sarg
Well-Known Member
My bad ... apologies to the plumbers ... sorry the good ones have left the site.
Rule #1 = If it doesn't change supper it's not worth any serious worry.
Rule #1 = If it doesn't change supper it's not worth any serious worry.
Baby, it's cold outside...
- Thread starter Hazydurg
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Don’t worry about it Tom, there are a lot of people who CANT so they get online and TRY to act like they can DO.
But In reality they just watch videos and believe all the crap they watch and read. They have a couple hours experience and they think they know more than us with decades of experience
I’ve personally caught mistakes in several well known publications online for improper piping diagrams.
Thanks for sticking around with us.
Mitchell-DIY-Guy
Well-Known Member
Blue,
When I owned a car wash, (in Michigan) keeping things from freezing was always a challenge but one of the tools we had to do so was called a Weep Mizer. Weeping is the car wash vernacular for "keeping the faucet at a drip".
The Weep Mizer was a computer controlled device that turned on at 37 degrees. It weeped the hot water through the high pressure lines at a trickle for about 10 seconds per minute. As the temperature dropped the length of weep time increased. At 32 degrees, the weeping was about 30 seconds per minute. At 20 degrees you'd be weeping all the time. So it saved a lot of hot water when the temps fluctuated between 20 and 37 degrees. At 20 degrees water will freeze in seconds. At 15 degrees even the most well set up car wash was having freeze problems. At 10 degrees, you were wise to shut down, as not only wouldn't the cars get clean, but it would be impossible to keep everything unfrozen, particularly in the lull hours at night.
Here's a true story, funny now but not then, that I experienced with respect to keeping water lines from freezing.
Most of my professional career was in chemical and refinery plants as Project Manager. I had a project in one of our company's northern plants in the 1980s. The plant's safety department had decided to save energy by not electrically tracing any new safety showers installed. Instead, they installed Ogontz AMBIENT TEMPERATURE SENSING FREEZE PROTECTION VALVES underground bypassing the underground manual valve for the safety shower. The engineer on my project simply purchased the "plant standard" as he should have. These valves open at a preset temperature and close when the temperature reaches 10 to 15 degrees above the set temperature. For freeze protection, the recommended setting is 35 degrees, so the water would have to reach 50 degrees before the valve would for sure close.
I remember the startup quite well. There was a long cold period, and on New Year's Day, the high was minus 1. On January 2nd we arrived on site to find a mountain of ice that enclosed the entire safety shower approximately 6 feet in diameter and higher than the safety shower. Through the ice, you could still see running water from the shower head. The water temperature in the underground feed never reached the 50 degrees that was required to shut the Ogontz valve. That design was never used again, and electric heat tracing was installed on all the safety showers that had Ogontz freeze protection valves and the valves were removed.
The good news was the water never froze. The bad news was that you couldn't get to the shower if you needed it because of the mountain of ice. Steam hoses and several hours of labor later, the safety shower was again usable.
Most of my professional career was in chemical and refinery plants as Project Manager. I had a project in one of our company's northern plants in the 1980s. The plant's safety department had decided to save energy by not electrically tracing any new safety showers installed. Instead, they installed Ogontz AMBIENT TEMPERATURE SENSING FREEZE PROTECTION VALVES underground bypassing the underground manual valve for the safety shower. The engineer on my project simply purchased the "plant standard" as he should have. These valves open at a preset temperature and close when the temperature reaches 10 to 15 degrees above the set temperature. For freeze protection, the recommended setting is 35 degrees, so the water would have to reach 50 degrees before the valve would for sure close.
I remember the startup quite well. There was a long cold period, and on New Year's Day, the high was minus 1. On January 2nd we arrived on site to find a mountain of ice that enclosed the entire safety shower approximately 6 feet in diameter and higher than the safety shower. Through the ice, you could still see running water from the shower head. The water temperature in the underground feed never reached the 50 degrees that was required to shut the Ogontz valve. That design was never used again, and electric heat tracing was installed on all the safety showers that had Ogontz freeze protection valves and the valves were removed.
The good news was the water never froze. The bad news was that you couldn't get to the shower if you needed it because of the mountain of ice. Steam hoses and several hours of labor later, the safety shower was again usable.
As an ex-security officer, I would have found coming across this on patrol would be fascinating. I have stumbled across all kinda odd stuffs in my tenure as an officer, but that would have been something to talk about to kill the lull in an otherwise uneventful night. Like that one time I was in charge of a site that deals with computer hardware assembly, and somehow the cleaning crew flushed a toilet, and the darn thing just kept 'flushing', flooding over onto the factory floor.
Also, find it interesting a generic question like mine seemed to have sparked quite the conversation!
Mitchell-DIY-Guy
Well-Known Member
You pros would have a FIELD DAY in looking at a new home by the big builders. Pulte, DB Horton, MI Homes and more. Even the custom ones. Doesn't matter if its a $300K home or $2M. The same level of care. I can only catch the most obvious.
Saw this one this week. It's a home plan they've built thousands of times. The location of every beam, post, joist, fixture is well planned. So why can't they get it right? The ONLY location for the toilet drain on the second floor has an engineered I-Beam right in the middle.
Told the homeowner to ensure the builder takes photos of the solution.
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Mitchell-DIY-Guy
Well-Known Member
Well studs are vertical. What you see in the hole is an engineered I-Joist running left to right. You cannot cut that top plate without some serious work. Oh, any idiot can make it work, but legitimately, it's a big deal to solve. It if were mere 2x12 joists, just box it in. I-Joists? No, cannot do much without an engineering stamp on the plans. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that this is in a tight area, right above the kitchen. Not a lot of room to work.
But in answer to your question, yes, it's in the way...which is why at least this plumber who did the rough in had the sense NOT to cut that top plate of the I-Beam and sent it back up the chain at Pulte.
They've only built a million of these things. You'd think they could get it right by now so as not to thwart the plumber trying to do his job.
Yeah, that's dumb. Think the old adage kinda plays here, measure twice, cut once. ..or in his case, verify plans and whatnot.
