I’ve griped before about the state of the plumbing in our house.
Infact, I stated at least once that I thought they’d used grey electrical conduit as water pipe. Turns out I was wrong about that. When we redid the shower in the master bath just over a year ago, I got a better look at the pipe being used, and discovered that it’s actually a type of water pipe called “polybutylene“. And that there’s a reason why it’s no longer allowed by code. Basically, for no obvious external reason at all, it splits randomly. Resulting in lots of water mess.
We’ve been replacing it as we run across it in the house. Eventually we’re going to have to hire a proper plumber to come and crawl under the house and remove and replace all of it under the house too. Since that requires pulling down all the insulation and water barrier in the crawl space (and since it all needs new insulation) we’ll probably combine the projects, a bill I’m not looking forward too.
Of course that means that we keep running into splits in it in the places we’ve not gotten to yet. Thankfully all such have been INSIDE the house, but cross your fingers for me, I figure it’s only a matter of time before we get one in the crawl space.
Yesterday it was in the water line carrying HOT water from the water heater. All internal pipe, no exposure to cold. Husband turned on the hot water yesterday morning and had no water pressure and went looking and discovered that the entire area around the hot water heater was saturated with water. God only knows how long it’d been spraying water.
Husband proved again that he’s no handyman. Last time we had this problem I found the breaker for the water heater no problem. This time he couldn’t find it and shut off the whole house in his panic to try to stop the water. Which no, didn’t stop the water. That required crawling under the house to shut off the water. Cause he forgot that LAST time this happened we had his father install a shut off on the cold water in line to the water heater. Even though he’d just looked at it to find the leak. He did at least have all the clocks reset by the time I got home from work……