Gobble-gobble!

Day 357: Dealing with a plumbing issue was not the way I really wanted to spend today. I would have much preferred standing at the window to watch the robins, starlings and a solitary Northern Flicker take their fill of mountain-ash berries. The Flicker was something of a surprise. I've never seen one eat mountain-ash fruit before, although they are a fruit-eating species. The robins, on the other hand, always come to the table, often as not cleaning up every scrap, leaving nothing for the Cedar Waxwings, should any happen to appear. It's been some years since I've seen them. Yes, watching the birds gobble-gobble would have been much preferable to buying a new water heater, but the Fates had other plans for me. Knock wood, I'll spend tomorrow watching birds.

Tapped

Day 96: A few months ago, I turned on the kitchen cold tap, filled the cats' water dish and shut it off again. The water kept running. It was just a trickle, but I could not make it shut off no matter how many times I opened and closed the tap. I'm sure I must have rolled my eyes as I swore, but for some reason, my hand strayed to the HOT tap and opened it. When I shut it off, the trickle stopped. I tried to duplicate the phenomenon with no luck and things went smoothly for a couple of weeks until it happened again: I turned the cold on and off, a trickle ran, and only stopped when I opened and closed the hot tap.

It didn't happen consistently, and there was no pattern to when it might occur...no association with high or low water pressure, nor with the pump cycling on. It occurred randomly, and days might go by before it happened again, but one day, the sporadic spouting took an even stranger twist when running water in the bathtub caused the hot to flow.

Having done my share of plumbing and not wishing to venture into those rough waters again, I asked a friend to look at it. The misbehaving tap obligingly performed its curious malfunction right before his eyes. Likewise, when I had a contractor in for a different issue, he also witnessed the peculiar behaviour and diagnosed the problem as a bad fixture. Based on his expert opinion, I purchased a new faucet and another friend volunteered to install it.

Plumbing is always fraught with unpleasant surprises, and it made no exception to that rule today. Ronnie shut off the water at the valves and as he unscrewed the flexible hose, he got a faceful of water. The valve would not close completely. I manned the bucket brigade as Ronnie completed the installation (one nut didn't want to unscrew). The flunky fixture is no more and the mysterious cold/hot connection is resolved, but he plans to come back when the weather gets warmer to replace the valve.