more plumbing

A week ago, I wrote about the unplanned installation of our new furnace. Today, I had the planned repair of an exterior faucet, which may have been out for over a year. Some time (last summer? The summer before? It was summer, because I was wearing sandals), I walked into the living room to discover that a considerable portion of the rug was saturated, as was the carpet of the neighbor on the other side of the common wall. It turned out there was a leak somewhere in the line to our outdoor faucet (there are two emerging from the wall between our units; the controls are inside our separate units). My wife and I put off the repair, thinking that it would be in the territory of $1,000. We finally called Roto-Rooter of New Brunswick about a month ago for a quote, and the engaging technician said he thought he could bring it in for under $450. I was off today, and so we scheduled it.

It turned out he brought it in under $350, despite having to chisel out part of two studs and the firewall (he did not break all the way through). Instead of running the copper line through holes in the studs, the builders had run the line tight between the studs and the firewall; it appears that electrolysis and friction (of the expansion/contraction of the seasons? Of turning the faucet on and off?) had worn a pinhole in the copper pipe where it contacted a (probably aluminum) H-channel between two sections of firewall. After chopping out enough material so he could move the pipe enough to turn the tubing cutter, the tech made short work of soldering in a new section... then was dissatisfied enough with his work to re-solder one of the joints. It didn't leak, and the tech fellow hung around long enough to make sure the outdoor faucet worked (in this twenty-something-degree weather), and made sure I knew how to protect the system from freezing, before he left.

Plumbing is never an inexpensive proposition, and both the furnace and the faucet line were fixes, rather than planned upgrades. That said, I've had good experiences with both of the plumbers I've used, and we had the money to do both repairs. Life could be worse