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.

I finally got back to working on my endless plumbing project today.

A couple weeks back, I pressure tested the new branch I ran for the outside sillcock. To do this, I soldered a female adapter onto a 12″ length of pipe, screwed a quick-connect air coupling into it, and attached the other end to my branch with a compression fitting. Then I hooked it up to the compressor, cranked it up to around 30psi, and let it sit. There was a v-e-r-y slow loss of pressure, maybe 1psi or so over several hours. This was a little troubling, but it didn’t necessarily mean there was a leak (it could be the stop valve packing, the compression fitting, or even the regulator gauge). It did make me fairly confident I didn’t have any “gushers” or “blowout” type leaks.

This morning I got the idea to use a couple compression fittings and hook the branch up to my existing plumbing. That way I can be absolutely sure that the branch holds water, and when I’m ready to make the final repair, I won’t have to worry about the branch leaking. So, that’s what I did today. Cut a short piece of copper to fit between the existing plumbing and the new branch, shut off the water, drained the plumbing, and hooked the whole mess together. When I turned the water back on, I found my pressure loss pretty quickly: it was a slow drip at the stop valve, where the valve “guts” screw into the valve body. I had taken the valve apart to sweat it, and it just needed to be tightened a bit. I also had to tighten one of the compression joints. Other than that, everything looks good, and I can finally use the sillcock I put in 6 months ago (just in time for the dead of winter. But hey — it’s frost-free)!

With that, the only thing left is to make the original repair, which was the driving force behind this entire project. Maybe I’ll get around to that by next January or so.

I’ve got this plumbing project in my basement, that I’ve been working at for what seems like about a year now.

It started with my wife finding a leaky pipe. The leak was (is) at a copper tee, where a 3/4″ line branches out to 2 1/2″ lines. It was (is) leaking at a rate of a drop every 5 minutes or so. I put a bucket under it. This was last spring or so. The bucket is still there.

One of the 1/2″ branches goes to an outside sillcock. The original sillcock was unoperational (frozen up, clogged, whatever). So I decided, well, I need to take this all apart anyhow, so I might as well replace the sillcock. So I cut the branch, capped it near the tee, and took out the sillcock and all the old plumbing going to it. Then I routed new copper pipe back to the tee. That was last summer. Over the next couple months, I sweated most of the fittings along the new line. I’m not what you would call an expert at sweating copper, particularly where it comes to valves. Now, I’m at the point where I need to test my new branch for leaks, replace the tee, and connect everything back up. I’m not looking forward to it, so I’m putting it off.

I’m thinking about pressure testing the new branch to find leaks. Here’s the current plan.

1. Take a short length of pipe, and sweat a female adapter onto one end
2. Screw a quick-connect air coupling into the adapter
3. Attach the other end to my branch using a compression coupling
4. Attach air compressor, close all valves, crank up to 30PSI or so
5. Leave it that way for a while and see if it holds the pressure.

I figure if I use a compression fitting, that will allow me to reuse this contraption on other projects.

Once I’m satisfied the branch is leak-free, I can hook it up to the live plumbing, which is what I’m really not looking forward to. For some reason, I find plumbing projects like this infinitely more daunting than electrical projects. See, with an electrical project, if I hit a snag I can usually get away with leaving a branch circuit off for a day or two. Just plug stuff into different outlets, run some extension cords, whatever. This is not the case with plumbing. There is absolutely no way I’m getting away with leaving the water shut off for a day or two. If I screw up, I’m really screwed, so to speak. No, the job needs to get done right, the first time. And anyone who’s ever done plumbing knows that there are always “gotchas” lurking around the corner, waiting to spring on you after you’ve shut off the main and cut all the pipes apart. Then, when you get everything back together, you have to hope that you got everything right and nothing leaks. To me, plumbing has always seemed like more of a crap-shoot than electrical work. This is improving somewhat as I get more experience, but I’m still dreadding this project.

More (maybe a couple years) later when I get back to this project..

Subject says it all! I finished the wiring up today, installed the fan control, and replaced an outlet while I was at it. All my extra wiring turned out to be worth the effort — there’s absolutely no way I would have gotten the fan control in the wall box with all the extra wires there. It’s enough of a challenge just getting these controls in the box with only one wire. Which brings me to my obligatory gripe of the day. These fan controls (Lutron Skylark model) are great. They seem well-made and reliable. But I hate installing them. They’re so deep that they barely fit in a standard-depth wall box. And on top of that, they have pigtails, and you have to fit three wirenuts (four if you’re attaching the ground) in the box, in addition to the control. This makes them very bad for retrofit work, particularly in older houses where the boxes tend to be smaller. If there’s more than one cable going into your wall box, you can pretty much forget it. It’d be much nicer if these controls could be backwired (stick wire in hole, tighten screw), to eliminate the need for wirenut splices. Maybe Lutron will eventually figure this out. Unfortunately it’ll be too late to help me out.

Anyhow, the only thing left now is to remount the fan and clean up all the plaster chunks, insulation and other crap that fell out of the hole in the ceiling. I’d say we can pretty much stick a fork in this project.

I spent the afternoon in the attic today, and got the lion’s share of the wiring done for the fan project. Last week I fished the wire from the basement to the attic. It was pretty straightforward. Some medium-duty nylon rope was the ticket. I dropped it down into the stud cavity from the attic, went into the basement, poked up a hooked piece of stiff wire, snagged the rope, and pulled it through. Then I used the rope to pull the romex up from the basement into the attic. The two keys to doing this successfully are:

1. Electrical tape; and
2. A helper.

Just tape the romex to the end of the rope with plenty of electrical tape, go up to the attic, and have your helper feed the cable up from the basement while you pull it up. This can be done by yourself, but you’ll get lots of exercise running upstairs and downstairs to unkink the romex.

The first job today was to get the old box and brace out of the ceiling to make room for the new fan-approved brace and box. Every time I do this, I’m reminded of how much I hate those metal ceiling box braces that nail to the underside of the joists. There’s no way to get them all the way out without tearing up the ceiling. Plus, the weight of the fixture tends to pull the nails loose over time, which is not good news for the ceiling, or for the person standing under the fixture when it eventually comes crashing down.

The trick to getting these out is to cut them, removing the center part and leaving the ends nailed to the joists. I’ve found that the best tool for this is a Dremel rotary tool with a cutoff wheel. I’ve used a hacksaw, and it’s laborious (the bars are actually pretty thick metal) and the sawing action can damage the ceiling (and your knuckles). The Dremel is not perfect (if you breathe wrong on the cutoff wheels, they break), but believe me, it is far superior to sawing.

This bar came out easier than others I’ve done. Once I cut one side, the other side just swung out of the way (because, of course, the nails had pulled loose).

The actual wiring was complicated but straightforward. There were a lot of wires in the old box (it fed two different downstream branches). Rather than put everything back into the fixture box, I mounted a second junction box, wired everything up to that, and ran a single 12/3 cable to the fixture box carrying two switched hots (lights and fan) and neutral. This makes for a neater job and lets me use a larger box for all of my splices.

Just a couple parting tips for doing this kind of work:

1. Invest in a pair of knee pads (or “kneelers”). Your knees will thank you for it.
2. If your house has lots of BX wiring like mine, invest $25 or so for a good quality rotary BX cutter. It’s absolutely worth its weight in gold, which you’ll appreciate if you’ve ever tried to cut BX with a hacksaw.

Almost done now, just need to wire up the fan control, route the wire in the basement, and remount the fan.