My Old House
Plumbing Problems already?

Greetings! Making my first blog post taken from my “house diary”. This is the diary I decided to keep to record info about problems we encounter in our “new” old home, at 9725 E. Winner Road in Independence, Missouri. I thought I’d record the problems we encounter, the help we get, the solutions we find, and just about anything else “house-related”.

We moved into this house on Friday evening, July 31st, 2004. I’m sort of “back-dating” a bunch of posts to this blog today. I took some notes that I had made over the past two weeks and decided to transfer them here. (For future notes, of course, my hope is to make them “same day” or the very next day.)

So… let’s start off with my first eventful day: Monday, August 2nd:

My wife, Terry, goes to use the washing machine (which came with the house) and discovers that the hot water only loads into it at a

trickle

… while cold water comes in with a full gush! I grumbled and said I’d get a plumber to come out later the next day. Frankly, I had way too much on my plate today to deal with this, even mentally. The move was quite stressful. We still have stuff scattered everywhere.

But Terry called her friend Sherry, who had her husband Larry come over after work to take a look at it. We shut off the water valves leading to the washer and disconnected both hoses. Tested both hoses for clogs. There were none.

Checked the filters at the point where the hoses attach to the machine. The hot water filter had some small, hard, rusty bits of metal stuck on and in it. Larry said these were iron deposits. We broke those off, but there weren’t enough of them on the outside of the filter to explain the hot water loss.

Larry said the inside of the filter must be clogged. So, we started taking screws out of the machine. But the washer’s construction wasn’t quite like we expected. Plus, at least one of the screws was so rusted and corroded, that taking the top off became difficult.

So, at that point, we realized that this was going to take a lot longer than 30 more minutes to do. We also knew that we had my wife’s PREVIOUS washer (a 2-year-old machine that we brought with us from our old house) up in the garage.

Larry and I stopped working on the old washer and instead, brought the newer machine down to the basement, and hooked it up. The strong hot water flow was restored and my wife was then VERY happy to have her newer washer back!