When Main Water Lines Break

From the title, I'm sure you can guess what this blog is about. I had a very interesting weekend. We had a small crowd of volunteers this weekend to help fix some things up. On Sunday, we had some sewer problems in the chapel. This usually comes from a holding tank in the cafeteria being full. That's where the chapel bathroom drains to. We usually pump it out into the main holding tanks buried in the courtyard. Nothing unusual so far, but then we started to have some overflow out of a crack in the cement. This flooded a hallway with raw sewage.

As it turned out, this 'overflow' behavior was normal here, but the problem was that it was not draining. We happened upon a vertical pipe that a child had shoved a small board down, blocking the flow. OK, so now we solved the overflow drainage problem.

Next up, we were thinking about why the tanks were filling up so quickly. After some consideration, we decided that the laundry room, with 4 washing machines going nearly every day, should not empty into the septic system. All that 'gray' water was filling up the holding tanks too rapidly.

We found an empty and unused holding tank in the far corner of the complex. It was a long way off, but we ended up routing a drain from the laundry room, 160 feet (including some vertical drop) to teh empty and unused tank. Fortunately, the laundry room was on the 2nd floor. It was quite a project, but did that bust a main water line? Read on.

Here in Chapultapec, the water pressure sometimes goes down to nothing ("nada" in Spanish). For that reason, most places have a holding tank for water and when the pressure goes down too low, you just use that reserve. Our reserve is about 500 gallons and with all the people here, it is gone in about an hour and a half. We had two 1,000 gallon tanks on the second floor, but they were both hooked up to the old water purifier that hasn't been working for years.

We decided to go ahead and hook all the tanks up together by connecting the pipes on the bottoms of the tanks. A great idea! Well, in doing so, we lifted the now very light 500 gallon tank and didn't notice the stress it caused on the main water line that connected to it. I'm on my hands and knees connecting a 'T' and 'SHHHHHH' water everywhere. And nobody could get the water shut off! I didn't have the right size to slam a cap on it. What a mess.

Someone ran to get the replacement pieces, and some others tried to find the shutoff. While they were doing that, I went ahead and hooked up the rest of the pipes for the storage tanks.

After getting the plumbing parts, elbows, T's, pipe, SHUTOFF VALVE, we got it all hooked back up. Best thing is that now we have a good 2,000+ gallons of reserve water. The third tank is on a little higher elevation than the other two, so it doesn't fill all the way up, but it's a lot more than we had before.

My next post will have to do with the solution to our ELECTRICAL nightmare from last week. We found the problem.....

Plumbing or Electrical Nightmare?

You're not going to believe this. I think I've heard of something like this happening, but I've never experienced it, until now. I woke up this morning and took a shower about a quarter 'til 7. I noticed the water wasn't very hot, and it seemed to run out kinda fast. Usually, I'm the only one using water at this time and I can take a long HOT shower without problem. Didn't think much of it. I figured maybe somebody beat me to it and used up a lot of hot water.

I walked down the hall to my office and started work. A little before 8 one of the other missionaries directly below my apartment comes into my office and tells me he had to shut the water off because his apartment was flooded. I'm pretty much the maintenance man around here, so I offer to take a look at the problem. We walk into his apartment and water is everywhere, about a 1/2" thick.

We do some troubleshooting and decide it is one of two pipes that go from the bathroom into the kitchen. These are the hot and cold supply lines. Checking both sides of the wall revealed no apparent flaw, so I had him turn the water back on briefly in hopes I would see or hear something. Sure enough, I hear water spraying and see it pouring down from inside the wall. So the problem has to be in there.

From what I saw of the water, I determined it was the bottom pipe (which was the hot water) and since there didn't seem to be a lot of hot water that morning, I figure I found the problem, right? Well, we cut the pipe on both sides of the wall and have to do a bit of pounding to get it out on account of the wood expanding around the hole. What do I find? A hole that looks as though it has been newly drilled. Hmmm. That's odd. It's inside the wall. I look all over to see if there is a way someone could have put a screw through an adjoining wall or the ceiling below. Nope. That's when I got shocked by the stove. Aha! There's a short in the wall and it arced. This must have made the hole in the pipe. Well...read on.

I cleaned up all my pipe. Got things ready to go and soldered it all back together, minus the section with a hole in it. We turn the water back on and no leaks! Whew. Saved the day again. Not yet.

