My wife works in property management, so because of the extreme cold last night, shes been dealing with busted pipes all day (and all night... shes still not home.) She called me today at work and asked me to go home and check the house. Lo and behold I check and theres a leak in a pipe in the basement. It wasn't big enough to flood everything, but our utility room is covered in a nice layer of water.
Now it was time for me to work my mad skillz with all things handy..
Its a pin hole sized leak in the main line. I thinks its 7/8” copper. The problem with this particular piece of pipe is that its resting on part of the vent stack, and the hose that goes to the heat pump outside rests on top. The hose vibrates, and one of the edges of the PVC pipe cuts into the copper so the leaking part is only held together by the pressure of whats above and below it.
While examining it, I made the mistake of lifting the pipe a bit and all hell broke loose. Water everywhere. After quickly shutting off the main water supply, I grabbed my keys and headed for Home Depot. I only found one product made for fixing leaking pipes, but when I got it home it was too big because of the tight fit where water is coming from. The solution: I wrapped the leak about 15 times with teflon tape and put one of those screw clamp thingamajobs on it.
I think it worked.
Now for the fun part; getting the vibrating hose off of the copper pipe.
They say to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So how does an IT guy fix the hose? With CAT5 cable of course! I've got a couple hundred feet laying around, so I cut off a piece and winched the hose up to a beam and tied it off.
Its not a permanent solution, but it'll have to hold until the plumbers can get out here, which might be a while if these 9 degree temperatures don't go away.
In the meantime, I may try and get myself into the Guinness book for being the first person to fix leaking plumbing with ethernet cable!