It rained heavily yesterday evening and overnight. I went to bed with storms and woke up at five a.m. to loud thunder and lighting -- and the sounds of a deluge. Went down to the basement a few minutes ago on a hunch, and there's a good-sized puddle of clear water on the floor. Clear is a good sign -- it means it came in along the foundation.
Looks like there may be an inch of water at the lowest point, which is the drain, and which probably means the backflow valve in the floor drain has closed. Yes, we still have combined sanitary and storm sewers, and if too much ran falls too quickly, it can back up. The next-highest drain is the laundry sink, two feet or more above floor level, with the top of the sink at maybe a yard above the floor and after that, well, I hope I won't find out.
The backflow has a little history of sticking, so the next step will be to put on boots and apply a plunger. I'll probably wait a while -- the rain has ended, but only just, and there's still water running to the storm drains.
Drain-worrying times like these remind me that they make "soaping valves" for showers. It's more often seen in regions that are short on water, a little sliding valve that goes between the supply pipe and the showerhead so you can shut off the water, lather up and scrub without changing the settings for temperature and amount. If I ever have the washroom redone (I'd love to but it's expensive), that's something I should add.
When we remodeled the bathroom in our 1901 house, we set up the shower with the hot and cold water lines feeding into a single temperature-and-pressure balancing valve, and then off the outlet side of that (it was over-sized) we had it tee into two different runs, each of which had its own flow-control on/off valve. One of those fed the fixed shower head in the wall, the other fed the hand-held which was on a sliding bracket with a hose.
ReplyDeleteOnce you had the water running and the temperature where you wanted it (which took a while since it was on the second floor and the hot-water heater was in the basement) you could turn on or off either one without changing the temperature set-point. It was nice to be able to turn the water on after shampooing or soaping up without having to worry about dumping either just-above-freezing or just-below-boiling water on you.
The shower routine you described is also know as a Navy Shower.
ReplyDeleteOne of the many joys of returning to port was to stop taking Navy showers and begin taking Hollywood showers.