The Life and Times of a Master Plumber

As a Master Plumber I have experienced many situations that the average person will never have to experience. In this blog I will detail some of these situations for your benefit and enjoyment.
     So sit back, grab a cup of hot coffee and read on. Enjoy!


                                                                        The Case of the Missing Water Connection


     One day not long ago a local box store called and wanted me to come out and take a look at a two inch gate valve that they thought had a broken stem in it preventing it from turning on the water that fed the garden center. I went and tried turning on the water at the gate valve the same way they tried. To me the valve was working as it should, the wheel turned easy from the closed position to the open position as it should and stopped turning as it should turning from position to position.
     If the valve stem had been broken as they suspected then I or anybody else could have turned the wheel of the gate valve all day until the cows came home and the crows got dizzy and it would have never stopped spinning.
     I determined right away that the valve was working that the problem was another valve shut off before reaching this valve. Management of the store disagreed and told me to replace the two inch gate valve with a two inch ball valve. Difference in the two valves is simple. The gate valve has a gate inside that raises or closes with the spinning of the wheel on top of the valve. A ball valve operates with the swinging of a lever that spins a ball inside the valve. When the lever is in line with the water piping the ball is in the open position, when the lever is across the water piping then the ball is in the closed position.
     I changed the valve as directed to so but guess what? When I cut the copper piping at the top of the valve where there should have been full water pressure there was none. No water. The valve had been fully functional.
     They were happy with a newer valve that was easier to operate so all is well at this point except they still had no water to the garden center.


     The search was on for another valve that someone had shut off without the box store management knowing the whereabouts of it that fed the water across the store to the valve that I had just replaced.
      I found the building plumbing plans, laid them out in the floor of the break room and traced the water piping from the garden center to it's own water meter in the store's yard. I went up and took the lock box off the water meter and found that it had a two inch backflow preventer that had frozen and busted during the winter. Another contractor had been sent out to replace the backflow preventer by corporate home office without the knowing of the store management. That contractor had turned off the water meter because of having to order the part to fix the backflow preventer preventing it from running full stream and pressure all over the place. He never told store management that he shut off the water meter and store management didn't know that the garden center had it's own water meter separate from the store's water service meter.
     After several hours on the job the case of the missing water connection was solved.

                                                                      Sleep Tight, don't let the bed bugs bite!

I just implemented a new strategy to keep our service technicians busy during this economic slow down by having them do free customer home plumbing inspections. All the customer has to do is call in to Skyline Plumbing and Septic, Inc and ask for a free home plumbing inspection and we will send a tech out totally free of charge and inspect a customer's home for plumbing safety issues,water leaks and problems that may not be evident at the time that may show up while on vacation or while company is visiting.
     I had a customer call me out to inspect her home's plumbing. I hurried over. I began the inspection by asking about any problems she thought she might have or had a particular interest in me looking at. I checked for stopped up drains, leaking toilet ballcocks, house in-coming water pressure, rocking toilets but when I got to the water heater my mouth hit the floor at what I seen.
     The water heater was a natural gas water heater with a open flame burner. The vent for the fumes to escape up the vent and out of the house was not connected to the vent diverter at the top of the water heater allowing carbon dioxide fumes to escape into the atmosphere of the home bringing down the oxygen content of the entire home. The water heater was in a open closet in the kitchen area. I immediately told the customer of the danger. She replied, "Is that what is making my seven children act so crazy?" I told her that it sure wasn't helping the situation.
      I corrected the vent problem for her free of charge because of the immediate danger to the life of the family.
      She was very grateful and I felt that I had done a great deed, thankful that she had called me in for the inspection.

Blog by: Lindsey Baine, Master Plumber, Service Technician, Skyline Plumbing and Septic, Inc
   

