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Ways to avoid repairing a leak improperly
F
I mean… If you’re unable to reach the valve to shut it off, this is way more preferable than ruining the entire building with water drenching it for hours.
A
Reminds me of a video of an apartment being flooded by a plumber working under a sink. Rather than finding the shut off valve, the plumber kept working under the sink while the residents of the apartment tried to mop up the water with towels and a wet vac. Edit: [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP30okjpCko)
A
Definitely not a plumber That’s a maintenance guy at best
O
Reminds me of the time after hours my upstairs neighbors bathtub/shower handle shot off and water wouldn’t stop coming out. I found out when water started flooding from every opening in the ceiling to my floor around 1am and after trying to call emergency maintenance and them not answering having to call the fire department to get someone out to access the water mains to start turning them ALL off bc they didnt label any of the ones in a row outside the building. That was fun
P
“Plumber”
Z
Plumb”durr”
D
damn near killed ‘er
F
I made sounds…. outloud. Thank you for the laugh:)
A
Or a guy with an excellent set of tools.
D
A certain set of skills?
S
Maintenance. Maintaining the damage?
N
I woke up to my hall bathroom sink looking just like that. Like a fire hydrant spewing hot water relentlessly beneath the sink. The steam caused the fire alarms to go off which is why I woke up. Ran downstairs to find the water had already drenched the whole kitchen. Ran into basement to turn the shutoff valve. Immediately see that the ground is beneath water and I’d have to walk through it. As soon as I start walking through it I see that the basement ceiling collapsed and there’s debris all over everything. We just finished the basement recently and it was all ruined. I was sleeping like a baby with no idea my home was getting royally messed up. It’s been months now and I’m still dealing with all the BS of it. Just living in a house right now with like no flooring, ceiling, nor some walls. That video made me feel a certain way. I feel like I might be traumatized.
W
Holy shit. Makes me want to order those moisture alarms in bulk.
N
The sad part is we had them. They send notifications to my wife’s phone. The issue is that her phone notifications are silenced when she goes to bed. You live and you learn I guess. I forget exactly the timing, but I want to say we woke up around 6:30am and the basement detectors detected water around 3am or so.
P
That sucks. I have the govee ones and set them to announce on our Alexas for this exact reason
T
I want a 300db fire engine airhorn as I do NOT want to miss it
S
You can also set app notifications on your phone to alert when DnD is on.
W
Damn, I feel for you
H
I bought a half dozen of those and put them all over the basement, one by the water heater, one in the lowest spot, etc. Came home from work one day and my wife and son were both sitting in the living room while three or four of the alarms were going off. They said “we don’t know what that sound is.” They had been ignoring it for like an hour.
D
Similar thing happened to my friend. He got out of bed in the morning to find his kitchen sink spraying water everywhere, ran to try to stop it and slipped in his bare feet on the tiled floor, hit his head so hard he had permanent brain damage. He died a couple years later due to complications related to the injury. RIP Jake
S
Fuck.
A
Oh dude thats horrendous….. I have a double storey house and I’ve had some leaks come down over the years. Repaired my hot water heater a couple days ago and replaced the element (scary to me because I’ve never messed with a hot water heater, BUT its just a big kettle really). So this morning I go downstairs and the laundry room is flooded from the hot water intake at the back of the washing machine. Not spewing water just an inch of water on the floor and growing slowly. Ugh. Whhhyyyy. I think when you live in a house with more than a single storey and you have had leaks before its like bed bug trauma. If I think I hear dripping I have everyone STFU, turn the Tvs and stuff everyone be quite – like its Das Boot and silent mode and I dash to see where it might be coming from. Your experience is a total nightmare – internet hug, my man.
N
Yeah, that’s why I joke about it being almost like a trauma at this point. Any slight sound like a little creak from an air vent sends us into a panic, running around the house to inspect everything. Doesn’t help that we had issues at our prior home, which was a condo. One time a copper pipe in a wall leaked, causing water to come up through the floor and ruin everything on the ground. Destroyed that kitchen and living room. Went through hell with insurance and the HOA until resolved. Then a few months later we left for a weekend and came back to find that the kitchen sink backed up and poured water into the kitchen while we were away. Fortunately not quite as bad, so not enough damages to need to put in a homeowners claim again. But, given all of this we are really starting to hate water and just live in constant fear of it lol
A
Okay if someone was to ask me what do I dislike in life the most: it’s liquids. Like water essential for life but if it’s in your house it’s in the pipes and it will go everywhere and anywhere that it can and it’s destructive. But yes I totally get you like you love every sound what is normal and when you hear odd sound yeah it is it is unbelievable PTSD
D
how bad was that leak? I never heard of house getting THAT bad damage from leaks if I have to guess, it must have been some city water line
N
No, it was from our well. Sort of surprised we didn’t drain it out. It was pretty bad. Completely destroyed that bathroom and some of the surroundings around it as it seeped into other rooms. The water spread around the ceiling of the main floor and came dribbling or pouring out of various spots across the kitchen. So all the cabinets got ruined, along with the island, floors, some walls, etc. and then the basement got wrecked once it got through that flooring. It was totally gutted by the emergency service company.
