How To Lose Everything in One Impatient Moment

If you don't want to lose everything, impatience can be a really bad idea. Take plumbing, for example: Even when you know quite well how to repair those busted water pipes, one moment of lost focus, one moment of--okay, stupidity--can slap you upside the head...hard.

Definition of "everything" for the purposes of this hub: 200 gallons of water, all we had left on hand after the big freeze exploded a bunch of pipes last week. In chronological sequence, then, here's what happened:

1. The PVC pipes running to and from our tower mounted water storage tank burst in the coldest temperatures to hit this area in six decades.

2. We lost virtiually none of the water, as I was able to cap the outlet stub before the ice plug melted out. So far, so very very good.

3. A few runs to Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Sutherland's provided all the needed materials to fix the lines.

4. Cutting the broken pieces of pipe away was a piece of cake. Still perfectly on track.

 The trickiest part of the repair process:  Removing the water-holding emergency cap and replacing it with a new ball valve without losing all 200 gallons of water.  There had to be a way to close off the outlet from inside the tank...right?  The top hatch wasn't wide enough to let me actually enter the thing, but my Daddy didn't raise no fool.  A soft rubber plunger from Wal-Mart, a piece of 2" x 6" lumber, a couple of U-bolts, and I was good to go.

Cutting the board down to a five foot length seemed about right.  Holes were then drilled for the purose of of mounting the plunger near one end, the Rube Goldberg arrangement was slipped down into the tank, and--yep.  By working the  2" x 6" around a bit, it was possible to get the plunger to seal right over the outlet coupling. 

After that, the exit pipe was cut off close to the outlet.  Sure enough, barely a dribble of water was getting past the plunger...definitely not enough to be a problem.  The new ball valve was glued to the much-shortened stub, the valve itself was closed, and the plunger removed.

It worked!  The hard part was done.  From that point forward, it would simply be a matter of making the other needed connections and--when all was ready--turning on the water.  We'd have our running gravity feed water back before sunset.

Man, I'm good.

Yeah, I'm good, but.... Dang it, there was a tiny seep escaping from the new ball valve connection. Not much, maybe a single drop every minute or so, and not where I'd glued the thing, either; that was dry as a bone. No, this little problem was issuing--albeit very slowly--from the teflon taped connection between the threaded adapter (male) and the threaded ball valve casing (female).

Sh*t!!!!!

Not until then did memory kick in. Blast! When I originally installed that tank in September of 2009, I'd at first tried to use teflon tape instead of hard-gluing every single connection. But I'd forgotten: Not once in my entire life have I ever succeeded in making a watertight connection using threaded PVC connections and teflon tape. Not once. I've never once failed with glue...and never once succeeded with tape.

Karma, karma, karma.

It is at this juncture, dear reader, where my one moment of impatience made me "lose everything" (defined, remember, as 200 gallons of water). Oh, there was a lead-in moment. Most definitely. Home Depot had been out of one inch ball valves. At Sutherland's, just one smooth (glue ready) valve remained in stock--but I could have and should have bought just that one. It would have been enough to get our water running again--to the sink, not out on the ground. But I ignored my inner guidance, my intuition, and thought, hey, thread and tape was the smarter way to go.

Not.

Now, at that point, there were a couple of reasonable options. I could wait another day, pick up the glue-ready ball valve from the store, re-plunger the outlet, cut the stub even shorter, and glue the valve in place. Or I could leave the tiny seep to do its thing for a week or two, in the meantime finishing the other connections and turning on the water--in which we'd have a working utility sink right at this moment.

So naturally I did the impatient, tinhorn thing. Delicately, ever so delicately, I grabbed a couple of tools and applied more torque to that seeping connection. It almost worked; the seep was down to something like one drop per three minutes--when I found the limits to PVC pipe strength and snapped the beastie clean in two. Free! Free! Free at last! All 200 gallons of water were finally free, no longer constrained by the horrible human but free to fly through the air with the greatest of ease until gravity took over.

Are we hurting for water? No, not really; we still have plenty of full containers sitting in the house.

Is my ego smarting? Hey, what do you think?

Okay, so...have I learned a spiritual lesson here? Only time will tell; ask me again in another 67 years, see how it's going..

And that is today's example of how to lose everything in one impatient moment.