Saturday, September 17, 2005

Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink

Woke up this morning and Laura & I talked about going hiking, maybe getting up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and doing 4-5 hours outside since it looked to be a nice day. Nice until I went into the bathroom to get a drink, and there was no water coming out of the faucet. That's a bad sign first thing in the AM. I went downstairs, and the same thing down there, no water in any of the sinks, except for a little dribble in the kitchen. Hmm, this will put a damper on the days activities. Laura opened the water bill we got the other day to get the phone number for Albemarle Water and Sewer Authority, and noticed that last months water useage was more than double what any of the previous 12 months useage was. Starting to see a problem here?

While she called the water people to find out what was going on, I got the dog ready to go out for his morning walk. As I stepped outside, I noticed that we had a nice stream of water rolling down the driveway, out into the street, and into the drainage grate a few houses away. This is not good. We were pumping water (and $) down the drain, literally. I ran back inside to grab a pair of pliers, opened the water meter, and shut off the water to the house which caused the stream to eventually slow and stop. I called a plumber to come out and look at it, and an hour later I'm outside looking at the water with him. We turned the meter back on to find where the water was coming out of the ground and easily located the spot, as the water was pretty much pouring out of a small hole under a bush near the front step. So, assuming that the pipe is cracked right there and they don't need to tunnel under the slab foundation, it's going to cost us approx. $1600 to run 35 feet of new water line from the meter to the house. If they need to go under the house, who knows what it's going to cost.

I've called 3 other plumbers to try and get another estimate to replace the line, but so far only one has called me back and they can't even look at the problem until Tuesday morning. It's going to be a long weekend. The only positive thing I can say is it's a good thing that we were sent home from the beach, or we wouldn't have found the leak until this evening when we were originally scheduled to get home.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, that sucks. It's stories like this that make me want to rent again.

Unknown said...

Ah, your house is new. You don't have plumbing in it that was the subject of a class action lawsuit. You've got nothing to worry about. Our's just happened to outlast the dates specified in the lawsuit settlement, and we are now on our own. Oh well.