Well here it is New Year’s Eve again. Once again, I took a nice, (2 week) long holiday break from work. And once again, I started out hoping to get tons done around the house, but it didn’t happen. Well OK, I got some stuff done, just not as much as I wanted to. It’s tough getting much done around the holidays, even when you only consider the social and family obligations. Then you add two young children to the mix, and that’ll be all she wrote. Next year I may rethink the long break, and maybe do a week around the holidays and another week a little later in January or Feburary.

In any case, I did manage to get several solid hours of work in on Michael’s bedroom, mainly trying to fix up the water-damaged area around the window seat. It’s a huge mess. I finally got all the crumbling plaster removed, and squared up all the openings, so I can patch the areas with drywall. The Dremel diamond wheel does a pretty good job at cutting through the plaster topcoat. If I run a shop vac at the same time, there’s not much dust. However, the Dremel isn’t the ideal tool for making square cuts in the plaster, because the tool itself is wider than the cutting wheel. I was able to make do with it, but what I really need is a tool that won’t get in the way of the cut, like a tiny angle grinder.

It will be really interesting to see how the finished product ends up looking. There are some issues with using drywall to patch plaster. It’s hard to get the drywall exactly flush with the existing plaster surface. In particular, the thickness of the plaster can vary from place to place, while drywall is always a single uniform thickness. I think I’ve got it pretty close, and my current plan is to skim-coat everything with drywall mud to get a smooth surface. I’m cautiously optimistic that this will give me a good final surface. Time will tell.

Once the window seat area is done, I have the other walls to prep. The existing paint is in horrible shape, so it looks like I’ll be doing more skim-coating…

OK, so here’s the current plan for the basement floor drains.

I haven’t quite finished poking and prodding the drains in the office and the back basement, but assuming the configuration is the same as what I predicted in my previous post, I want to scope them out with a video drain inspection system like the Ridgid SeeSnake. I think it’s the only way I’m going to find anything concrete out about their configuration. SunBelt Rentals, which has a location in Laurel, rents the SeeSnake at a base rate of $126 a day, which seems reasonable.

Assuming I can get my hands on a SeeSnake, I may need to do some surgery on the drain(s) to do my inspection, depending on which SeeSnake model is available. The camera on the base model is 1.75″ in diameter, which is too large to fit through the bell trap opening in the drains. I’ll need to enlarge the opening to about 2″. The drain is cast iron, so I will initally try using a tungsten carbide hole saw. Home Depot has one for around $12-$15 that I hope will do the job; Grainger has some much more expensive models. Drilling the drain(s) out will lose the bell trap functionality, but that’s not a huge loss because I don’t have bell trap covers for most of the drains anyhow.

During the SeeSnake rental, I may want to simultaneously rent a power drain auger with cutter blade. This will allow me to inspect, then clear obstructions, reinspect again, etc.

12/12 – A week or so ago I checked out the carbide hole saw that Home Depot sells. It looks a little too shallow to clear the raised bell trap opening and reach the area where it would need to cut. As a workaround, I might want to try using a sawzall to make shallow radial cuts through the opening, so I can break off the raised area. Home Depot also sells tungsten carbide sawzall blades.

Also, today I was able to confirm that the bar sink drain ties into the floor drain plumbing. With the drain plumbing relatively empty (it’s been several days since it rained) I ran a large volume of water down the bar sink, and I was able to see the water flowing through the drains in the office and the back basement. This also confirms that the drains flow from east to west, and it raises the possibility of using the bar drain as an entry point for the video snake. Access is a little tough under the sink, though.

I’m slowly learning more about our basement floor drains. I bought a small pump (a Little Giant PP-1) that sucks and discharges through a garden hose, and it does a wonderful job of pumping the drains out. A short length of hose easily fits down the drain, and I run the discharge into the office sump pump. The drain system holds quite a bit of water — as a point of reference, if the standing water is about 4″ below the top of the drains (a typical situation a couple days after rainfall) it takes roughly 20-25 minutes for the PP-1 to pump them out. This is slightly longer than the PP-1’s 15-minute duty cycle, so I have to do it in two “shifts”.

