Computerjargon.com

After learning about water heaters and furnaces, this past weekend was spent learning about water piping.

I was surfing the web in my computer room, affectionately known as L1R1, when I heard a peeing sound coming from the door behind me. I turned around to discover water pouring from the ceiling onto my orange carpet. I dashed around the stream and yelling, “Stop! Stop! Stop the diswasher!!” to Courtney. A bucket contained the stream while we started troubleshooting the problem.

We started sliding the false ceiling panels around. I could we the swishing of water above my head and I deduced that I was hot on the trail of the culprit. A few tiles later we found the pipe spilling the water.

Courtney hopped on the horn to the Father-In-Law to find out what we were looking at. A 2-inch pipe coming from the kitchen area…It’s the drain pipe. The suggested solution was to tighten the pipe. The leak was coming from a joint so it made sense. We jetted to Home Depot, picked up the largest vise grips they had, and were back in minutes. In one fluid move I had the vise grips out of the plastic casing and around the pipe. As I started leaning in to the first turn I noticed a hole the width of two toothpicks right before the joint. Water was dripping from the crevasse rythmicly.

I discovered the solution the next day, epxoy. Plummer’s epxoy to be more specific. What looks like a harmless piece of silly putty, actually hardens into concrete in under twenty minutes when mixed. Not believing that I had actually solved this problem myself I watched the hole as the dishwaher ran. Every 5 minutes jumping from the couch to watch for water. To my pleasure I could find no fault with my handwork. Another home improvement well done.

“Flame sensor,” he muttered.

“What?”

“FLAME SENSOR,” he barked at me.

The service department had told me someone would be by the house in the next two hours. He showed up 15 minutes after I hung up the phone. He dodged through the side door and down into the basement. Within 2 minutes the side of our furnace was open and he was poking and prodding things with a phillips-head. He was chewing gum to pacify himself until he could get back to his smokes in the truck. His mullet was full and long. His handbar mustache neatly trimmed for the beginning of the work week.

“80 degrees to 30. Jeez..” he lamented.

“Yeah, it’s pretty unbelievable,” I said. Damn it! I was being so stereotypical Minnesotan. Nothing better to discuss than the weather.

He shot me a glare, “I was talking about me. I was in Southern Mexico last week.”

“And you came home to be greeted by freshly falling snow? That sucks,” I said, hoping to get on his good side.

“Yeah it does. I asked my girls, ‘Are you sure we need to live in Minnesota?’”

I chuckled. If this guy isn’t the same mullet having, thong wearing guy we saw on our honeymoon, he was at least a near relative.

He yanked out a 50-cent piece of wire from the furnace. It looked much like an outlet tester. Nothing more than a little plastic with a metal head.

“Flame sensor…”

“What?” I have bad hearing

“FLAME SENSOR,” he annunciated.

“Oh,” I heard him that time.

“Well, I don’t have an extra on me,” meaning in his pants pocket, “So I’m going to wipe this one off.” He took a small piece of sandpaper from his pocket and sanded the sensor a bit. “See, when this thing gets dirty, then the flame isn’t sensed. The furnace will continue to fire until a flame is sensed. If this thing doesn’t work, the furnace won’t stop firing.”

“Oh,” my first lesson in furnaces.

“You know, you can do this yourself,” he tells me.

For 75 bucks I probably will next time, I think to myself.

And just as briskly as he walked in, he was out the door. The entire transaction took until 6 1/2 minutes. I may be out 75 bucks but at least the heat is back on.