utenzi

The old line goes "there's always something" and this holiday season it's a plumbing something in this household. Exhibit A is over there on the left. Pretty ugly, huh? I was kayaking in very windy conditions today and came back all cold and covered in nasty lake water. I wanted to jump in a hot shower and scrape off the germ-ridden gunk off me as well as warm up. That didn't work out so well since it was a cold shower--no hot water available at all. After a bit of analysis--and me blaming my mom for turning on the washer while I was showering--it came to light that the hot water heater had sprung a leak. Given the amount of rust on the outside this probably happened a number of weeks ago. When my dad and I were looking it over, before we shut off the water and power to the unit, there was water coming out of both of those blue metal covers in a torrent. I hate to imagine what this month's water bill will be! As you can see on this closer shot, the inner cont...

Yesterday I tackled a small plumbing project for my parents. The faucet set you see to the left is about 12 years old and came with the house. My parents wanted to replace it with something a little prettier and they enlisted me to do the work. I don't have much plumbing experience and had only installed one faucet set before--and that was around 10 years ago--but for some odd reason I had a sense of confidence about this project. LOL As it turns out, that confidence was ill placed. I spent near 6 hours--albeit some long breaks were contained within that time span--trying to remove the original faucet set. Between corroded metal, frozen screws, improper tools, and an unusual original installation I really got frustrated! This is what I removed from the sink. At least most of it. I had to tear apart some metal flanging from each knob with visegrips to get at a hidden screw--I couldn't figure out the proper way to get at it--and those metal shards aren't on the towel. In any ...