Still Plumbing

The pressure relief valve hit the critical point where the leaking was too much.

I had to step it up to a bigger bucket, which meant it was time. To make this fix, I have to turn off the entire system. Because of that I got all the parts to completely fix the fix I did last month and the month before, but time is of the essence so I decided to leave the previous fixes alone and just replace the pressure relief valve – and the bottom drain/spigot which had started leaking around the time the PRV started leaking.

The PRV needed to be completely replaced. It’s non-serviceable. The spigot just needed a new washer. In both cases I had to unthread the metal pieces from PVC, then thread them back in – something I wasn’t really confident would work. For the PRV I went as far as to buy all new PVC in case I had to cut out the old and replace with new to guarantee the PRV threaded and sealed.

Turns out the hardest part was replacing the rubber washer in the spigot. I hate those things.

It’s all together now and not leaking. Yay! The only anomaly is the PRV didn’t thread in like the old one threaded out.

The arrows point which way the relief goes. As of now, it would blow (or leak, which is less of an issue) up. This is partly why I bought new PVC to go around it, so I could insure it points down. Considering my lack of time and its lack of importance, I’ll probably just thread in some easy stuff to the PRV to route the blow-off back to the floor if it ever happened. Not a big deal. At least it’s not leaking.

Speaking of plumbing, I’m not entirely convinced the heating element job on the water heater was the right fix. The hot water is consistently hotter than it was, but it’s not completely consistent. My guess is that in addition to a burned out element, I have a burned out thermostat too. Again another replaceable part and looks fairly straight forward, I just need to muster up the time, energy and concern to dive into it.

Last weekend when it snowed I took the opportunity to test out my heated roof cable. We only got around 2 or 3 inches of snow. After about 5 hours of the cable being turned on, this is what I got.

The red arrows designate where you should look along the roof line. Not really impressive I know. Maybe it’s enough. I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see if we ever get a significant enough snow.

Today Abigail and I got out and took care of a Mommy complaint. Apparently the dryer hasn’t been drying very well.

No wonder. It was nearly blocked. With the help of Abigail we got it all cleared up and hopefully have full dryer functionality again.

– b