                                                                 UM!......That Smell

I received a service call from a box store in Hiram that they were having a bad odor in the front of the store in the morning when the morning shift opened up. The manager told me that last time it happened they had another plumbing company come in and run a sewer cable in the piping all the way to the street to clean the drain piping of whatever was causing the smell.
      This didn't make any sense to me being the smell in the drain piping should never enter the store to begin with if the p-traps were full of water and the trap primers feeding the floor drains were working properly. I checked that the floor drains were full of water and that the p-traps under the lavatory sinks were functional.
     They were.
      I began checking other fixtures in the men's and women's bathroom and ask the manager had they noticed the smell more strongly in one bathroom or in some area of the store more than in other areas. The manager told me that the women's bathroom was always smelly.
      Now I was ready to get down and dirty and find this smelly problem. It didn't take but a second when I walked into the right hand toilet stall, seeing the brown staining around the bottom rim of the toilet indicating that water was leaking around the base every time the toilet was flushed. If water is present then a way of sewer gas escape is present also. I grabbed hold of the toilet to see if I could move or turn it in any way. It came right up off the floor. The flange was broke causing the toilet to move and twist every time someone sit on it. This movement caused the wax to work it's way out of the toilet base causing water and sewer gas to leak from the base of the toilet.
     I took up the toilet, cleaned the area well, installed a new toilet flange, applied a new wax ring and reset the toilet. Problem fixed.
     The store manager told me that other plumbers had tried to fix that toilet but never could get it right. I reaffirmed that the toilet had been the source of there morning smell being that the store had been closed all night allowing a build up of sewer gas to float with the positive air system to the front of the store trying to escape through the front door where the air pressure of the building was trying to push through to outside atmosphere.

Blog by: Lindsey Baine, Master Plumber, Service Technician, Skyline Plumbing and Septic, Inc

                                                                           Mud!.....What you mean Mud?

Drain cleaning is part of my daily duties. It is a dangerous job to run a rotor rooter cable down a sewer pipe as many things can go wrong causing severe injury to the operator of the machine. Most common injury happens when the cable get in a bind and the torque causes the cable to twist violently. This action can break a finger, wrist or arm in a flash. It can happen to a Master Plumber just as fast as a novice.
     Usually with a stoppage in a home's main sewage drain it's caused by some kind of pipe functionality problem. This problem is generally a broken pipe, cut pipe, separated pipe, improperly installed pipe or any and all of the before mentioned. A good functioning pipe just don't stop up with no reason. Another cause is heavy types of toilet paper that is soft and absorbent that gets heavy with water, finds a low place in the piping to sit or hang up waiting for other things to come down the drain to snag on to. These other things can be feminine napkins of all sorts especially the ones with the strings. They love to stop up main building drains and sewer ejection pumps.
     For example. Just this week I had a call to a gentleman's home which had been flooded by a overflowing toilet downstairs that completely destroyed the carpet and hardwood in his front foyer. The problem began with a building sewer stoppage in the front yard that backed up to the lowest point of the home which was the first floor bathroom. His children was taking showers upstairs, as the water hit the stoppage it backed up to the first floor toilet, filled the toilet with upstairs shower water which began running over top of the toilet. At this point the mess began to be really, really bad. Everything in the building drain began running out onto the bathroom floor making it's way into the foyer area and adjoining bedroom.
     When I got to the home the water had receded in the building sewer outside. I knew this by taking the four inch cap off the cleanout outside and looking into the pipe. I saw no water. I had to determine where the blockage was located so that I could alleviate the problem. The blockage could be between the cleanout and the toilet that was overflowing or it could be between the cleanout and the tap at the street where the building sewer tied onto the county sewer system.
     To determine the location of the stoppage I had the gentleman flush the first floor toilet with the problem. It flushed fine and I saw the water flow by the cleanout where I was looking pacifically for the water to come rushing by. The rushing water let me know that the stoppage was between the cleanout and the street.
     At this point I was ready to began the drain cleaning process. I took a water hose, inserted it into the cleanout, turned it on just to see if I could get the pipe to fill back up. In seconds it did. The stoppage was close. I unloaded my sewer cable machine, readied it for work and began by inserting the cable into the cleanout pushing it into the pipe until it stopped. At that point I hit the go pedal causing the machine to began spinning causing the cutter blade on the end of the cable to began cutting into the stoppage to tear it to pieces, causing it to flow on through the pipe. The water in the pipe instantly went down. For now the stoppage is cleared but with a problem. I should have been able to keep pushing the cable on through the pipe but it wouldn't go any further. I feared the worst.....a broken pipe.
     I grabbed the cable and yanked it free of the piping, pulling it all the way out. I looked at the head and found a clump of mud on the end. This told me the pipe was broken and that the head had went out of the pipe into the dirt. A major repair was now necessary.
     The gentleman was with me the whole time being a witness to all that was going on. When he saw the mud he asked, "What you mean mud?" He gave the go ahead to make the repair as I could not guarantee how long the pipe would stay unclogged.
     Upon digging up the problem area I found that the four inch sewer pipe had been broken by heavy construction equipment when the home was built a couple of years ago. The repair was made as well as a new happy customer.

Blog by: Lindsey Baine, Master Plumber, Service Technician, Skyline Plumbing and Septic, Inc