Puttering, and other putterances...

This past week, Galina called my attention to a spot in the water line that goes from the basement to the hose connection near the garage door. I vaguely remembered our former tenant saying something about a pipe that had started to leak "in the basement," but was unprepared for what I saw.

The joint had come completely apart, and in such a way that the ends of the pipe segments did not even overlap. Casting my glance down the length of the line, I saw another joint that looked pretty grungy, as if ready to come apart. Assembling the required repair hardware, I took a pipe cutter to the line. The grungy-looking joint actually came apart in my hands before I was able to cut the pipe behind it.

The replacement line was going to be built from piping that had become redundant when the old heating system was replaced with a new air heating and cooling system, and thus, three joints were going to be required. When the work was done and everything had cooled down, I gingerly opened the valve to the garage hose line (the original builder of the house must've been a submariner, because there are valves scattered all throughout the piping system).

My joints held, I think. What didn't hold was the tear in the line down near where the line turns to go down the wall to the hose fixture. Once I got the flooding under control, it became apparent that the line in the garage had well-and-truly been exposed to sub-freezing temperatures, enough to rupture the pipe.

More repair work is scheduled for next week, once I figure out how to replicate the bend in the pipe.

* * *I don't know if it's still going on, but if you've got a free Dropbox account and don't mind uploading large quantities of photos from your camera, the service is offering to expand your free storage allowance by up to 5 GB if you agree to try out what they describe as an experimental build and use the camera upload feature. Details (and the build) can be viewed here.

Cheers...