Introduction to Plumbing

Meet my new, very expensive pipes. They reside under my kitchen sink. We came back from our house hunting trip on Wednesday and turned on the faucet to the kitchen sink to note that there was no water running into the sink. I looked down, and there was a lot of scuzzy sewer water IN the sink that shouldn’t have been in the sink. Panic-stricken, we checked all the other faucets and drains in the house. They all worked, which was a tremendous relief.

Suspecting that the pipes might have frozen, we called the plumber, but he couldn’t come until the next day. On Thursday he called and said another home had all of their pipes frozen and the ice caused them all to burst, so he wouldn’t be able to make it to our home until Friday. Apparently the subzero weather this week was a boom for the plumbing industry. I called several other plumbers in town, and none of them could come either because of a community wide rash of frozen pipes. Mr. Plumberman arrived about noon and couldn’t unthaw the pipes. We had few good options. It seemed that the old pipes were too close to the outside wall, or something, or went outside for a bit, or something. We could wait until spring for the sink to thaw (not going to happen with three kids . . . it’s pretty hard to live without your kitchen sink for only two days) We could tear a big hole in the wall under our cupboard and he could blast the pipe with some hot air. (Expensive). Or we could redo the pipes that drain the sink. (Also expensive). We chose to redo the pipes, and here they are.

The sink worked beautifully, and then we discovered that the water line to the dishwasher was also frozen. Lucklky a space heater did the trick in that case. The lesson: don’t turn your heat down while leaving town in the dead of winter? Maybe it would have happened anyway, but being responsible people that we are, we did knock down the thermostat to 50 degrees before we left. It seemed appropriate since we keep our house at 58 degrees in the winter. But apparently 50 degrees is not enough of an insulator against -25 degree overnight lows. Ho hum. Thus disappeared many hundreds of dollars in one lousy afternoon.