ein rega dal
update at 6:35p sat.. appears fine in safari, broken in firefox. will try to get it to clean up proper. not sure where that comment closure is coming from…
update at 4:50.. not sure about the weird formating. ::shrugs:: I’ll look at it motzei shabbos.
update at 4:30.. ok, it was some loose screws and then the line to the tank started leaking. that was fixed too. my rug and some rag towels are now mostly dry and hanging and the floor hasn’t been that clean in a while. Dinner is cooked. I’m still scared of the toilet and that if I look wrong, the thing will leak again, so I will be reviewing some toilet anatomy and making sure that I have parts and tools onhand to prevent or quickly fix this in the future. Oy, my mum’s (?) father must be shaking his head at me. He was a plumber (I think) and taught her about fixing them. Of course I am totally clueless about this kind without a tank I don’t know how to fix. (My flat had one of those. It was weird and annoying.)
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orig post:
I was vacuuming the bathroom in prep to wash the floors and I hit the toilet tank and discovered that the washers screw was loose that connecting tank to toilet bowl are totally corroded and that tap caused them to completely unseat and the full tank leaked all over. L, one of the maintenance guys I tracked down, groaned because everything he has to fix for me involves him getting wet (the leak in the shower was another). Well, it is one way to make sure I clean the bathroom floor, but not quite what I had in mind for 3pm on a Friday afternoon. At least the water’s been turned off, I wasn’t strong enough to attempt it at the toilet. I can’t wait until I live in a house and can make or break things on a more sane schedule.
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6 Replies to “ein rega dal”
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No, dear…if you live in a house you have to find a plumber with time in his schedule to come fix things when you need it, and you have to pay him for it. I’m not sure what makes you think that a different type of abode would change the observant Jew’s variant of Murphy’s law, anyway.
But hope you stay dry, now. ;-)
Why bring in religion where it’s not necessary? In a house, one has control over turning off the water, something not possible in this building. As for paying a plumber, why would I need one? If I could have shut off the water it would’ve been much easier for me to fix it. Plus, I wouldn’t have worried about causing damage to a neighbor, all damage would have been to my (or E’s) own things.
Um…ok…I guess I didn’t get that as being the salient factor. I figured that the full tank of water would have caused a mess no matter what. And I mentioned religion in response to it having been 3pm on a Friday, the most obvious time in any Jewish household for things to leak, burn, explode or crash. (Unless it’s on erev pesach or erev rosh hashana — remind me to tell you a story…)
Everything ok?
I’ll second that “things always break on erev Shabbos” thing!
So this past Erev Shabbos I went downstairs to think about turning the washing machine back on, since it had wet laundry, ie things spit up on or worse, soaking in it, and it needed one more wash. But the water heater sounded like it was filling, and there wasn’t really time to switch it to the dryer before Shabbos anyway, so I didn’t bother.
Motzei Shabbos my husband complained that the “water heater is making a funny noise, the ground around it is all wet, and there doesn’t seem to be any hot water coming out of the tap.” It was that same filling noise that I didn’t think twice about on Erev Shabbos, even though I had never heard it before.
So, it turned out that the interior tank was leaking. Leaked into the tray on the bottom (inside it) and put out the pilot light. Continued leaking. The water cut-off for the water heater also cuts off water to the washing machine, so I ran that last wash while the heater continued its slow leak, then we tried (not quite successfully) to turn off its water supply. We could still hear it dripping in, but nothing would come out of the hot water taps anymore. We (mostly) drained the heater through the faucet at the bottom with a garden hose. This particular faucet also leaks, so a bucket had to be under the connection to the hose as well. And that’s how we spent our Saturday night.
Oh, that and replacing filters in our reverse-osmosis drinking water system thing.
The good news is that when we called the gas company on Sunday, they actually sent someone to confirm that it was indeed broken and in need of replacement, (and he got the water intake all the way off, with a wrench) and he supposedly put us in for not only a free replacement (never thought a rented water heater was a good thing until I heard they’d cover all the labor!) but for a bigger tank, for today. Supposedly for this morning, but as it’s already half an hour past noon, I don’t think we got that morning slot.
But our erev Rosh Hashanah story was when we had just moved in (less than a month before) and a toilet on the second floor was accidentally left running and my basement sinks started overflowing. We discovered that the main drain from the house was basically blocked. Plumber came and discovered this, then went off to get the proper permits. Day after Rosh Hashanah they dug up our front lawn to fix it. Fun.
Your great-grandfather, my grandfather owned Quogue Plumbing with his brother. Eventually my father (whom you never met) bought out the other family members. I remember when daddy did that.
I recently went into a plumbing store while on some errands, when I walked in I stopped and took a deep breath. The store owner looked at me, and I explained that it had been thirty years since I had smelled a plumbing store because my dad had owned one and it gave me such wonderful memories!
(as remembered and summarized by penny after a phone conversation — she hopes she got it all right!)
Thanks mom! That was such fun talking with you.. Oral histories are really fascinating. I need to get you and A taped! Heck, I should record some of my own..
I have the same happy warm memories when I smell certain foods cooking (thank you mum!) or sawdust ..
I love you!