With most of the water out of the drains, I’m more able to inspect the drains and see how water flows through them. In the back part of the basement, It appears that the 4″ vertical drain pipe goes directly down to a cast iron “T”. If I run a tape measure down the drain, I’m able to get it to go in either direction a good ways. This seems to indicate that the lateral line is directly underneath the drain, and it’s 4″ cast iron. If that’s indeed the case, then that is good news, because it will be easy to get a sewer auger into the line.

What’s still not clear, is where the drain lets out, and why it collects so much water. The line is a good 7 feet below grade. As to the water, my theory is that the people who did the waterproofing in the well room area tied these drains in with that system, and the water from that drain tile is draining through the floor drain pipes. Since the floor drain pipes are plugged up, the water collects until it overflows into the well room sump pump. It’s really the only theory that would account for the volume of water that collects in the drains (the water problems in the well room area are another, totally separate issue…)

Next steps: I’d like to prove the theory that the lateral line is directly under the drains. I think I can do this by running a snake down one drain and seeing if I can spot it in a different drain. Then, I want to empty the drains and observe what happens during a rain storm. That will (hopefully) confirm that the water is coming from the well room and not the other direction. And then finally, I can look into snaking the line, doing a video inspection, etc.

I’ve decided to try to figure out our basement floor drains. My goal is to ascertain:

• How the drains themselves are configured;
• Where the plumbing goes;
• Why they seem to hold water indefinitely; and
• Why they back up into the basement during heavy rainstorms.

My goal is to either fix the existing drain system (I’m assuming it’s clogged), or reroute the drains somewhere else, like a sump pit. A third, less desirable, option would be to just close the drains up completely. But I’d rather keep the drains around, because (properly working) floor drains provide cheap insurance against flooding from things such as burst washing machine hoses, busted water heaters, etc.

My current hunch is that the drains tie into an old network of underground pipes that also used to handle the rain downspouts. I’ve abandoned most of these in favor of downspout extenders and splash blocks. However, the pipe openings are still there, and they still collect some water in rain storms. Assuming the original piping is plugged up, this could account for the rising water in the drains during rain storms.

[More:]

Yesterday, I tried sucking some water out of one of the drains using a wet/dry vac and some PVC piping sized to fit into the drain openings. I’d estimate I sucked out around 20 gallons before giving up — much too labor intensive. However, I managed to get the water level down around 2 1/2″, and the water dropped around the same amount in all the floor drains I checked, which seems to confirm that the floor drains are tied together, and that the pipes underneath them are relatively clear. There’s still too much water to see all the way down to the bottom of the drain, though. Interestingly enough, after 12 hours or so, the water level had crept back up around 1/2″. No rain during that period, and I’m relatively sure it’s not ground water — our water table is not that high.

Next up, I want to get the drains completely free of water, and try to figure out where the pipe exits the drain. Apparently there’s quite a bit of water down there. So, I’m going to need a better (less labor intensive) way to get the water out. I’m going to try a drill powered pump, with the discharge going into the sump pump pit. With the drain free of water, I’ll try to get an idea where it goes, and see if there’s any chance of getting a snake down there.

With the drains empty, I’ll then try flooding a couple of the downspout pipes outside, and see if any of the water ends up in the drains. That will tell me whether they all tie together. At that point, can make some decisions as to what to do next.

Aah, the joy of old houses. Stay tuned!

Wednesday, I took the day off work and moved the bulk of the circuits off our old FPE “Federal Noark” panel, to the new Square D QO panel. There are three circuits remaining to be done, all of which are connected via conduit, so I’ll need to reroute these before I can rip the FPE panel off the wall. I’ve blocked off next Wednesday to do this, as the wife -n- kids figure to be out of the house most of the day, and I have no meetings at work.

As with every other project in this house, half the work seems to involve fixing shoddy previous-owner retrofit work I encounter along the way, and this project has been no exception. Here’s what I’ve found and fixed so far.

1. Old QO subpanel didn’t have its netural bus isolated from ground. New panel has a separate ground bus and an isolated neutral bus.
2. The basement clubroom exhaust fan circuit was wired with 14 gauge wire but had a 30 amp breaker. It now has a 15 amp breaker.
3. Whole house fan circuit was doubled up with one of the lighting circuits. Someone probably did this at one point to free up a slot. They are now two separate circuits again.
4. The wiring to the boiler room/office light switch had individual strands of wire running unprotected behind the paneling. Apparently, when the room was finished, someone removed some conduit but didn’t bother to replace the wire. I replaced it with romex.

