The Maintenance Catches Up
After living in the Old Man for over two years virtually maintenance free (quite impressive, actually), it caught up with us in December. First it was the leaky roof, which Nyberg Exteriors repaired for us.
A week later while making a trip to the basement I discovered a small puddle on the floor which turned out to be a pinhole leak in one of the ancient galvanized pipes. Fortunately, American Vintage Home showed up in less than 90 minutes to fix it, but the fix took more than half a day since the leak was, of course, in the most hard to work location of the water system.
Less than a week later we had a different repairman out from American Vintage Home to take a look at our main furnace which was overpressuring to 30psi, tripping the overflow valve and creating another puddle on the basement floor. Fortunately, it was just a waterlogged expansion tank, but since our hot water radiator system doesn’t have a single shutoff, it took some creative draining to drain the expansion tank without draining the entire system.
So that was December. It’s now mid-February and today was our first day above freezing in twenty-two days. Fortunately, the Old Man deals with the cold weather well enough (ignoring, if you will, the lack of insulation).
February 20th, 2007 at 12:01 am
Our expansion tank waterlogged not long ago, which caused the psi to raise too high and it blew with quite a force out the safety valve. I asked the repairman what causes tanks waterlogging and his answer was, “that’s a good question”. In other words, he didn’t know. Did your repairman offer a reason for it? Are we suppose to be draining the tank as regular maintenance?
February 25th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
I feel your pain. I’m in the midst of remodeling my bathroom and kitchen only to discover that the waste pipes are no longer pipes but more like troughs. The cast iron has since rusted away. It’s no wonder we’ve had this bad smell in the walls from time to time….