Another Victory for Occam's Razor · 30 June, 09:31 AM

I haven’t written much about the basement project lately. The framing went pretty quickly by homeowner project standards; after 4 weeks the framing was done, except for the fireplace and one wall in the office that I couldn’t put up until I had moved the water heater. Moving the water heater – that’s one of those jobs that 6 months ago, I would have hired out, or at least asked a more experienced relative to take the lead on. Today, I can say that’s one project I’ve done on my own.
Thursday night about 9 PM, I set in to move the water heater. The job isn’t that tough, in our house the pipe is CPVC, which is easy enough to work with: cut the piece to length, put primer on both surfaces to be joined, then put contact cement on both parts and stick the two pieces together. One caveat: you have to work quickly. The contact cement sets up within a minute. But overall, as scary as it is to cut into a water line, the work wasn’t difficult and it’s rewarding to see the pipes going together. Overall, there were two big boo-boos: first, although I labeled the lines (hot and cold) before disconnecting them, I got confused when I got to hooking up the heater to the relocated pipes: after I connected the cold water line, I suddenly realized that I’d hooked up the hot line to the cold side of the water heater. Since the contact cement basically sets instantaneously, I had to tear apart my work and re-do it. Except that once I’d done that, I realized that, no, the original version was correct, so I had to re-do my re-do. Fortunately, I’d bought a few extra connectors and had enough spare pieces to recover.
The second issue was more a lesson in problem-solving. It was about midnight when the heater was reconnected, and I went to the water main and opened the valve. But I couldn’t get water pressure up in the house. I spent about an hour hunting around, trying to figure out why the water wouldn’t turn on, before finally giving up and going to bed at 1AM. The next morning, I woke up early and started looking at the system again, but was completely stumped, until I looked more closely at the water main. In new houses, there are shutoffs on the main line before and after the water meter. When I’d turned off the main, I’d shut off both valves, but only turned on one when I tried to pressurize the line, and didn’t notice this because the second shutoff was covered by other construction materials leaning up against the wall.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious: when I turned on the main line and the lines didn’t immediately pressurize, I should have known something was blocking the main line. Occam’s Razor in action again. The second lesson is not to start projects like these at 9:30 at night.

— Gordon Weakliem

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