Plumbing Down Pat? Not Yet

Smugness is a great sin.

Particularly where plumbing is concerned.

When first we begin to plumb, we are humble souls, all too aware of our mortality. Our joints leak and must be sweated time and again before the solder fills the gaps. Our drain pipes don’t match up and our faucets spout tell-tale streams of failure from every coupling.

But then the day comes when we sweat all our joints on the first try, our drains run free like a jet black stallion on the open range and faucets drip only when they are told to do so.

Then we start to think, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this. I think I’ll add a bathroom upstairs.”

And that’s when the plumbing gods take note. That’s when they make a little mark in their plumbing god “Things To Do” list, reminding themselves that next Tuesday, they must take you down a notch or two.

That’s when, if someday someone writes an updated version of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be hidden away for discovery thousands of years from now, the historians would say, “And a great smugness came upon the earth.”

My day of reckoning came a couple of weeks ago.

So great was my sin that I wasn’t even confining my focus to plumbing. In my haste to finish up a current restoration project, I was dashing first one place and then another: a little plumbing here, a little carpentry there, a little clean-up, and some doorbells.

Installing garbage disposals was such a simple task, the last touch in the upstairs kitchen. I’ve installed dozens of disposals by now. Just slap those suckers up. The only thing left to do then was to set the new dishwasher off on its maiden voyage.

What could go wrong?

Just start the wash cycle and rush off to something else.

Here’s the thing about garbage disposals, though.

In every garbage disposal, the manufacturer inserts a little plastic plug into the opening where you hook up the drain line from a dishwasher. This is so if you don’t have a dishwasher, all your minced-up garbage doesn’t shoot out the side of the disposal into your sink cabinet.

Removing this plug is a simple task that requires only a screwdriver and a sharp blow from a hammer.

If you fail to remove it though, what happens is that all the water being pumped out of the dishwasher backs up and spews out of the dishwasher air gap mounted on the sink. The water then spews over the countertop. Most of it, though, goes into the sink. And if you have the plug for the newly-installed garbage disposal sitting in the drain, the sink fills up and all the water overflows onto the floor.

I first noted that something was amiss when I was installing base shoe in a downstairs bedroom, and noticed that the ceiling fan was beginning to leak. Now I have had all manner of problems with ceiling fans in my life, but this was the first time I’d ever run across one that leaked.

On closer examination, I discovered that the globe on the fan’s light fixture was full of water, and that the water was running down through the fan’s motor, into the globe, and then dripping out onto the new carpet.

If this ever happens to you, you will find it is a very good idea not to turn on the light at that point. It is such a good a idea not to turn on the light, that you probably want to go down in the basement and turn off the circuit breaker just to be sure that someone else doesn’t come along and turn on the light.

The good news, though, is that if you leave the light off for a few a days everything seems to dry out and be none the less worse for the ordeal.

Although, it is exciting the first time you stand there and flip on that switch.