The pipes appear to be in order, as of last night.
Total cost: ~$300 (including $100 Sawsall)
Total time: 23 hours
Trips to Lowes: 5
I can now return to my regular, less-stinky life, complete with fewer nervous-system-destroying cements.
If anyone needs help replacing cast iron pipes, well, um… good luck with that.
We arrived home from our vacation at the beach to discover that another section of the cast iron drain pipes had rusted away, depositing only water on the basement floor this time (as opposed to the ground up food mixture from the last pipe adventure).
My dad hadn’t yet left for home when we discovered it, and reiterated that it is a simple thing to get a Sawsall, cut out the iron piping and replace it with PVC. “It’ll take about an hour,” he said. Coupling that with
So, the game plan: I knew it would take more than the hour my dad estimates, because he is always, always wrong in his time estimations. So, multiply by a factor of 8. I can work on it through Sunday, and if I need to do some touch up, I have Monday.
So far I have logged 17 hours, $250 in tools and materials, 4 trips to Lowes, and two close calls with out-of-control iron pipes. I estimate I’m about 75-85% done.
The act of sawing out pieces of cast iron caused leaks to spring up in other points along the line, so I couldn’t just do one or two manageable sections. It became a case of project-scope-creep.
Another thing is that the cast iron piping that is there is wrong. The pipe/house/Earth has settled over the years (or possibly, was always screwed up) in such a way that water had to run uphill in spots, which caused pooling, which caused the eventual rusting through I am currently combating. So, if I want it to be right (and less prone to clogs), it’s all or nothing. Or, at least, most or nothing.
On the plus side, I’ve gotten to listen to a lot of podcasts.
My mother called me at work today (she’s in town, staying with us). She was in the basement asking how to make my printer work.
She mentioned that it smelled musty down there, which it does, a little.
But when I got home, Stacey said there were puddles downstairs, presumably from the rain storm of late.
I went down to investigate, and noticed that one of the puddles was composed mostly of ground up rice, carrots and lettuce. Directly below the kitchen sink pipe.
So… does anyone have a plumber recommendation to fix rusted-through pipes?
Last night Stacey tells me she couldn’t get either the computer in the spare bedroom nor the computer in the basement to get a dial tone, but the kitchen phone worked fine.
I had wired the basement line at the same junction that goes to the bedroom line, so I figured I’d made the connection loose somehow and the wires had fallen out or something. But it hadn’t.
So why would the bedroom and basement jacks not be working where the rest of the jacks in the house did?
Since moving into the house 3 months ago, we had given up DSL for economy. We were back in the dial up business after a 4 year hiatus. When I went out to buy a modem for my machine and installed it, it hyped how you could receive calls while staying on line. It even had answering machine software. I thought, wow, dial-up has come a long way, because once I’d installed it and logged on, we discovered we could place a call out using our only phone, the kitchen phone! No modem noise on the line! (What should have been our first clue is in italics).
The second clue is, I tried calling our house to test out the answering machine software, and it wouldn’t answer the line!
The third clue is that the back bedroom had been an office for the previous owners of the house.
For those of you much quicker on the uptake than I, you’ve realized that there was a second line in the house that had been left active by the previous owners, and had finally been shut off yesterday.
So, dial-up has gotten even suckier, because we can’t use the landline while we’re online, as we thought we could before. *sigh*
But a big thanks to the previous owners, John and Janet Hagye, for giving us 3 months of a free extra line, even though we didn’t know it at the time.