A funny thing happened to me... *Updated*
Thursday, January 10th, 2008 - 7:52pm
Today was a good day; did some work, read some webpages and played some Gal Civ 2...
This evening we have a friend staying over so that he can catch an early train tomorrow. Well, all was said and done, the Wii had been Wiied and dinner eaten... each of us (my two housemates and the friend) climbed the wooden hills to bed: all content.
So, i'm about to turn off the PC when an almighty klang sounds throughout the house and the sound of pneumatically pressurised gas or water gushing out of somewhere fills the air with its urgent hiss. I rush upstairs to find the friend stood frantically in the bathroom with one of my housemates as the boiler proceeds to expunge all evidence that water may have once filled its bowels. Seriously, the water was pouring out from behind all parts of the metal casing... The boiler had decided that it should explode. Water was gushing out onto the floor, splashing down the walls and generally soaking everything in the room.
"Right", i thought, "Don't panic. You know exactly what to do."
So i went to where the stopcock is.... or where i thought it should be - underneath the sink. It's funny how these things turn out. You know that whatever house you're planning on staying in for any reasonable amount of time there are three things you should know about the place: 1) know where the electrical board is. 2) Know where the gas mains is. 3) Know where the water stopcock is.
I've thought about this kind of thing before and i know where 1 and 2 are... i had planned to find out exactly where 3 was but had never gotten around to it in the year or so that i've been a resident between these 4 walls.
I shout through the noise to see if anyone knows where the stopcock is.... nobody knows. Panic begins to gnaw at the edges of my thoughts. At this point in time, i'm standing in the kitchen in a pool of water that's cascading through the light fixtures on the ceiling. I turn off the lights. There's only one thing i can do - phone the landlord!
I grab my mobile and dial his... the phone rings and rings and doesn't even go through to a voicemail - the pools of water now stretch across the whole of the kitchen and the bathroom is completely soaked. I hang up and dial his house number and he picks up in a matter of seconds. I have to shout above the noise for him to hear me and i bear in mind that he was possibly in bed (considering it was eleven o'clock). I ask him where the stopcock is... he tells me it's under the sink. My heart is pounding with the adrenaline rush and i quickly point out that i've looked there and in several other places. He suggests behind the washing machine and i tell him to stay on the line as i need both hands to pull it out of its enclosure. Several grunts and wet sloshes later the machine is removed from its resting place and i see the dull glint of a metal tap in the darkness behind it.... i don't bother telling him he was right, i just grab that tap and start turning - presumably in the closed direction - until the sounds of the waterfall from the floor above begin to recede.
It was only after we'd begun the clean-up operation (that included semi-hysterical laughter - you know the kind that you get when you know the situation isn't funny but there's nothing to do but laugh) that i realised that we hadn't any water to drink or flush the toilet with... luckily there was enough in the resevoir to fill the kettle so we can at least have a cup of tea in the morning.
The problem is that now i'm completely awake - i don't feel tired at all and coming here and writing this (admittedly messy) account was the only thing i could do to engage my mind in something that would ease me down off my adrenaline high.
I hope your nights went a little quieter than mine. Tomorrow i have to see a man about a leak...
Good night ^_^
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Teehee.
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"Do I what I do: hate everyone." - Quintin_Stone
My thought exactly
So hell did freeze over after all; Welcome to Skjold!
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Hooray for water damage!
There is only one thing you can do in a situation like this: Grab a preferred alcoholic drink and rock it heavy weapons style in TF2 for a while. Then deal with your problems at some point in the future.
You can't control the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
stopcock
Teehee.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
It just sucks that i don't have TF2 or a stable internet connection to play it (or any other twitch game) online
The landlord's managed to get his friend - who i hope is a certified plumber - to come this morning so i imagine it will be fixed very soon. Hopefully it's just that the inlet pipe/hose into the water system (it's a combi boiler) has just popped off... if it's anything more serious then i'm not looking forward to this weekend as the temperature is supposed to drop below 0 C from tonight...
Ah well, at least if i leave my PC on and close my bedroom door then the room should be nice and warm by tonight.
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Don't you just love heating rooms with electronics. At least you have an excuse to play games for the whole weekend.
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams
I love American central heating and water heaters.
Although I understand if you abuse your water heater, it could take off like a rocket through the house and out the roof...
