Midnight Water Main Work

Last night, the city turned off water in our neighborhood from about 11pm until (they said) 3am. Here are some workmen down the block a little before midnight.

Neighbor Fail Double-Header

In Minneapolis, if you put bogus stuff out with your trash, you get one of these orange tags complaining about it. One of our neighbors attempted to submit some concrete pavers for trash collection, which are bogus. They received both this orange tag as well as a blue one. I didn't look closely and didn't see what the blue one was about, though, it seemed to be the same at a casual glance.

About a month ago, I complained about water pouring out of the ground in front of a different neighbor's house. Long story short (Erin queried not one but two city councillors), apparently it's the neighbor's problem, not the city's, even though somehow it's related to when the city turned off a water main???

Anyway, this is our slacker neighbor, who hasn't shoveled his driveway once in two years, almost never mows his lawn, and has ten-foot weed trees growing next to his house. So I was unsurprised when it wasn't until Monday when people came by and started working (and turned off our water at a different time than the door hanger said they would, but that's a different story). But now Erin's told by the city councillor's office that something went wrong and they're not coming back for another two weeks! Yeeesh.

Public Works Fail

This stream of water is emerging from the ground in front of my neighbor's house, since Friday at least which is when I noticed it. We called 311 and they told us that they'd "bid it out". It seems strange to me that the city does not have a crew of people on-call for these sorts of emergency repairs.

I wonder if Tim has any water in his house.

Project 100, #107.

My Nemesis Is a Bathroom Sink

One of the adventure types that I really dislike is plumbing, perhaps because I don't seem to be particularly good at it. There have been three ongoing plumbing problems at our house over the past months, and only one of them is really solved to my satisfaction.

1. Toilet not flushing consistently. I started in on this one last weekend with some hot water flushes. No dice. This weekend I did some Internet searching and fussed around more. The bowl took a bucket of water as fast as I could pour, so that told me there was no clog and the roof vent worked. That meant that the bowl was not filling fast enough when flushed. I used a wire and plumbing snake to clean out all the holes in the bowl that I could find (hint: flush with a bucket of warm water before you start, and then the water isn't so incredibly cold), and that seems to have done the trick. It flushes much faster now.

2. Bathroom sink drips. This had been drippy something like a year ago, and I put in new gaskets and springs on both hot and cold and it stopped. But it had started again. Fiddling with the spring on the cold side (it seemed stuck) seemed to pretty much solve the problem on Friday night, but on Saturday it had started dripping again. Several iterations of assembly and disassembly (including turning off just the hot water to the house, in which process I broke off the valve's handle) resulted in a faucet which dripped not a little but a lot. I ended up going to Home Depot (reasoning that the Ace parts were low-quality) and brought home two types of gaskets, including genuine Delta ones. The Delta parts didn't make much difference, but the Home Depot generic ones were pretty good. It seems to be down to a a dozen or two drips per day, which is Good Enough but unsatisfying.

3. Shower faucet drips. I first addressed this about a month ago and ended up, after multiple trips to the hardware store, with a faucet that still dripped and also leaked from the control knob while it was one. Yesterday, after half a dozen iterations of assembly and disassembly, I ended up with new gaskets and springs and also a new ball. It doesn't leak water from the knob while it's on, but it's very stiff and still drips. I think it loses a few tablespoons a day, which isn't all that much, so I'm going to ignore the problem for the time being, but it's again unsatisfying.

The most annoying thing about this work is that there aren't shutoff valves for any of the faucets in the house, so each iteration requires two trips to the basement to turn the water on and then off again. It gets old fast. It is also frustrating to have not fully fixed the problems.

Lastly, this photo was taken with the 10-17mm fisheye. All my photos from the past month are take either with that or the 50mm manual Tak. This is because my 18-250 zoom is at Pentax being serviced and has been there for a month now. I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the choice between a fisheye wide-angle, which is kind of a trick lens and not really appropriate for general use, and an excellent but very fiddly manual lens that's not a focal length I prefer. Unsatisfying. I really hope my zoom comes back soon (I'm going to bug Pentax about it on Monday).

Project 100, #53.

Reid's Plumbing Skills: Fail

Today's project was to fix the drippy faucet in the tub.

Here's the open access hatch in the hall closet. Notice anything missing?

Yes, there's no shutoff valves! So I have to shut off the water to the whole house in order to do anything.

Step 1 is to disassemble the faucet and stretch out the springs a little, reasoning that they're a bit worn out (when I did the bathroom sink, the hardware dudes told me that it's often the springs that wear out, not the rubber gaskets). I had put everything back together again before I remembered that I wanted to take a picture. Doh!

However, it leaked way worse than before, so that problem was out of the way. Here's the disassembled faucet with the old gaskets and springs:

Trip #1 to the hardware store yielded new gaskets and springs. These installed easily and now the faucet didn't drip any more. Yay!

However, now the faucet itself leaked when the water was on (I'm not sure if it did this before). So, trip #2 to the hardware store yielded another, different new washer (no photo, sorry). However, this fit rather tightly, and maybe I overtightened it, but the faucet action was now extremely tight, and in messing with it, I destroyed the new gaskets. Sigh.

I didn't have the heart to go back to the hardware store AGAIN. Maybe on Monday.

Long story short, after a lot more futzing, the faucet was put back together with all old parts except the springs, and it's more or less the way it was before I started (unless the leaking while turned on was new, in which case it's worse), though the dripping does seems to be a lot less (just not eliminated).

Project 100, #18, #19.

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Oh, program note: I'm going to stop tagging the Project 100 posts "project100" and "photography", since that's pretty much all I post lately and those tags don't add much value.