Plumbing Misadventures

First, to understand the water systems in our home, check out the Water: Philippines Style blog post.

So, about four weeks ago, I left the house and headed for Manila. The night before I left, the shower stopped working in the master bathroom.

This story might sound familiar from my My Latest Diesel Generator Issue blog post. Multiple things break at once, every time. The only thing I can really say is to follow the advice I outline in the Be Your Own Maintenance Department post.

So, I track through the plumbing as best I can; it’s not necessarily my thing. The sink, wall faucet (it’s a Filipino thing), toilet, and bidet (in Southeast Asia, this is a hose with sprayer next to the toilet) all work as expected. Those all had full water pressure, which is generally fairly good in our house. So, it’s just the shower that has no water (or a trickle) coming out. It was late, I was going to be leaving in the morning; so, the immediate solution is to just take a shower in the other bathroom on the first floor.

The next day on my way to the airport, I texted the electrician / plumber. Later that day, the other downstairs shower stopped working too. So, frustrating. I don’t think anyone checked the shower upstairs at this point.

About a week later, the electrician was able to stop by the house. After looking at the situation, they determined that a larger negative pressure tank was needed. The tank was ordered along with the other necessary parts.

About two weeks later, the parts arrived. The electrician came back and installed the new negative pressure tank. They showed up at 6am one morning. The doorbell had been disabled because the Christmas carolers had kept coming by. We’d already given out the amount we planned to that night. They had to knock quite a few times before one of us woke up. But, we got them upstairs to do the work they needed. By 8:30am, they were done. They asked me to wait an hour and then turn the well pump back on. I waited a bit more than an hour. The well pump was turned on. Naturally, the shower didn’t work. Plus, now, none of the bathroom fixtures that used water worked (no water pressure). The rest of the house seemed to have almost normal water pressure.

This is the new negative pressure tank and the pipe joint that burst shortly after we turned the new system on.

So, I texted the electrician and let him now the current status. About an hour later, we noticed that nothing had water pressure anymore. So, I went upstairs to check on the well pump. The pipe that led from the well into the well pump had failed. Water was spraying everywhere. It was quite the mess. I turned off the water, took some pictures, and texted the electrician again. About an hour later, one of his people showed up again to redo that joint that had failed. This time we let everything dry for about five hours. That evening, they decided to replace the PVC pipe fittings with a metal joint. That one shouldn’t fail anytime soon. So, now water is flowing to most things involving water in the house without issue. Still no water pressure to the master bedroom shower. There is partial pressure to the second downstairs bathroom, but it is a much weaker flow of water than it had been before the system started having issues.

They disconnected each pipe for the shower. The pipe leading from the wall (that comes from the main holding tank + water filter) and feeds the hot water heater had great pressure. Hot water at a high flow rate was coming out of the hose coming from the wall mounted hot water heater. That was promising. I had been waiting to find out it was the hot water heater all along that was causing problems with the shower. The model we have cost about 25K PHP. Was hoping to get more than a couple of years out of that.

Still there was nothing coming out of the shower faucet. So, they started disassembling the shower faucet handles. There was a filter in there that was completely covered in “gunk”. Some mud, some algae, some other stuff that I’m not sure science could identify. The filter could have been cleaned but we decided it probably wasn’t needed given that we now have the whole house water filter in place. We just cleaned that filter when I got back to the house last week. I wanted to be very sure that thing wasn’t some how causing the low water pressure. It has a reusable filter that can be cleaned. It takes some work to clean it, but we did it. There was no change in shower pressure.

So, we removed the water filter from the shower faucet.

At this point, if you pulled the prong to direct water to the overhead shower head, set the faucet all the way to the left, and waited about ten seconds, you got hot water. This thing didn’t use to be this sensitive. Good enough for the moment. First hot shower at the house in a while. Victory was declared.

My next step is to use a pipe snake that I have to see if I can clean out any blockage in the pipe for the cold water faucet valve on the shower. Instead of actually doing that, I’m writing this blog post. I’ll deal with that in a day or two.

The water pressure to the sink is still not what it was before all this started. The toilet and bidet seem to be fine. The other wall faucet (for filling buckets) continues to have a lot of air in the pipes. It will have water run for a few seconds, then nothing, then run again. This is likely all related. I might need to open up all the faucets and get air out of the pipes.

I’ll update the post with what I find.

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Photo by oão Paulo Carnevalli de Oliveira on Unsplash