Our plumbing comedy of errors

Last October, I mentioned that we'd been without water at home for a couple of days, and promised to tell you later about how it came about. So, as promised, here's the whole long, strange story. I referred to it in my earlier post as a "bizarre string of circumstances," but the phrase my husband used in relating the story to his parents was "cascading clusterfuck"—and after hearing the story, his mom, though normally disapproving of such language, had to admit it was an apt description. However, as you'll see at the end, even this perfect storm proved to have a silver lining.

First, a little background: Earlier this year, one of my survey panels invited me to take part in a home product test. The item to be tested was a little device called a Leakbot, which is already in use in Europe and is now being tested for the U.S. market. You clip this gadget onto your home's main water intake pipe, directly above the main shutoff valve, and it can supposedly tell—presumably by detecting changes in water flow through the pipe—when you've got an undetected leak somewhere in your home's plumbing system. It then alerts you through an app and helps you set up an appointment with a plumber.

Anyway, the company offered me a $100 gift card if I would install one of these devices in my home, download the app, and use it for a full year. I figured there was no real downside to this; it wouldn't cost anything, and there was always the chance it might save us some money by catching a leak early on. What did we have to lose?

All went fine for the first month. Then, on a Monday in October, I got a call from Leakbot saying the device had detected a leak in my home. I thought this was odd, since not only had I seen nothing, I hadn't received any alert through the Leakbot app. Just to make sure, I checked the app, and it said our system seemed to be working normally. The phone rep seemed puzzled, but suggested sending out a plumber to check it out just in case. Since I work from home, this was no problem for me, so I agreed to meet with a plumber on Wednesday.

The first thing that went wrong was that the plumber ended up having to reschedule the appointment for Friday—a delay that, for reasons you'll soon see, proved to be significant. So on Friday morning, shortly after Brian (who had taken the day off from work) and I had finished breakfast, two guys showed up on our doorstep and headed down to the utility room to check the system. To do this, the first thing they had to do was shut off the main water valve to the house. And within five minutes, they were back upstairs saying, "We've got some bad news."

The shutoff valve for our plumbing was an old-school compression valve, a type that's particularly likely to break when it gets old—and ours apparently had never been replaced since the house was built in 1971. Knowing this, the plumber did his best to turn it as slowly and gently as possible, but to no avail; it had broken, and the valve was now stuck in the closed position. In short, we no longer had water to the house.

The plumber immediately admitted that, no matter how old and crappy the valve was, fixing it was his responsibility, since he was the last person to touch it. But there was one problem: Since it was the main shutoff valve for the whole house, in order to replace it, he'd need to shut off the water supply to the house at the curb box, which taps into the town water main. And while plumbers normally carry "keys" with them to turn these curb boxes off and on, the curb box used in our town was an unusual type that he didn't have a key for. So we'd have to call the water department to come and shut it off before he could do the repair.

It took a little bit of research to find the number for the water department, and once I managed to get through, they informed me that all their crews were currently out and they'd have to get back to me. I asked if they thought someone would be able to come shut off the water before the office closed at 3pm, since otherwise we'd be without water for the whole weekend, and they could only say, "Well, I hope so." So the plumbers, who had just been sitting around up to this point, decided to take off and attend to another job, while Brian and I had to sit around the house waiting for a call.

Eventually, someone showed up, armed with the appropriate key to turn off the water—but when he tried to put the key into the box, he found he couldn't reach the valve. Due to some sort of settling or shifting, the curb box had actually changed position, leaving the shaft between the shutoff valve and the opening bent and filled with dirt. So there was no way the "key"—basically a long, straight metal pole with a connector on one end—could reach the valve. The guy from the water department informed us we'd have to have the entire box dug out and a new access put in, a job that would probably cost between $2,000 and $3,000—which we'd have to pay out of our own pockets, since the curb box was technically on our property and didn't belong to the borough. So now we were facing a whole weekend without water, plus a repair that would cost between two and three grand. All on account of a leak that, I will stress once again, we had no evidence actually existed.

Well, the plumbers, who had returned from their other job by this point, said their company could take care of the repair for us, but they'd have to send out a separate crew with the right equipment for the job. So we brought up some bottles of water from the basement and settled in for a weekend without running water. Fortunately, the company called us up that evening and said Leakbot had offered to pick up the cost of our new curb box—probably because they realized it would be really bad P.R. if we went around complaining that our Leakbot had cost us $3,000 for repairs because it sent out a plumber to fix a leak that wasn't there. So the good news was, we now knew we weren't on the hook for the expensive repair; the bad news was, we still had no water until it got done. (Leakbot actually offered to pay for the cost of putting us up in a hotel until we could get the curb box replaced, but we declined, figuring we'd be more comfortable at home with no running water than in a hotel with it.)

The repair crew showed up the next day. They didn't bother with any such niceties as ringing the bell or talking to us, so we had only the vaguest idea what was going on out there, but by the afternoon, they'd gone away and left behind a five-by-four-foot patch of gravel where part of our sidewalk had once been. By this, we assumed that we now had a usable curb box. Unfortunately, this got us no closer to having running water in the house, because we still had to wait until Monday for the plumber to come back.

So, first thing Monday morning, I called back the plumbing company to ask when I should expect them. The secretary seemed surprised by the question and said, "You're all done." I had to explain to her that, no, the part of the job that involved heavy digging equipment was done, but we still needed to get the valve replaced before we'd have any water. So she checked the schedules and said, okay,  she'd send someone out on Tuesday. This, in case you're counting, meant a total of four days without water.

