Bit of a wake up call this week after getting a little too comfortable opening up gas lines and filling up basements with natural gas immediately before sparking a lighter.
I was in the damp catacombs of a historic restaurant, down this long low 45 degree plane- like a mine shaft, to a point where it opens up in a floor of broken concrete and old timbers as supports. Rats nests of ancient plumbing overhead, half defunct. Around a small wall, tucked in a corner and almost buried by old cigarette machines, a random water heater installed on the hot system (which already had a couple other water heaters in the other room). The ground and walls around it were a jet black restaurant grease and smelled accordingly.
I removed the drip leg and bled out a bunch of air and gas, and put it quickly back together. I’d done this a dozen times at this point- though maybe not quite so much, and maybe not quite in such a small and cramped area, and maybe not right before trying to light it- and this particular water heater had a sealed burner chamber with a push-button spark igniter on the valve body. Normally I am opening a little door and sticking my torch deep inside to light the pilot, but this one was easier. And even though I knew that the burner chamber wasn’t sealed from the bottom so it could draft fresh oxygen, I thought it might have protected the burner area from all the gas I just dumped into the room. I thought the spark inside the chamber wouldn’t affect what I had dumped outside of the chamber.
So, I held down the pilot button to engage the gas, and clicked the sparker a couple times. It made a loud CLICK, just like a BBQ grill, but nothing happened. On these sealed burner chamber units there is a small glass window the size of a quarter. It’s very low, and you have to get your face right on the ground at just the right angle to see inside- and if you find the right angle, you can see the spark going off in the dark in there. I wondered if it was even sparking, considering how nasty the entire ‘everything’ was in that space. So I leaned down as far as I could, and opened my eyes as wide as I could to see as well as I could, and repeated the procedure.
Gas button held down. CLICK. CLICK. CLI-
And suddenly there was an orange flash, and the sound of like a huge dog barking- except much faster than a huge dog would, and ear piercingly loud. Both of my eyes exploded in blinding pain as soot and rusty debris got blasted into them as the air around me ignited and punched me backwards. I stood up and stumbled out of there shell shocked, back up the mining ramp to my trusty first aid kit behind the passenger seat. Saline wash is one of the things I always keep on hand, and I was quite glad to have it.
I laid on my back on the ground and washed my eyes repeatedly in both directions. Then I moved to a mirror and repeated a few times. Tons of black grime and debris came out. It took hours before I could keep my eyes open, and even then only with sunglasses, and be able to see things without tears blocking my vision. Both eyes were deep red, and felt like I had been punched in both for the rest of the day. Sharp daggers like scratches anytime I blinked or looked side to side.
By the time I got home hours later it has begun improving. The following day I just had dull headache type pain from behind them, and by the end of the week I feel optically back to normal.
Just in time to encounter something of a miracle of physics.
When I winterize a home, I shut it off at the source- in cases of homes that have their water supplied by “the township,” it’s a curb stop valve that you reach with an 8 foot wrench through one of those little “WATER” manholes you see here and there. We turn it off there, then we use compressed air to vacate all the water from the pipes in the home, and the hot water tank. Then we continue to used compressed air to blow dry the pipes until there is not a drop left. Then, we open every fixture, and what are called “drain points,” small valves like little hose spigots that are at the lowest point of the system- so if any water ever WAS to get in there, it would fall out of these drain points via gravity.
That’s how you protect the plumbing in a house without heat in northern winter climates where it stays well below freezing for months at a time. It works great. We almost never have problems.
However, upon arriving at one of my favorite smaller and older homes, I noticed that the lowest drain point on the home system- there were 6- was seeping water. Which meant that the curb stop valve that I turned off with the 8 foot wrench wasn’t turning off all the way. It was, for the first time I had seen, ever so slightly leaking through. Drip drip drip.
I didn’t think much of it, honestly. The house has 6 drain points and it seemed to be leaking out of the one that was outside in the yard, and that valve seemed to be in fine shape. But, to my horror, when I filled the system at the house- the walls exploded with water in what seemed like countless places. I found split pipes on the first floor, high up behind the water heater. Split pipes in the ceiling and high in the wall on the second floor. Water leaking through three different ceilings. Until 8 PM Doug, a builder that I work with often, and I, went through this house cutting holes in walls and patching split pipes, until we finally got them all and found blessed silence instead of the sound of falling water when we engaged the water main.
I was completely befuddled. All 6 of this house’s drain points were wide open. The split in the pipe behind the water heater was on a riser directly above one of these open drain points. Four feet above an open drain point, somehow a drop-at-a-time speeding water defied gravity and managed to fill and freeze and explode a pipe. And then it went on to the SECOND floor for more of the same. Nothing about it made sense on a physics level.
Until finally it did.
It was dripping through the lowest drain point in sub zero temperatures. Every drop left behind a thin layer of ice that eventually blocked the drain completely, and so the water would move up to the next. And repeat. And repeat. Back and back, like the sinking of the titanic- until all drain points were blocked by ice sickles, then it was up to the second floor- slowly filling one drip at a time through the thin channel of liquid water surrounded by a frozen conduit of itself. All the way to the top, where it sat there long enough to freeze solid, and then burst in several places.
I run into this shit all the time. Things that are supposed to be the simplest and most basic and self-evidencing systems I know, and know intimately- STILL throwing me mysteries and curve balls and completely inverted expectations. This is why I don’t take a single conspiracy theory or political statement that isn’t completely self evident seriously.
And even if something appears self evident, I always leave room for doubt. Don’t blame me- the world has literally drilled this into my brain via interacting with it. A bit similar to my argument with Christians that take issue with me being an atheist: “take it up with God, he made me this way according to you.”
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