The Sounds Your House Makes

How well do you know the sounds your house makes? Can you identify all the creaks and pops, the phases of the furnace coming to life, the squeak of hinges on different doors? Do you know the sound your house makes when water is running through the pipes? I do. During the spring, summer, and fall, I usually wake to the sound of water moving through the plumbing as the sprinkler runs through the morning cycle. Since I'm not the deepest sleeper in the world, I usually take note of the rush of water and the plumbing as the systems shifts to a new balance.

Fortunately, I am not the deepest sleeper in the world and I know that my sprinkler system is not active right now. Knowing that, the sound of water running through the pipes is not a good thing to hear at 3:45 in the morning because that means it is coming out somewhere. That somewhere happened to be the basement. The point of failure was where poly tubing connects to copper piping for the supply line to the espresso machine. The best guess I have on this one is operator error and failure on my part to tighten the compression fitting sufficiently. I could have had similar results on the supply line to the ice make in the freezer.

Given that I was just wasting my time simply sleeping, I got up, headed down to the basement, shut off the water as quickly as I could, wading through the 1-4" of water on the basement floor. What better place to keep buckets than the basement? I had a couple handy and started bailing water. Approximately 50 gallons later, I had puddles of reasonable, manageable size and decided I could stop the one man bucket brigade. I made the necessary plumbing repairs and turned the water back on, knowing I'd probably be interested in taking a shower when it was time to wake up for real.

The good news is that I caught on pretty quickly. The other good news is that I now know where all the low and high spots are in my basement. Some more good news is that the stuff down there that got exposed to moisture (i.e. sitting in said 1-4" of water) was either plastic containers or things that I would classify as unneeded. Nothing like a little soggy motivation to do some early spring cleaning.

As long as I'm awake . . . might as well have an espresso.