Tuesday the plumber showed up. I once again had to call the borough to get them to turn off the water at the curb, which involved making several rounds of back-and-forth calls to them and the plumber to determine that no, they really didn't have the key for the curb box. But eventually we got the water turned off and the plumber installed a new valve. In fact, just for good measure, he installed two—one above the water meter and one below it, which is the setup most homes have. (He explained that most likely, this was the reason our Leakbot had given us a false positive in the first place: the instructions said to clip it to the main water pipe "right above the valve," but in most houses that would mean the valve above the water meter, and I'd installed it below the water meter, since that was the location of the only valve we had. Which means, of course, that if the instructions had simply told me to put it above the water meter, we could have avoided this whole mess.)

Anyway, once the new valve was in place, I had to call the water department yet again to get the water turned back on. The guy from the water department grumbled about the fact that when they'd replaced the box, they hadn't also eliminated the upright piece of pipe that the valve was mounted on, thereby making it unstable. Apparently he'd tried to explain to Brian, the first time he came out, why this was a problem, but between his limited English, Brian's limited plumbing knowledge, and our general frazzled state, it hadn't sunk in, so we didn't think to go out and give the plumbing crew any instructions about it. In any case, it was too late now.

Fortunately, he managed to get the water turned back on without incident, and when I turned on the taps in the house—hallelujah!—water actually came out of them. Admittedly, it came out in a rather spurty fashion due to all the trapped air that had settled in the pipes, but it was a lot better than the barely discernible trickle we'd had before.

When Brian came home, I told him that the problem was now resolved. He went downstairs to take a look at the new valve the plumber had installed, purely out of curiosity, and then came back up saying, "You're not going to like this." Apparently, the new valve—the brand-new valve that we'd gone through all this hassle to get—had a slow leak. It was barely noticeable, just a drop every couple of minutes, but it was definitely there. So after spending the past four days with no water over a leak we didn't actually have, we now had one.

So, the next day, the plumber—who was surely sick of the sight of us by now—came back to install another new valve. This time, just to make absolutely sure there would be no problems, he installed a different type of valve, one he swore couldn't possibly leak. After one more round of calls to the water department to get the water turned off and back on, we finally had a system that was working as it should.

Unfortunately, we also had a torn-up sidewalk that needed to be repaired. It took only a few minutes of research to determine that this wasn't a job we could reasonably do ourselves, so I had to spend much of the next week trying to reach cement companies to get quotes on a repair, and they were all a lot higher than I expected. We eventually ended up paying $350 out of our own pockets to fix the sidewalk...which we'd had to tear up to replace the curb box...which we'd had to replace because of the broken plumbing valve...which broke because a plumber came out to fix a leak that, I will note yet again, didn't exist. (There was also an expense of about $15 to replace the float valve in our upstairs toilet, which had given up the ghost after four days of having buckets of water dumped on top of it every time we needed to flush. But it was old and touchy anyway, so that expense didn't bother me.)

So, even though the problem is now resolved, it sounds like we have a good reason to be ticked off about the whole situation, wouldn't you say? Except, as it turns out, though, there's a coda to this story that shows how the whole disaster was kind of a blessing in disguise.

You see, the weekend after this whole plumbing debacle, Brian was working at the utility sink in our basement, and when he tried to shut it off, he couldn't. There was a slow but persistent drip that stayed no matter how much he tightened the tap.

Well, that's a simple enough problem to fix, right? All you need to do is shut off the water under the sink, take apart the faucet, and replace the washer. Except when Brian checked below the sink, he found there was no shutoff; the hot and cold water lines were both plumbed directly into the wall. This sent him into a panic, because working on it would require him to shut off the water to the whole house, and he was afraid of setting off yet another chain of catastrophes. He was so freaked out that he declared he didn't want to touch the job; I should just hire a plumber.

However, I wasn't prepared to do this without at least looking into the problem first to see how hard it was likely to be to fix it ourselves. A quick search online suggested that, as I'd thought, it was a very simple job; I told Brian I saw no reason I couldn't handle it myself, with no plumbing experience whatsoever, and he certainly should be able to. If he was really that worried about it, I was willing to call a plumber just to set his mind at ease, but only if he really thought it was necessary.

After hearing this, Brian decided he'd be willing to at least give the job a try. He popped by the Home Depot and picked up an assortment of washers and other small parts, figuring that if one of them proved to be the right size, that would save us the trouble of making a hardware run in the middle of the job (and if none of them was, we could always return the set). As it turned out, one of them was a perfect fit, and the whole repair took us probably 15 minutes, from the time we turned off our spanking new main water shutoff valve to the time we turned it back on.

But here's the beautiful irony: If Brian had discovered this leak two weeks earlier and tried to fix it then, we would have been the ones to break the main water shutoff valve. We would still have gone through the entire series of problems with the valve and the curb box and the four days without water, but with one crucial difference: We would have had to pay for the new valve, as well as the new curb box, out of our own pockets, to the tune of around three grand. But as it was, we got both jobs done for free and only needed to pay $350 for the sidewalk repair. So ironically, by giving us a false alarm and setting off a whole chain of unnecessary repairs, Leakbot actually ended up saving us quite a lot of money.

Of course, when the repair crew came to fix the sidewalk, they also pointed out some previously unnoticed, but definitely significant, problems with our roof. So it looks like our home-repair troubles are not over yet. But replacing the roof is an unrelated problem, one that I'll no doubt cover in a future post.