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Rube Goldberg, sort of...
Jan. 28th, 2006 06:37 pmLast night, Galina and I went over to the kids' place for dinner and a shower (and not necessarily in that order). Huntür wore the pyjama-looking outfit that Galina spied and bought for her at the Hong Kong Market in Houston, and she looked very nice in it, the blue of the fabric matching the color of her eyes.
I spent most of today trying to get the drains to work. I went to the hardware store and bought a 24-foot heat tape, which is normally used on the outside of pipes, but a closer look at the design hinted that the wires could stand some immersion in water, so I ran the tape down through the cutout next to the house, attached at one-foot intervals with electrical tape to a metal snake, so as to get the heat tape as far down the pipe as I could get it.
Then I remembered that I had some small-diameter plastic tubing (from my post-hospitalization of several years ago), and it was long enough to stretch from the kitchen stove to the cutout, with plenty to spare on both ends. I ended up putting together a system of large pots, interconnected with siphons made of this tubing, with one siphon going out the window and into the cutout. The idea was to allow me to melt snow (plenty of that around, let me tell you), heat it to near boiling, and then inject it (gravity feed) into the house's sewer system.
I hesitate to say this was engineering, and not science, and I learned about several "gotchas" as I put together the system (as in: hot tubing tends to flatten and constrict flow when it goes around a sharp edge, such as a window ledge; the solution: have the tubing go around a cylinder - such as a cup - at such places).
The only way to tell if all of this work has paid off (it has, probably, just in terms of the exercise I did today) is to pour a few healthy slugs of water down a drain; if the shower pan downstairs doesn't back up, then the drain is probably clear. I've already put one 5-gallon canner's worth of hot water down the drain with no backup, but that might be because I pumped out a lot of water from the drains under the house yesterday, so I'll need to put another couple of canner-sized slugs of water down there to make sure the problem has finally gone away.
I don't want to think about the alternative scenario, where the water does back up.
Never a dull moment around here, lemme tell ya.
Cheers...
I spent most of today trying to get the drains to work. I went to the hardware store and bought a 24-foot heat tape, which is normally used on the outside of pipes, but a closer look at the design hinted that the wires could stand some immersion in water, so I ran the tape down through the cutout next to the house, attached at one-foot intervals with electrical tape to a metal snake, so as to get the heat tape as far down the pipe as I could get it.
Then I remembered that I had some small-diameter plastic tubing (from my post-hospitalization of several years ago), and it was long enough to stretch from the kitchen stove to the cutout, with plenty to spare on both ends. I ended up putting together a system of large pots, interconnected with siphons made of this tubing, with one siphon going out the window and into the cutout. The idea was to allow me to melt snow (plenty of that around, let me tell you), heat it to near boiling, and then inject it (gravity feed) into the house's sewer system.
I hesitate to say this was engineering, and not science, and I learned about several "gotchas" as I put together the system (as in: hot tubing tends to flatten and constrict flow when it goes around a sharp edge, such as a window ledge; the solution: have the tubing go around a cylinder - such as a cup - at such places).
The only way to tell if all of this work has paid off (it has, probably, just in terms of the exercise I did today) is to pour a few healthy slugs of water down a drain; if the shower pan downstairs doesn't back up, then the drain is probably clear. I've already put one 5-gallon canner's worth of hot water down the drain with no backup, but that might be because I pumped out a lot of water from the drains under the house yesterday, so I'll need to put another couple of canner-sized slugs of water down there to make sure the problem has finally gone away.
I don't want to think about the alternative scenario, where the water does back up.
Never a dull moment around here, lemme tell ya.
Cheers...
