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I should have never complained about the cold and the snow when I did. I spoke too soon, when I thought that things couldn’t get any worse and I couldn’t take much more of the cold, something got worse, worse as in pipes bursting upstairs yesterday.
My daughter was a champion, she caught it pretty quickly and that gave me the time to race down to the basement to shut the water off to the whole house. The break was in the small passage way up to the attic on the East side of the house, water started dripping from the wooden beams in the kitchen and I set up pots and pans in a straight line.
After that was done, I went down to the basement to better investigate the problem, meaning determining which zone controls what part of the house, isolating it and shutting it off while allowing the other zones to run. Writing it down, it sounds fairly straightforward, but this is an old house and the heating system wasn’t put in all at once, the second floor was added to the heating system when we moved in and we had to replace the furnace a few years ago, so it took me a few minutes to look around and trace the pipes back both to the furnace and to the various areas in the floor plan from the bottom up.
I took my daughter down with me to show her where the entire house water shutoff valve was located, where the other turnoff valves to the furnace and the water heater were located; it was a very good lesson in home maintenance for both of us. Basically I figured out where the zone was, the correct valves to shut off, I drained the zone to get rid of the water so that future leaks wouldn’t happen and I restarted the furnace to start heating the ground floor. I thought everything was fine until I saw that another leak had sprung from the upstairs guest bedroom and the downstairs library had water dripping from the celing. I raced once more downstairs to turn off the furnace and switch the water back off. Now I was confused because I thought that I had found the solution, it wasn’t until my husband came home and he saw that one of the zone 4 valves wasn’t closing and that’s why I had had problems with the other leak, if it had closed correctly, I would have been fine.
My husband to the rescue, he replaced the faulty valve and we are back in business for the moment. The next order of business is repairing the leaks which will get done, I am not worried because we have the issues understood and a plan of action. ANd that is really all you need, a plan of action.
laurieanichols 