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
Yeah, i prefer having a non-on demand system so i could heat up water for 30 mins in the morning and 30 mins in the evening to last the whole day... but i'm not sure which is more energy efficient.
Either way we're stuck with a combi boiler and they're very popular at the moment. Personally i also hate the 'power' shower that we have... there's no power there as far as i can tell and it just about manages to push out some warm water.
Can't wait till i get a place of my own.
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I've never seen that episode. That was awesome.
Sorry about your problems, Duoae. I know the panic you dealt with there, as in college we once had an electric dishwasher do something similar.
"I have not supped of Buffy, nor have I supped in any wise during the absence of Firefly. When Firefly returns again in glory, then shall I sup at the table of Whedon." - Fedaykin98
Wow, must be the day for it, we had our washing machine breakdown and void enough water to swamp the carpet in the three closest rooms. We used every towel in the house to sop up as much as we can and we're getting a carpet cleaner tomorrow morning for the water extraction. Good luck with your water woes.
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Do not lie, cheat or steal.
These things are for lesser men.
Protect the weak against the evil strong.
And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the pursuit of evil.
What a day. Be glad that you don't have one of those fancy water heaters. There was a recent MythBusters Episode on the explosive potential of that thing... And it has the potential poke a hole through the house...
On a side note: It is a good thing that it is just water, I remember watching a Dirty Jobs episode where some family's toilet just "backed up" so their basement was flooded with sewage... That still give me nightmares when I think about it...
Decisions are just decisions, there are neither "good" or "bad"
LobsterMobster wrote:
Oof. No fun, my condolences. Look at it this way: at least it isn't your house.
Around here the contractors loathe all forms of life. To provide as much pain and dismay as possible to the humans that purchase their creations they typically install the water heater in the place with the highest potential for catastrophic, whole-house damage when it inevitably fails: the attic. That it's also almost impossible to extract when it does fail and causes no end of frustration for the plumbers trying to shoehorn a replacement through the access hole is merely icing on the cake (is a lie).
We got relatively lucky in that when ours finally went tits up we discovered it within minutes of the failure. This is a Good Thing as it was spraying water throughout the attic, liberally coating all surfaces. Had we been, say, out of town we would have returned to a house where we'd essentially have to replace everything from the shingles down.
My current house's water heater is thankfully conveniently placed in the garage. This is nice as two weeks ago when I was pulling in after a late night of hockey I heard the glorious sound of free-flowing water drips. Yes, yet another failure. What, they can't design these things to not spring a leak when they fail? It can't just, I dunno, stop making hot water?
"THE HELL ASS BALLS." - Prederick, expressing frustration in the time-honored way.
I reckon that I could design a fail safe system which probably wouldn't cost much more than a normal heating system. Wouldn't be too hard to fit an in-line in-out reader (probably flow meters) to the mobo and calculate if they are equal... if not, then the system would have a cut-off (magnet or spring-based) on the mains inlet which would isolate the system allowing only what was in the tank to leak (backwards) assuming that there's not a no-return valve on the end of the inlet.... Of course, any heating of water would also be shut off....
Actually, maybe it might be quite expensive.... however i'd use as generic pieces as possible so that people wouldn't have to upgrade to a new system if theirs failed after 5 years.
Ahh... dreams.
Thanks for the support guys... apparently it's fixed now.
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I've had hoses go on the washing machine and create a lake in the basement. Now I only use steel-mesh reinforced hoses.
Duoae, hope you didn't lose anything valuable in the flood.
I'm not lost. I'm locationally challenged.
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I'm torn here. While my heart goes out to you for enduring that, I'm also glad that sounds like your electronics are in working order. I'm also heartened that your initial thought was to go staright to GWJ.
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I had a similar problem last weekend.
The piling company building the foundations for my extension drilled through my main water pipe. The stopcock out in the street hadn't been operated for about 30 years and wouldn't turn off. So we called the water board out and after 3 hours a guy came round and turned off the outside stopcock. Then the builder was able to replace the pipe. Alas, the stopcock wouldn't turn on. Given that it was 5pm on a Friday afternoon, it was 9pm until a different water board man came out and proclaimed that he couldn't turn the outside stopcock on either, and so we'd have to wait until the morning until some contractors could come out and replace the stopcock. They came at 8am and started tearing up the pavement with pneumatic drills. Naturally, there was a blockage in the pipe after the water had been leaking for so long, so the builder had to come out and replace the internal stopcock as well. However, the blockage was upstream of that, so we had to disconnect his new section of pipe and flush it through using a hose from my neighbours' outside water tap.
