My flight leaves for San Francisco in 16 hours. My parents will be away from their house for a while so I suggested they turn off the water main while they are away. Last winter the heat went out; I got it fixed but if no one had been there, the pipes would have frozen and the downstairs would have become a small frozen lake (like my neighbor’s was last winter!)<\/p>\n
So I went over to shut off the water main in the basement with my dad to try things out. I found the pressure reducing valve and a shutoff valve between it and the outside. As I turned it off, I noticed that it was starting to leak. By the time it was mostly off, the water was a mostly constant stream. Once off, it was down to a once every 2 seconds drip. I tried opening a turn and closing it to clear debris but each of the three times I did it, the water leaked a little faster while it was open.<\/p>\n
Now there is a problem! It’s possible that if I open the valve all the way, it will seat itself and stop leaking. (that’s not the problem). It’s also possible that if I open the valve all the way, the valve will break completely, leaving me with an unstoppable torrent of 75 PSI water!<\/p>\n
Since it’s 1 am, I figured it was best to shut off the valve and put a bucket under it til morning. Tomorrow I will call the property owner’s association to see if there is a shutoff valve outside the house. After that, I may call a plumber or (dare I?) try opening the valve all the way.<\/p>\n
I heartily<\/strong> welcome any suggestions!<\/p>\n update<\/strong> Before I woke up, my dad turned the water on full, guessing it would be alright (a wild guess, seeing as we both agreed to leave it off last night). I’m glad I didn’t get a morning swim. Now the high pressure valve only drips once a second. Now what? Follow the same plan?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My flight leaves for San Francisco in 16 hours. My parents will be away from their house for a while so I suggested they turn off the water main while they are away. Last winter the heat went out; I got it fixed but if no one had been there, the pipes would have frozen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}