I’m sure there’ll be more to come..

Today I officially began my project to replace two Federal Pacific circuit breaker panels in my house. I’m starting with a subpanel in the boiler room, and after that’s done I’ll move on to the house’s main panel.

Ironically, the first step to doing this was to replace a perfectly good Square-D QO subpanel in the boiler room. This panel was upstream of the FPE panel (which is totally full — a previous owner added the QO panel to add capacity). The plan is to consolidate both panels into a single QO panel, but the existing one was too small. So step one was to replace it with a 24-slot QO. Next, I’ll move all the circuits over from the FPE panel.

Wiring the new panel was pretty easy as far as these things go — no big surprises. The QO panels are very nicely laid out, with neutral busses on either side, for example, so there’s no need to cut conductors to different lengths. The only thing I didn’t care for was the placement of the separate ground bus (required by code for subpanels) which was at the very bottom of the panel. A couple of my existing ground wires were not long enough to reach the bus (keep in mind the new panel is several inches taller than the old one). But this wasn’t too hard to work around.

Phase two, as mentioned, will be to move the circuits off the FPE panel. I’ll need to set aside a day for this, as there’s some conduit that’ll need to be rerouted, plus some wires that will need to be spliced to reach over to the new panel. I’ll probably try to do this the week after we get back from the beach — no sense rushing it with the beach trip looming and lots of other stuff to take care of.

At long last, I got the planetary alignment needed to caulk the pool deck joints, so I did it this morning. First lesson learned: I need to wear disposable gloves when doing this. Because as bad as I thought silicone caulk stuck to my hands, polyurethane caulk is 10 times worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m still peeling this stuff off my fingers when I’m 60.

The actual job went very quickly. The caulk flows very easily. The important thing is to mask the joint on both sides. I went through 2+ rolls of masking tape, but it was well worth it. If I hadn’t, the caulk would have been all over the map. I went through 8 29-oz tubes of caulk to do this portion of the pool (I couldn’t do the entire pool because the coping stones are off on the deep end side). I imagine I’ll need 4 to 6 additional tubes to complete the job once the coping is repaired. Not too bad, and the Sikaflex stuff I used was much less expensive than using Deck-o-Seal or some other pool-specific product.

It will be interesting to see how well the joint holds up. There are a couple spots I’m concerned about, where the backer rod was a little close to the surface, and I suspect the caulk bead might be too thin. If these areas fail, I’ll just touch them up as needed. I’m confident that most of the joint will be sound.

The color of the stuff is interesting. Sika calls it “sandstone”, but it looks more like “calamine lotion” to me. For some reason, Home Depot carried only this color and gray — no white. It really doesn’t look too bad, just a little more pinkish than I expected. I wonder how it’ll weather.

It seems to cure pretty fast. When I was finishing up, the areas I had done first were already starting to solidify. The directions say that a full cure takes from 48-72 hours. Given the weather forecast (sunny / upper 80s), I’m guessing I’ll be at the early end of that window.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll do one last joint that I haven’t stuffed with backer rod yet. All in all, this wasn’t a hard job at all. If I have to do it again down the road, I should be able to do everything in a single weekend. The other nice thing is, I have an idea now how much caulk I need for the job. So if Home Depot stops carrying it or something, I won’t have to guess how much to order.

Well, May starts tomorrow, and with it comes… the pool project. This is sure to be the topic of many entries over the next couple months.

Background: Late last summer I noticed a loose strip of waterline tile in the deep end of the pool. Further investigation revealed that all of the coping stones in the deep end had also popped loose. Long story short, I planned the repair for this spring. Basic plan is to:

1. Sawcut the expansion joint (between deck and coping) so the deck doesn’t contact the pool shell;
2. Rebed the loose coping;
3. Recaulk the expansion joint.

I’m putting the waterline tile repair off till next year, as it’s mainly cosmetic and I’ve got other stuff to keep me busy this summer..

#1 and #2 are pretty straightforward; for #3, the common practice is to use a self-leveling polyurethane caulk. There’s a pool-specific product called Deck-O-Seal which is commonly used. Of course, being pool specific, it’s pricey. There are other equivalent products sold under different trade names, which are somewhat less expensive if you can find a decent supplier. The brand names I’ve run across include Vulkem, Sonneborn, and Sikaflex. My hope is to find a local supplier for this stuff; that way I avoid paying shipping, and if I need more, I can just run out and get some (possibly multiple times). Anyhow, the great news is, today I found the Sikaflex product at Home Depot in the concrete aisle. Hard to beat Home Depot for convenience.

