help me!” he cried. I mean, think about this. The entire city is flooded, roads have been
demolished, creeks overflowing, cars washed away, thousands of souls are in
great danger and turmoil, and “you gotta help me”? He went on, “I got thirty gallons a second comin’ into my
house!” I can’t help but wonder, did he
just make up this statistic somehow, to use as a rallying cry, or did he
actually make some crude measurement of water volume and do the math? Is that
the first order of business, calculating the flow rate? So having announced his crisis to my
nonplussed brother, he whipped out his cell phone and started calling
plumbers. As if every plumber in the
state isn’t already addressing a crisis, perhaps his own. As if the National Guard hasn’t already been
deployed. This neighbor is yelling into
the phone, “I’m payin’ cash!”
In this
particular case, however, the guy happened to stumble on the right neighbor. Max is a great big manly man, could easily
kick my ass (in fact, he has, multiple times) and he knows his way around homes
and plumbing and crises. In fact, he has
an honest-to-god construction worker’s hardhat, and not only that, he’s got
this big badass spelunker’s light mounted to it. All this and
he’s a helpful enough guy, or at least morbidly curious enough, that he
headed right over to the guy’s house, temporarily abandoning his own
crisis. As Max gleefully related to me
afterward, this guy’s toilet was doing the weirdest thing. Every few seconds it would projectile-vomit a
massive gush of raw sewage. Like, ten
gallons at a shot, with this menacing regularity. So Max ran out to the yard and found the
clean-out.
Now, I’m not
entirely sure what a clean-out even is, beyond it being related to the sewage
system. I know that “clean-out” is a
term that manly men throw around when they’re describing their weekend
projects. (Sure, I could look it up in
Wikipedia, but that’s cheating. You’re
supposed to learn about these things first-hand, in the field.) Max found this clean-out because it had a big
metal lid or cap on it. Maybe they
always do. Anyway, he used some giant
tool that he happened to be carrying, a big old monkey wrench or crowbar or
something, and pried that lid off. He
said there was instantly this unbelievably massive—wait for it—geyser of raw sewage, going way high up
there into the air, almost like Old Faithful.
And it was endless, like it was feeding right off the entire sewer
system of the city, an endless foul fountain.
Max booked it back into the neighbor’s house, confirmed that nothing was
coming out of the toilet anymore, and then hustled on home to work some more on
his basement. So, this neighbor? Yeah, he got real lucky!
(This phrase
“real lucky” is one my brothers and I throw around a lot. It hearkens to something my dad once said to
me, when I was parking my car and got too close to a broken concrete curb
outcropping, and it stripped the trim right off the side of my ’84 Volvo.
This freak accident made a terrible noise, like the car was shrieking,
and when my dad got out he was shocked—almost disappointed, it seemed—that my
comeuppance involved so little damage. I
zipped the trim right back on to the car, and my dad said, “You are real lucky you didn’t do more
damage.” For him to use the adjective
“real,” where the adverb “really” is called for, is tantamount to the harshest
profanity, given his normally gentle, professorial syntax.)
Rule
#5: get that water shut down!
I guess this
rule is kind of implicit in what I’ve already said, but this is a guide for dummies. So, assuming you’re not involved in a
catastrophic flash flood, or even if you are, see if you can’t get that flow
shut off. Sometimes this can be tricky even
when your plumbing disaster is localized.
For example, the other day I was in the kitchen when I heard this hissing
noise coming from upstairs. I ran up
there and the floor was completely flooded.
There was a strong blast of water coming from below the bathroom
sink. Remember what I said earlier,
about finding the line that carries the water, and looking for the little
handle that turns it off? Well, the
little handle was lying on the floor.
Dead. The cylinder that it
attaches to, that ends in a rubber plug that closes off the water, was made of
plastic, and had spontaneously failed.
It broke in half, so the handle part went shooting off and there was
nothing to stop the water from spraying out like a high pressure hose.
Here’s where
I made my first mistake. I paused,
staring at the cheap piece of treasonous plastic, and I took a moment to marvel
at the pure, unalloyed venality that caused somebody to decide to make this
thing out of plastic. I mean, what if
I’d been on vacation when this thing broke?
That could be thousands and thousands of dollars in damage to my home. How much did that company save skimping on
materials? Maybe a cent? So I took a moment to curse whoever chose
plastic as the material. My curse was
this: May you be waterboarded to death in a campground outhouse. (I know, that’s pretty harsh, but I was in
the middle of a crisis and trying not to panic.
I’ve since rescinded my curse, though perhaps too late, who knows.)
Okay, wasting
time pausing to curse persons unknown wasn’t actually my first mistake. My first mistake was not knowing in advance how
to shut down the water supply to my entire house. Everybody should know how to do this. In modern homes there’s usually a very large
pipe in the garage with a big handle on it, so it’s really easy. (In the state of Washington, my
brother Bryan tells me, there’s a giant knob in every garage, and it’s painted
red and white so it’s especially easy to find.)
