This is a picture of a very long weekend. Sometime late Friday night this valve and coupling let go right behind our shop buddy’s tub. Besides water going everywhere, before they could shut it down it was too late to go get parts to fix it. It’s a bit on the rare side but down where we live it’s been below freezing at around 20 degrees at night for the last week or two.
The two may not seem connected for anyone who’s never had to deal with it, but the cold temperatures, manufactured housing, and faucets not dripping is a bad combo. The pipes froze out over night and then he was left with two problems: a busted tub hose and the 20-foot intake pipe under the house was frozen (and perhaps cracked), effectively cutting off his water.
Two days later the pipe unfroze and he had repaired the broken tub connection since he had some time on his hands. The good news is that everything in his place is PVC. So a simple run down of tools like a Kobalt mini hack saw PVC glue and teflon tape were about the only tools he needed apart from the valve and a new pipe fitting. The total bill for the project was less than $20, if you don’t count two days without water.
The lesson here was clear: wrap the hell out of that outside pipe and go to the big box and get a bunch of spare parts for the plumbing all around the house in case it ever happens again.
Mini Hacksaw [Kobalt]