I stick my head under the counter and I hear a sound like running water. There's no leaks. No dripping. Both sides look good. Just then, someone comes from the first floor (the chapel is located directly under us and the children are having there morning devotions). They said it just started raining. We shut the water off.

I went down to investigate. Water is all over half the room. It's running down the wall. It starts to slow down. The ceiling is soaked. Paint is bubbling. All this, of course, had already happened some time during the night, but the water currently dripping was fresh. I opened a door that is right under the 'rain' and the ceiling outside, the stucco ceiling outside, is soaked and dripping.

I'm thinking now that there has got to be a busted pipe up there somewhere. I bust up the drywall a bit to have a look. Nope. Nada. (I'm learning Spanish you know) So I think the worst is probably true and there is a pipe in that ceiling that I'll have to find. Well, just then Pedro (the minister here) mentions that he thinks there is a pipe in the wall behind the cabinet. So we all go upstairs and have another look. We turn the water back on so that we can hear. Sure enough, it sounds like there is water spraying out of a pipe that is in the wall behind the cabinets. We start to tear into it (I told you this was gonna be a long story didn't I). We're pounding through stucco with chicken wire and none of my tools are really liking it. Now that we have a layer of the wall off, we turn the water back on. It's louder, for sure, but now it sounds like it's coming from where the two pipes run through the wall.

I take a closer look. I can see water dripping in the hole we stuck the pipe through. Since the hole was so tight, I had him send a 1" spade bit through there before we put the pipe back in. I can see the drip, but it isn't the kinda flow that the sound is making. I'm thinking, what are the odds that the other pipe has a problem too?

I decide to just open up the wall where the two supply lines feed through and see what is going on in there. Pedro starts hacking. There is stucco here too (no, the saber saw blade does not have any teeth left). We keep swapping sides back and forth. Pedro crawls inside the cabinet and starts wacking it away with a hammer. I'm on the other side with the saber saw. He yells "I found it!" Sure enough, he hacked enough of the wall away to see a hole in the second pipe! That's when I put 2 and 2 together. It was a nice little shiny hole, except for one thing. Black char all around the hole. The mystery solved. The chicken wire used for the stucco was shorting. It was hot! Just like a welder, it ate a hole in BOTH pipes.

We assembled the pipe and then I wrapped it with a healthy supply of electrical tape just in case. We ate that hole out as well with a 1" spade bit. I had heard they had problems with walls shocking people here, but I though that got fixed. While inside the cabinet working on the pipe, I got hit a few times. The breaker had tripped in the kitchen. This, unfortunately was not related to the shocking of the wall, just something the water hit no doubt. When I turned the main breaker off to the apartment, the chicken wire was still hot. That means another project will be finding that short...

Orphanage Update

Hola! Things have been going very well here. I was able to get a good start on our kitchen. I did not have time (or money) to put real cabinets in, and since we don't know how long we'll be renting this building, I built a frame with 2x4's and then installed the counter top onto that. I installed the sink and there it sat for 2 days while I mustered the courage to tackle hooking the water and drain up.

Here's the scoop. I have found here that often you come across a job that is incomplete for one or more reasons. For example, there are two bathrooms in our apartment. In one, the water was hooked up to the shower, but not the drain. In the other, the drain was hooked up, but not the water. Fortunately, both my bathroom and the one down stairs, never had drywall hung so hooking the drain up was easy...well, sort of.

I never like splicing into old copper. Especially 10 year old copper. I got the drain hooked up, wasn't too tough, so I decided to tackle the copper hookups. I mean, it was only 8 o'clock, right? I told everyone I was turning the water of (which is "aqua" in Spanish). The pipe I was cuttin into was on the second floor. Took a long time to drain, then we cut in.

It was a touch job on account of the pipe locations, but that's nothing new for doing a plumbing remodel. The test came. 18 solder joints and of course, one was bad. I knew it was going to give me trouble because when I soldered it, it would take. The solder would just bead up. As my amigo turned the water on, I could hear it hissing and feel the air. So we drained it again. This was a "T" and taking a "T" off is not easy. I cut it off, cleaned up the pipes, and away we went. This time, no leaks!

I hopped upstairs, and finished off the drain from the kitchen sink. All was well, no leaks on that either. We're so thankful to have a sink now!!!

The toughest part of a job like that is when you are dealing with something that somebody started years ago, and then they just stopped. You don't know what pipes they glued or why they stopped. All sorts of surprises.

Things are going great though and we think Baja California, Mexico is "maravilloso".