R
So…. Once upon a time I lived in an apartment with a shared sewer stack. Someone clogged it with babywipes. We had the lowest drain fixture apparently, a toilet, so all the sewer water started flooding our apartment. The maintenance guy who came out was trying to limit damage while we waited for the plumbers to come. So he was catching the water in buckets. He then tried pouring the buckets into the sink. Which shared the same sewer stack as the toilet…. So it came rushing back out every time he dumped it into the sink, endlessly circularly cycling poo water.
B
Sounds like an incident I had at work a few years back, I came in on Sunday night to open up the plant, turn water, on, start up air compressors, and right away Im hit with a stench of sewage. Black water in the bathrooms, cafeteria, lab, etc. The lift station, which handled the sewage of 3 plants was plugged with paper towels because an adjacent plant ran out of TP and instead of borrowing some from another plant just used those coarse paper towels, and my plant, being the lowest on site, backed up into it. We had RestorePro working on things for over a week, fans everywhere. The cheap-ass company I worked for installed a back flow preventer on the main line to the plant so it wouldnt happen again.
S
When you’re doing plumbing work, sometimes you’ll do this stupid thing where you take the trap off a sink for whatever reason, but you need to dump the water in it somewhere. So you dump it down the sink you’re working on, but there’s no trap so the water just falls through the sink and onto you or into the unit it’s in. I’ve done it, all the plumbers I work with have done it.
P
So according to the description of the video this happened because the apartment complex is set up such that each apartment did not have an individual shutoff valve for the water supply. Instead, there is one central supply shutoff and the building charges you $150 per half-hour to shut it off. The landlord of this unit decided to cheap out and instead of paying the fee opted to hire an overconfident handyman to try to fix the leak with the water still on. So – this was the fault of: \- Stupid cheap apartment complex without individual shutoff valves per apartment \- Stupid cheap landlord trying to avoid a fee to shut the water off for the repair \- Stupid overconfident handyman overestimating his abilities. Stupidity and penny-wise pound foolishness all around.
X
how much would it cost to “rewire” everyone’s apartment to have their own shut off valves? i live in such a place where the water gets turned off for everyone if theres an issue. it sucks but they aint flooding apartments.
P
I’m no plumber but it’s going to depend on how many apartments there are, the condition of the existing plumbing, how accessible it all is, etc. It will also involve of course shutting off server while installing the valves. The shutoff valves for each unit will also want to be in some place accessible, and if no such place exists it would need to be created somehow. Hidden inside a wall isn’t useful. So… it depends.
F
Quite alot, even if it’s as simple as cutting a pipe and installing a valve to each apartment, that’s gotta be an hour per, so maybe 300$ for the plumber, and 300$ to the apartment building for having the water turned off for that long. Now, it’s probably WAY more than that, considering you need all the shutoffs to be in an accessible place, rather than buried beneath sheetrock/floors. In which case you need to rerun all of the pipes to every floor (it’s probably just 1 main pipe, with splits going to each apartment as needed), in which case it’d probably be cheaper to just demolish the entire building and build a new one from scratch
C
This one was a genuine jaw dropper. Absolutely cinematic. Thank you so much for sharing this
X
sad video tbh
C
Yeah from what the woman said it sounds like the building management charges them $150 to have someone turn the water off and on so the guy decided to try a repair without shutting it off under estimating the flow of water.
A
That was fucking hilarious
E
Stupid decision on both the “plumber” and landlord: > … in order to shut the water off for this one apartment, the entire building’s water would have to be shut down. The apartment complex requires a $150 fee to be paid every 30 minutes the water is turned off. The shut off valves and water heaters are behind locked doors and are only accessible by the complex staff. This is obviously a flawed system compared to the ideal of each apartment having separate shut off valves. The landlord is far too cheap to do anything about it. Wilmer [the “plumber” in video] tried to please the cheap landlord by saving her $150 on the bill – you guessed it – by repairing the leak with the water still on. The video description tells the whole story.
N
I’m losing it so bad at that video… pure chaos
K
I mean how hard can it be? It’s not rocket appliances
A
Right after moving in to my condo, the one down the hall from me was being renovated. The realtor who was selling it talked the owner into using her son to do the plumbing. Found out he wasn’t licensed, wasn’t insured and wasn’t a good plumber. He ended up flooding that apartment and the 2 directly underneath it. Meanwhile the rest of us were without water for a day. Condo board was not happy and of course neither were the rest of us owners.
N
I think its hot water too so dude was like lobster red
Z
That’s a classic
T
*If you can dodge a drench….*
P
You can dodge a ball… Or a hammer!
B
That’s what I thought. It may not be a permanent fix but… Hell that seemed to work to slow it down.
R
Or you affix a new valve and shut it once it’s secure
S
That would be what we call a “quickie” in the trade (where I am). Do it all the time on things like the break tanks that supply booster pumps, if you’ve had to have the booster running for filling/testing/chlorination but you have to fit a sensor or a pocket or something later. If you’re doing an emergency valve, you close it before you put it on and hold it with your grips so you can get a spanner on it right away, nip the olive on fast as possible. Sometimes you’re told things are isolated, you’ve closed the isolations yourself, and the thing you think isn’t live is still live, or maybe there’s an open end somewhere and you’re getting all the water in the pipework above you coming out with no real pressure.
F
So just let the water spray all over the basement for an hour while you go down to the store and buy one, and the tools needed to “affix” it? Hammering it is a better option than that
M
This is a good time to use a 3/4″ shark bite ball valve. They work pretty good. I used one yesterday on a boiler saved me so much time on the service call.
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