Just when you're feeling fairly confident that things are going well, you get blindsided by yet another old-house problem. I think our next career will be something in building maintenance. Heck, why not? That's all we do anyway, and we're getting pretty darn good at it.
On Saturday the soft ssshhhhh sound from just outside the front door was ominous. It's been really cold here, down in the teens at night, and the main for our irrigation system had split. And, you guessed it, it's directly off the main to the house, which means we had to turn off the water to the entire house to get it to stop running. Fortunately, this was discovered after breakfast and after people had checked out, so we only had a few guests out and about. It changed the plan for housekeeping quite a bit, so the laundry didn't get done and floors didn't get mopped, but nothing significant.
However, it got really interesting when Steve had to take his Sawzall and cut off the split piece in order to put a new pipe back on and reconnect it. He got an electric arc when the blade touched it. What the....? His tester showed 120 volts going through the pipe. What??? Somewhere there's possibly a connection where the live wire and the ground wire have been reversed and the electrical current is running through the plumbing! Which could result in something really bad if someone is standing in water, grabs onto a pipe and is not sufficiently grounded themselves. The good news is that this is only likely to happen down in the shop if it gets flooded. The bad news is, it would likely be one of us.
He has a theory or two about where this ground reversal may be located, one of which involves digging up some conduit (in the frozen ground) he found at the site of the irrigation system. So I guess I know what his plan for the day is. If we're lucky, that will be the problem and we can go on our merry way. If not, a day has now been blocked out (no guests), we turn off everything in the house and start hunting for the errant wiring.
Fun, huh? It just never ends.
