Common Sense Mechanicals: Plumbing

Walking up to a set of buildings with “mechanical issues” is not terribly uncommon. First of all we need to know what the mechanical systems that cause the most problems are, and what common sense lacunae created them. Lacunae are suspenses of sense, or gaps in thinking about plumbing, mostly forgetting basic principles: gravity and materials:

  1. Hot on the left, cold on the right and waste goes downhill. Gravity- improperly pitched pipes cause 90% of plumbing blockages, and suprisingly right from the installation, like the architects who forget that 1/4″ per foot is the proper pitch for a “flat roof” that can’t tolerate standing water-1/4″ per foot is de rigeur (and code) except with really large pipes, where the bottom looks flat to the waste in the channel. Let’s not forget to pitch the pipes to a low point drain where winterization is standard operating procedure. I have seen the tell tale low bursts or sawzall improvised drains at low points at the spring startup of cottages by the sea.
  2. Be the water. My friend Dan Holohan likes to assume molecular size when describing circulating water systems. When I get to a bull head “T” I don’t know which way to go, so I go both ways- just like traffic, water flows in the direction of least resistance, sometimes in the wrong direction, bad news in a circulating hot water heat or domestic situation. In the big leagues with “primary-secondary-tertiary” pumping, the lack of a common leg has been the downfall of huge campus wide installations. We won’t begin to discuss the life safety and trauma of large scale steam distribution when it gets fouled with air- another chapter.
  3. Sometimes water is not just water, in fact usually this is the case unless we go to great lengths to correct its chemistry. And some of those chemistry lessons come to light when acidic water literally eats copper pipe for breakfast: pinholes. The chapter in Florida’s pinhole aversion by means of substituting polybutylene plastic is frought with a digression on improperly designed connexions (as the British like to spell it).
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