At the time that I discovered the big water leak under the cabin, I was already committed to making a loaf of bread and a chicken pie. The bread came out well, and that was more or less the last good news of the day.
WAAAYYY too much bread on the meatpie. It’s basically chicken and fixin’s under a loaf of bread.
Tastes good, but yeah. Should have used like 1/4 the dough. I’ll try again another time.
I ate while the bread was baking, and then as soon as the loaf came out of the oven I went outside to fix my water leak.
By unfortunate coincidence most of the cabin’s plumbing is under the part where the crawlspace is shallowest. Getting to it is a colossal pain in the ass. Finally ended up just digging out under the side, and that simplified everything.
Found the break right where I expected it, lay in the cold mud and fixed it. Congratulated myself while loading LB into the Jeep still covered with mud so I could go feed dogs and horses and still have some light for the clean-up.
Came home, fed LB, went outside to open the valve and confirm that the leak was fixed. Good news: That fitting no longer leaks. Bad news: Water started pouring out of a pipe or fitting further downstream toward the bathroom.
Terrible news: The shut-off valve decided it didn’t want to shut off.
Finally got it at least mostly shut by putting a wrench on the valve shaft. Whether I’ll ever be able to open it again is a very interesting question. I have a terrible premonition involving me digging that whole thing up from the faucet to the cabin.
(Sigh) At least I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to clean off with some wet wipes and have a drink. Or two.
If you do have to replace it, a one-piece run of PEX might be worth considering*. It does require special crimping rings and their tools (or collars and an expander, my favorite, which is unfortunately mucho $$) for attaching fittings, but PEX is flexible enough to expand when frozen and not rupture. The fittings would be the only weak points, so use brass fittings, not plastic. There are also Shark Bite fittings that work with PEX, and those are easily removable and reusable with a $1 tool (or the appropriate size open end wrench to barely fit over the PEX O.D.)
* A “one-piece run” would require “home runs” from a manifold to a fixture if you need to connect multiple fixtures; takes more PEX to do it that way, but PEX is pretty inexpensive, and there is an advantage to being able to shut off individual fixtures at the manifold.
Man, if it takes that many extensions to get down to the valve with the socket, I’d sure tightly duct-tape the joints between the extension and socket as well as the individual extensions and perhaps even at the ratchet, as well. Murphy says one or more of those joints will let go and drop everything downstream from that point into the bottomless pit. Or are your arms skinny/long enough to perform an extraction of said dropped part(s)?
BTDT
No, I can get my hand down in there.
Even considering it’s faults, that meat pie sure came out pretty! That’s an idea worth perfecting.
Joel, how deep do you have to bury water lines where you are and how do you keep the pipes under the cabin and the riser from below ground from freezing? Being from MI what passes for OK plumbing down south is a mystery.
While I would love to offer some great advice my knowledge of plumbing is rather limited. So all I will say is good luck and I hope the solution that works the best is the one that is the simplest. Plumbing drama is something no sane person wants or needs.
Terrapod, most people consider 12 inches down deep enough. I have plumbing less deep than that and have never had trouble – on the other hand I have pipes almost 24 inches down that freeze chronically. Depends on how much sun that patch of dirt gets.
Of course the riser is the problem. I use pipe wrap, then a pool noodle, then a couple of loose wrappings of fiberglass insulation covered with plastic and taped. So far that has worked. So far. Can’t do all that on the pipes under the floor, and that’s where I ran into trouble. Pipe wrap and Styrofoam has worked for years, but it failed me this week.
Would sure be nice to find a heat tape that was such a low-draw trickle that it wouldn’t drain your batteries overnight. I have no idea if such a thing is even available.
I’m no builder, but it seems to me that the very best idea would be the have all of the plumbing beyond the riser inside the building. Failing that, perhaps it could be up between the floorboards and the floor insulation?
That said, having water piping in inaccessible areas creates it’s own set of challenges and potential disasters.
My philosophy exactly. Pipes inside walls are almost as likely to freeze as pipes under the floor, and impossible to fix without partially destroying the building.
“Would sure be nice to find a heat tape that was such a low-draw trickle that it wouldn’t drain your batteries overnight.”
Actually some solar controllers provide a way to turn on a load only when the batteries are on float. It’s a feature called “Dump Load” or “Opportunity Load”. So you could use that feature to turn on heat tape only when your system has excess power available from the solar panels.
The problem with using that power for a heat tape is it would typically have power only when you need it least (the warmest part of the day), and you would never have power at night, which is probably when your pipes actually freeze.
You might be able to (somewhat) alleviate that problem with a little Yankee ingenuity, using some sort of thermal mass under your pipe insulation to store heat.