ACT ONE
Last weekend I commented to MWK, “You know, I haven’t gotten a water bill since I moved in here.” (That was July.) MWK said, “You signed up for water service, right?”
Signed up? I was supposed to sign up?
Okay, this isn’t quite as idiotic as it sounds. This is the second house I’ve owned; the first was in Washington, DC. And in Washington, DC (at least in 2000) you didn’t have to sign up for water. The city water department simply mailed bills to your address, without a name on them. So if you lived at, say, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, they simply sent a bill there and whoever lived there paid it. The city didn’t keep track of whether it was Barack Obama or George W. Bush’s house; they just sent the bill.
Nobody mentioned to me that I had to do anything, so I just waited for my bill. They were also quarterly in DC, so I was not expecting one right away.
So, this week I called the nice people at the Houston water department, got set up, was informed I would have to pay a $30 penalty for not signing up before moving in, and today paid them about $150 for back charges. I was just glad that the water never got shut off.
D’oh!
ACT TWO
It’s cold here, and getting colder; tomorrow night’s low temperature is forecast to be 26F. Friday night, 23F. Now, this is Houston; houses are not built for that. There are often exposed pipes. So everyone is in a frenzy about freezing pipes. In addition, I have a pier and beam foundation, which means that all my pipes are under my house, in the crawlspace between the ground and my floors.
Now, it’s not going to be single-digit cold, but it will be cold. I thought of the exposed pipes by my back door, and the spigots on the front and back of the house, and decided that while this cold is really nothing that can’t be addressed by leaving faucets dripping for the next few nights, I might as well spend 30 minutes covering those up just to be safe. (Fun freezing pipes fact: the problem isn’t that ice just breaks pipes, it’s that if everything is sealed up, there’s no room for anything to expand. So by leaving faucets open, pressure can be released, avoiding ugly breakage. Also, moving water doesn’t freeze so quickly.)
I stopped by the hardware store on the way home from work, and of course they were out of everything, so I decided I would get some heavy blankets and duct tape to do the covering-up, add a trash bag in case of rain, and that would have to do. And so tonight, when I showed MWK what I was going to wrap, he started laughing.
“That’s your gas pipe.”
D’oh! (I have almost no water pipe outside the crawlspace, which won’t get that cold because it’s not exposed to wind and my badly-insulated house will be radiating heat into it. I’ll cover the spigots though. 15 minutes, not 30!)
You know, I am not an idiot, and I’m generally very good at dealing with these things. At least my failures are somewhat amusing.
{ 4 comments }
“That’s your gas pipe.”
I don’t think you have to worry, natural gas liquifies at -162 so we should be okay this weekend.
… and if the natural gas liquified, the greater risk would be pipe implosion, not expansion.
In point of fact, I think there’s extremely low risk that 26 or even 23 degrees would yield frozen pipe problems. Keep in mind that there’s no water forward (outside of) the spigot’s valve, and behind the valve it’s essentially an uninterrupted pipe all the way to your main water valve. So even if the 2 inches of pipe outside the house froze solid (which is unlikely itself due to heat transfer from the house, radiant heat from the ground, etc.), the pressure of that little bit of water expanding into ice would essentially be distributed throughout your entire house plumbing system.
The D.C. water scheme seems silly – it seems ripe for corruption, or at least disputes – “I’m just renting, I don’t owe that” or “The house is in my husband’s name but we’re separated and he’s in Burma”, something like that.
The issue really is that the plumbing system is mostly outdoors (in the open space in the foundation), very weird by northern standards but pretty common here. So I think the chances of problems are relatively slim, but in fact the pipes are all exposed to outside air (even if it is air that’s under a house that’s radiating heat, not far above ground). Anyway, temperatures that certainly wouldn’t be a problem up north can be trouble here because of how things are built.
Oh, and you are surprised that the DC government had a system ripe for abuse? I believe that as I left town, they were moving to actually tracking who was responsible for the bill, so it may be more typical and sensible now.
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