Reuben the plumber [by Matt]

This weekend while Andrea's parents were in town, I had her dad help me tackle a project that has been on my list since the day we turned the water on in the addition, but that I had not gotten to in the past 2+ years.

There were a number of things about the west addition to our home that were a first for me. Plumbing was one of those things. Shortly after my Mom moved in, you may remember a post about water leaking out of the light switch in the hall and having to cut a hole in the ceiling and re-do some of the waste piping below my Mom's toilet. [Can't find the post right now - will link to it if/when we find it!]

Well, there was another plumbing issue in my Mom's bathroom. Namely that the hot water in her bath tub never ran at more than a trickle. Cold water was okay and hot and cold water were both fine at her sink. But for some unknown reason, the hot never worked well in her tub. Since she is not usually in a rush, we would just plan plenty of time to run the water and it was OK.

So this weekend we pulled the faucet apart. We had thought that maybe something was wrong with the cartridge, so we got that off and then tried running hot and cold water separately to see if there was a clog in the cartridge. Nope. We were really hoping it was the cartridge as that would have been an easy fix. Now we were wondering if the pex piping had gotten kinked somewhere or who knows what.

With the cartridge out, I did notice that the check valve on the hot water was less open than the check valve on the cold water side. We decided to pull those out to see if there was something clogging up behind the check valves. Here is what we found.

This is the back-side of the check valve. Notice anything out of the ordinary?

In total, there were about 5 shards of wood jammed into the check valves. Mostly on the hot side, but a couple on the cold water side.

Now we get to the heading for the post. I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that my little "bum, bum" addition helper Reuben was behind those wood shards getting into the pipes. He was often out helping me and it would be just like him to pick up pieces of wood and stick them into the open ends of the roughed-in pipes. Then when everything was hooked up and we turned the water on, they got pushed into the check valves where they have been sitting ever since. Thanks Reuben.

It ended up being a simple fix after all and it is very nice to have normal pressure and volume on the hot water in my Mom's tub after having her live with it for two and a half years.

This was apparently the weekend for working on west addition projects. On Saturday I cleaned up the last pallet of a few siding materials that had been sitting in our front yard since we did the addition. That was a very good feeling.