So that was 24 hours without water all told. Great fun with 2 kids. I was able to fill the toilet cistern from a water butt in the garden, which was lucky since the femtosecond the water went off my son stood up and said, "Daddy, I need a great big poo".
Being a home owner in no way protects you from this kind of stuff. It just tends to move to a higher and more destructive level since you own everything in the house and there is no landlord. Just you.
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When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
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Robear, that is so cool.
Duoae, that is so uncool.
I once rented half of a townhouse from this one guy. It stood on a steep slope and the family units were separate floors. I and my hedgehogs lived on the upper floor, while the guy lived on the ground floor which was essentially in a small ravine. After some particularly huge torrential rains hit the area in 2003, the town's sewers got blocked, and a magnificent backflow became fountaining in his bathroom downstairs. It looked like the toiled bowl had a case of projectile vomiting, nonstop. A great day it was.
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Between "stopc*cks" and "waterbutts", the morphology of Imperial English is astounding.
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Valuable? Apart from the thousands of pounds worth of games i own (my PC is relatively 'cheap' nowadays) which are all waterproof and a Wii that my friend managed to get in December i doubt there's much in the house that could be counted as valuable.
Seriously though, the bathroom is right above the kitchen and due to the many floodings that the poor house has been subject to in the recent past i'm pretty sure there is now a direct route for the water to flow from one into the other
@Wordy: Heh, easy come, easy go. Nothing really happened to cause any of us to loose sleep. We all had a laugh and are all now cosily ensconced within our heated house, protected from the heavily falling snow.
@Dudleysmith: Well, my case was nowhere near as bad as yours! At least our landlord was pretty responsive this time. In one of my old houses i had to sort out everything myself when the boiler stopped working - including paying for the work - because we couldn't get ahold of the landlord... who did eventually pay me back.
@Gorilla: You keep hedgehogs? That's so cool! I love those little guys... don't see so many any more though. And yes, Stopc*cks and waterbutts are cool words - just like verily or pernicious (that's such a cool word
)
Speaking of cool words (and off at a tangent) there was a street sign that i was unable to walk past without reading: Kenneggy Mews.... it just rolls off the tongue... well, mine at least.... Kenneggy Mews...
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I know i'm posting after myself (though it is several hours later now
) but just thought i should provide an update.
The water and heating are all fine... but this morning when my housemate decided to do some washing, the washing machine began to make strange noises during the spin cycle and then it decided to 'spread the love' all over the kitchen floor...
They say that these things come in threes... the only thing that i can see that's left to break is the shower....
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I thought that perhaps the 'three of a kind' bad luck dealie would pass me by and we'd be stuck at two unfortunate events... however, on wednesday our house was burgled and loads of our belongings were taken....
So annoyed. I wasn't too bad because most of my small things were with me (on holiday) like phone, credit cards and camera/passport.... but they've stolen a few DVDs, some games (one of which was Shadow of the colossus - sealed and unopened which i'm really annoyed about) and some expensive things like a watch with sentimental attachments and some bank details.
I know it sounds stupid to be annoyed about crappy stuff like this and that i was lucky that my PC and guitars hadn't been stolen... but in the back of my mind i know that they know what's in my house and they also can get in quite easily since the method they used can still be used....
Ah well.... life sucks.
A blog: by me!
EGGmen - A European gaming blog *Episode 3 now live*
Ouch!
Maybe you need The Backup
Looks like I picked a good day to be too busy to read Twitter. So much bitching, you'd think people forgot how to use the back button -- Certis
Damn, man. That is a hell of run of misfortune. If you find yourself in Portland, I'll stand you to a drink. Sounds like you need several, after all that!
*Legion* wrote:
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That makes me laugh for some odd reason. Having two just sounds like mutually assured destruction tactics for domestic disputes.
*Legion* wrote:
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The only major problem I have with the townhome we just purchased is the fact that the water heater sits facing the electrical switch box, and there's only a foot of distance between them. I'm thinking of coving it in protective hard plastic casing, just in case the tank decides to explode one day.
Damn... that just sucks.
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Duoae, I'm really sorry to hear about the watch. Have you made sure to take precautions against identity theft via those stolen bank records, though?
Elysium: The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid.
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