When life gives you limes, go find a taco truck
This week a line of storms raged through Durham knocking out power and bringing down trees. During a disaster there is always a mad scramble to deal with the damage. With the increase in remote work, extended power outages mean there is also a rush to find places with stable internet to work. We were a few miles east and escaped most of the 50mph sustained winds. This meant a friend of ours could set up a satellite office and spent two days working from our house.
The second day of the power outage, we needed a quick lunch and I remembered a taco truck I had discovered during a somewhat different disaster I experienced in January. The truck is situated in a parking lot to the side of a Home Depot. Luckily for me, I have friends who don’t abandon me when I tell them I’m going to take them to a vacant parking lot for a taco experience that might change their lives. In both cases, the cheesy, slightly crisp tortillas shell wrapping savory fried meats was enough to almost make us forget the disasters we were in the midst of experiencing.
Cold Showers
In January, the hot water in my house started producing lukewarm (I should say lukecold) water. Rather than doing the reasonable thing and putting my house in the hands of a licensed professional, I decided to start a self taught course in Plumbing 101 (via Google and YouTube). Oddly, the temperature of the water in the sink immediately next to the water heater was at the desired temperature. This was my first and only clue.
In most situations, unless your house is actively flooding, water piping can be described as a closed loop. This allows us to isolate pieces of the system to try to figure out how hot water at a source can turn cold. One of the top suggestions was that I might be experiencing water crossover with my single handle water valves. So I started by shutting off all of the water valves leading into the sinks. Unfortunately, after this there was still no hot water.
This left me with the showers which have mixer cartridges that bring the hot and cold water together. These can go bad leading to the hot water getting mixed together with the cold water. You’ll usually notice this when the water on a different fixture will suddenly go cold or hot when you turn the bad fixture on. This wasn’t quite what I was seeing but I was running out of leads.
Hungry and on my second day of cold showers I headed to Home depot where I encountered exactly what I didn’t know I needed. Hot tacos and the perfect set of chips and queso. This powered me through replacing two shower cartridges. Now I had much smoother shower handles, a full belly, but no hot water. It was time for bed.
Is it ghosts?
At this point everyone I talked to about the problem was seriously suggesting that the house might be haunted. I couldn’t rule this out but I also hadn’t seen any other spiritual manifestations so it wasn’t high on my own list. Enough other options were being crossed off that we were inching closer to that being the root cause.
One added complexity in the closed loop of my hot water plumbing was the literal closed loop of my hot water recirculation system. When working correctly a recirculation system pushes hot water through the pipes so it’s ready at the facets much faster than pulling it all the way from the water heater. This convenience adds another level of complexity to the system and complex systems have a tendency to fail in unexpected ways.
I finally made it to a corner of the internet where I found the company of a similarly frustrated person who had spent more time than me on this problem and had the charts and graphs to prove it.
He had uncovered the root cause as a one way flow valve that should have been preventing cold water from going backwards had failed. All this was solved with a $6 part. On top of that, there was a simple test case, turn on the sink down-flow from the shower and see if the shower was now hot. Words can’t describe taking a hot shower after three days of cold ones.
Find your taco trucks
Disasters bring us out of our comfort zone. Our patterns and routines can trapped us and it can take some type of upheaval to teach us something new or just put us in the same parking lot as the best tacos you’ll ever eat. I know more than I want to about plumbing because I embraced a hot water problem as a learning opportunity to build more tools in my toolbox.
I have found troubleshooting is 98% understanding and 2% actually fixing the problem. A lot of times the actual solution to something can be so simple it can make us feel dumb. The secret is, the smartest people you know are probably just very comfortable looking dumb a few times while they take those journeys. Disasters may force us to make an uncomfortable journey. If we’re really ambitious we can also seek out these adventures on our own. You just might have tacos waiting for you off the beaten path.