Seeking to Understand

Owning a house is an interesting thing. It seems like every time I wander around the place, I find something else I’d love to change/fix/upgrade/hack. Jer tells me this is a pretty normal home-owning state of mind, so I guess I’m going to need to get used to it.

It’s easy to see how tempting things like home equity loans can become. When there’s thousands of dollars worth of stuff you want to change it can begin to feel like an impossible dream to see everything done. I just have to keep reminding myself the insanity of using credit in a situation like this and the fact that the house is perfectly livable as-is - not to mention it beats the snot out of the last place we were living.

Still, though, I’ve found a few opportunities to be a handyman. After I got over the evil sickness of doom I caught immediately after the dog attack, my dad and I started work on installing a utility sink in the basement. This proved to be an expensive and time-consuming process…

Our sewer line is around 4 feet above the basement floor which means we couldn’t use a gravity drain in the utility sink. We had to install a pump which would move the waste water up to the sewer’s level. The pump setup is just a sump pump in a box, basically. The sink drains into it, and the output from the pump is connected to the sewer line where the washer had previously pumped into. To make room for the sink, we had to move the washer to the other side of the dryer which meant plumbing some new water sources for it as well as a new tap for the sink. The washer now drains into the sink rather than directly into the sewer to save from having to run another pipe around the gas line and other things that are in the way. It’s quite a hack.

In testing, it worked pretty well - but that was a red herring. A day or so after getting everything back into operation, we went downstairs to fetch a load of freshly washed laundry and were greeted with a large, soapy lake all over the carpet of the finished side of the basement. After doing some investigating, I found that the tube that drained into the sewer line had popped out and so the pump had happily drained all of the washer water on to the floor. Wonderful.

After mopping and soaking the mess of water, I got to work on securing the drain tube more effectively. A few more clamps and some duct tape did the trick. The tube was now quite solid and a test run showed that it worked (again). Since there was more laundry to do, we had to take the chance and run another load the next day - so we did.

This time the pipe stayed in position - but the pump failed to move the water and the pump’s housing box overflowed. The basement was flooded again. Arg!!

Dad came over and we poked around the system a bit and decided that the backflow valve he had installed into the pump’s output line might be the problem. The theory was that the weight of the water in the output tube might have been too much for the pump to push reliably - especially when combined with the force needed to open the backflow valve. So we took it out. The risk of sewer gas is minimal anyway since the pump actually drains into the old washer drain which already had a p-trap in it, so the backflow valve was just engineering overkill.

So far it’s been solid. Melody has done many loads of laundry now without incident - plus the removal of the backflow means that when the pump stops running, the water left in the output tube actually flows back through the pump and flushes it out. That’s a nice bonus to keep little bits of things from building up in the pump. I think the overflow problem has been solved now - but you never know. We’re still a bit paranoid about running the washer…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 11:06 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.