Now that I have somewhere I can buy the sealant, I can focus on planning the job and getting it done. The plan right now is to start this around mid-May, so I have some time to finish up other projects first. Depending on when we decide to uncover the pool, it may get pushed back… we’ll see.

Well, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see this day, but the basement plumbing project is finally finished. It went smoothly and pretty much according to plan. No more leaky fitting in the basement, and I now have a working frost free sillcock outside by the pool equipment. I started at 8:30am on Friday, and finished up at around 1:30pm, with lunch and a couple of breaks in between. Lessons learned along the way:

1. I had originally suspected that our house shutoff didn’t fully shut the water off, but it looks like it does after all. It just takes a long time to drain the house plumbing. When I first cut the pipes apart, I had a persistent drizzle coming out of the cut pipe. At the time, I had opened every faucet in the house except for the bar sink. When I opened the bar sink faucet, the drizzle stopped and I was able to sweat the pipe without using any bread.
2. I tried to solder one of the joints while there was still some standing water in the pipe near the joint. It took a loooong time before the pipe got hot enough to melt the solder. In the process, the heat from the torch boiled the water off. Despite my worries, I still ended up with a leak-free joint. Next time though, I’ll make sure the joint is a dry as possible before soldering. Barring that, make sure there’s an opening somewhere for the steam to escape.
3. Don’t hold the torch directly below the joint, or solder will drip into it and foul up the torch tip. Fortunately, they’re cheap..

This was the biggest project I’ve ever done involving copper sweating. I’ve found that as long as the joints are fully cleaned and fluxed, it’s pretty hard not to end up with a leak-free joint.

Really glad to finish that one up!

Friday’s the big day.

Friday is the day I’ve set aside to finish the never-ending basement plumbing project(tm). My goal is to finish this before the baby comes, and before the yard/pool work starts. The trick is picking the day to do it. Ideally I need a day when I can have the house to myself for several hours starting at around 8-8:30am. The job really shouldn’t take too long, but with plumbing projects, you always have to allow for unexpected complications. Anyhow, most Fridays fit the bill, so I just had to pick a Friday, take off work, and go for it.

With these types of projects, it’s always good to have a plan, so here’s the plan.

Before Friday:

1. Order and receive remaining supplies necessary to complete project (expecting these today).
2. Clear space in boiler room for access to pipes.
3. Make sure we’ve got some bread on hand that I can use when sweating pipes.
4. Disassemble a 3/4″ stop & waste valve for sweating.
5. Check side-by-side play in branches to make sure I won’t have any problems getting couplings on them.

On Friday: For phase 1, disassemble the old pipes and sweat a new stop & waste valve onto the 3/4″ supply line. This will give me a positive shutoff for the branch (the main shutoff is a gate valve which doesn’t seem to shut the water off 100%)

1. Take shower and fill up drinking water pitcher, water bottles etc.
2. Shut water off. Open faucets (including outside sillcock) to drain plumbing.
3. Disassemble the old branch starting with the compression fittings and working back to the 3/4″ supply in the boiler room. Have buckets and rags handy to catch drips and plug pipes.
4. Put new 3/4″ supply line in place. Clean and flux new supply line and disassembled valve.
5. Stuff bread in existing supply line. Clean and flux. Put joint together and sweat.
6. Reassemble stop & waste valve. Make sure valve is shut OFF. Turn water on at main. Check for leaks.
7. Turn valve on to eject bread (can I do this without a helper? Not sure..)

For phase 2… hook up the rest of the branch, with the main turned on and the branch shut off via the new valve.

1. Trim, deburr and dry-fit the new branch together.
2. Open all faucets on the branch to allow steam to escape.
3. Clean, flux and fit the “tee” fitting, and two of the three branches. Wrap wet rags around existing soldered joints. Sweat together and allow to cool.
4. Clean, flux and sweat the remaining branch. Allow to cool.
6. Remove aerators from all fixtures on branch. Shut all faucets off.
7. Turn branch on and check for leaks.
8. Turn each faucet on in succession and run till water comes out clean.

That’s about it. Wish me luck!