In my home, built in 1929, there is no obvious way to shut off the
water. I’ve long assumed it has
something to do with the pipe under a plastic lid in my yard where the water
meter is. There are weird, crude steel
thingies down in there, at ninety degrees to each other, and I reckon if you
could line them up, the water would stop.
So, my
bathroom still actively flooding, I raced down there to the yard, pried that
lid off, and tried to budge the machinery down in there. I did this using a weird quasi-wrench, long
and totally rusted and of the cheapest imaginable quality, that my wife had
suddenly handed me. She had found it
near the guts of our drip irrigation system and figured it must be the thing. Well, I did manage to get a purchase on the
weird clunky metal doohickeys down in the ground near the water meter, but I
couldn’t budge them. The crude tool was
flexing so much I thought it’d break in half.
The next obvious step was to panic.
But, I
didn’t panic, since I always keep Rule #2 in mind. I asked myself, “What would Captain Kirk
do?” So I thought hard for about two
seconds and then it hit me: “Spock ...
the water coming out of that sink line ... it’s hot!” Meaning: it came from the hot water heater! I raced into the garage, found the pipes
coming off the hot water heater, and cranked them closed. I ran to the bathroom: no more gushing. Whew!
(I know what you’re thinking:
what if it had been the other cheap plastic valve that had broken, the
cold water side? I know. You could say that I’m real lucky.)
Rule #6:
After the crisis, see what you can fix yourself
I went back
downstairs. My wife was on the phone,
trying to get help. “Who are you talking
to?” I asked. (You can tell I was still
a bit frazzled because I said “who” where “whom” is called for.) She said she was on hold. “Hang up,” I said. (It’s possible I said “Hang up on that fool!”
but this is probably the embroidery of memory.
I know I didn’t say “Hang up ... I got this,” because that would have
been pure hubris.) I showed her what
broke and announced my intention to head over to the hardware store. She immediately shot down this idea and starting
researching plumbing supply outfits online.
I initially
bristled at this—I mean, browsing in a hardware store is one of life’s great
joys, especially (perhaps) for men. When
my dad used to go to McGuckin’s, the totally kickass hardware store in Boulder,
he’d always ask if we kids wanted to go along.
We always did. That place was
amazing. Absolutely giant, and there was
nothing they didn’t have. It was like a
hardware cathedral. A friend of my
brothers ended up working there, and let us in on a little trade secret. Whenever a particularly gorgeous woman was
spotted by an employee, he’d immediately get on the PA system and announce her
location using the code name “Larry.”
For example, if she were in the Bolts section, he’d get on and say,
“Larry to Bolts, Larry to Bolts.” All
the male employees would immediately head over to the Bolts section to check
her out. This went on for ages until
some manager suddenly realized, “Hey, we don’t have any employees here named
Larry!” He put an end to the practice,
though I’m sure they developed a work-around.
Anyway, I
looked over my wife’s shoulder and saw on her screen photos of the entire valve
assembly, which I’ve come to learn is called an “angle supply stop.” They were priced at like $40 or $50, which
seemed pretty high when all I really needed was the little internal cylinder doohickey. She got on the phone to some local place and
explained the issue in such a way that I was completely lost, even though I knew
exactly what she was trying to say. (Not
that I’m complaining, having recently used the term “doohickey” myself.) Eventually she handed the phone to me and I explained
it in my own words. The guy said the
thing I needed was called a “nipple” and could be had in various non-plastic
materials. I don’t know how my wife
chose the place she did, but when I looked at it with Google Maps Street View I
realized this wasn’t exactly a boutique.
I went down
there and showed them the broken piece, mentioned that the guy on the phone
said it was a nipple, of which he had many, and they looked at me like I was
crazy. I showed them the handle that
attached to it, and then pulled up a photo of the whole assembly that I’d taken
on my smartphone. They said I’d have to replace the
entire assembly. I couldn’t help but
wonder if the fact of my flashy smartphone had led to this diagnosis. You know, kind of a luxury tax. If I’d flashed a gold iPhone 5S, maybe they’d
have said I needed a whole new sink!
So this guy
got a new angle supply stop, and I could see right off that its internal
cylinder was made of plastic. I complained
about this. “That’s the only way they
make them,” the guy said. I was about to
reply that I’d rather go without a bathroom sink than to pay good money for
another plumbing time bomb when another guy said, “I think that’s the wrong
size.” He stared at my photo. I realized I should have put a ruler in the
frame before snapping the photo. This
second guy went and found the right size angle supply stop, which was fancier
and had no plastic in it. It’s
chrome-plated brass, and lead-free (though the box says “lead-free*,” and the
asterisk might mean “sort of”).
The good
news is, the angle supply stops were only $7 (apparently these things are much
cheaper at the Blair Witch Plumbing Emporium than online) and a cinch to
install. (Well, the hot water side was a
cinch. I bought two of them, needless to
say, so I can preemptively replace the other side, just as soon as I can figure
out how to shut off the water supply to the entire house. Still working on that.)
Rule #7:
Figure out how to shut off your water BEFORE you have a plumbing
emergency
See
above. Maybe this should actually be
Rule #1....
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