Eek!  A Leak!  And Other Alarming Plumbing Issues

Water in Pipes, Crud in Drains, and the Dreaded Leak

By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

 It’s never a good thing when I hear that certain pitch in my wife’s voice that signals the alarm of impending disaster with a household emergency. At such times, I brace myself for the worst and try to maintain a calm demeanor for her sake.  After all, I’m the guy, right?

Early one morning last week, I was enjoying my simple but luxurious ritual of a long hot shower when I heard the alarm sound.  In a few seconds the bathroom door burst open and my wife blurted out, “Water is pouring through the ceiling downstairs!” Oh no.

I turned off the water and started kicking myself mentally for not heeding the warning signs of a plumbing problem. For a couple of weeks, when I showered, an inch or so of water would collect in the tub and would take its time draining out. I suspected that the drain was clogged by the physical evidence of my receding hairline.

But I procrastinated with trying my home remedy for unclogging drains. (Recipe: 1/2 cup baking soda, followed by ½ cup vinegar; let sit for three hours.).

Downstairs, I found that the leaking had stopped and obviously was caused only when the shower upstairs was running, but who could know the reason for that?  I called my friend Joe Pascarelli who is a house painter but seems to know everybody who is available for emergency situations in the home. He referred me to Mark Merone of Merone Plumbing, Heating & Cooling.

Within hours Mark was in my house with his partner, son Jason, to assess the problem. By testing, they found that the “el” valve to the pipe for the shower head had cracked from wear (“unless you’ve been doing chin-ups on that pipe,” Mark joked) and needed to be replaced. And yes, the other problem was that the drain in the tub was so badly clogged with hair and who knows what else, because the protective screen on the drain had fallen away years ago, that we decided to replace the pipe with PVC (polyvinyl choride).

In the past 30 years, PVC has been used for waste but not for delivering hot and cold water into the home. For the latter, the relatively new PEX (cross-linked polyethylene) serves as a substitute for copper, is very flexible, not requiring soldering, bends around just about anything “and is much cheaper than copper,” Jason said. 

While the Merone father-and-son team was with me, I learned a thing or two about leak emergencies and what plumbing issues prospective homeowners should be aware of when purchasing a home.

“The main job of the plumber is to bring potable water into the house and to make sure that it doesn’t cross connections between the waste and the domestic water,” Mark said. “People are just not aware of that as long as water is running out of the faucet and the toilet is flushing, but if that water interchanges, it can make people very sick and they can die from it. That was the cause of cholera.”  Wow

With such a dire warning, I can understand why the Department of Health requires a certain distance, 100 feet in this area, between wells and septics.  The same thing can happen indoors under the wrong conditions, I learned, such as having a defective backflow preventer on the boiler.

But the plumbing problem that causes the most panic among homeowners is a leak they can’t stop. “That would show that it involves a pipe delivering domestic water to the house which is under 50 to 70 pounds pressure per square inch,” Mark said.  “In that case, the appropriate valve that delivers water to the fixture would have to be turned off.”

“There are certain plumbing issues that some buyers and their realtors should be aware of when they consider a home for sale,” Mark said.  “You need to pay attention to the quality of materials that bring water into the house from the street or well and take it away to the septic or sewer, and whether those materials are up to code.”  He said that plumbers normally don’t have a lot of problems with the fixtures themselves, such as toilets, kitchen sinks and bathtubs, but they do have problems with the pipes that deliver and drain the water.   

“Besides the quality of the piping, a homebuyer should want to know the condition of the hot water tank and boiler that both will need attention on a continuing basis, and the kind of heating system the house has,” Mark said. “The engineer who does the inspection will know good piping practices and, if they are below code, he will suggest certain changes, such as eventually substituting galvanized piping with copper or PVC. The more up to code the piping is, the fewer plumbing problems the homebuyer will have in the future.”

Having Mark and Jason Merone visit me was like taking a crash course in plumbing with various issues that could fill several columns. I guess that kind of information exchange is something I like about a family business where the owners are actually the ones who do the work and get to know their clients personally.

The Merones’ website is:  www.meroneplumbing.com or call directly at 914-528-8534.

Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (www.PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com). For questions or comments about the housing market, or selling or buying a home, he can be reached directly at 914-522-2076.

Winter Garden: Mind, Body and a Pile of Wood Chips

By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

My wife loves to tell people that all I need to be happy is a big pile of wood chips.  It’s true.  And what makes me really happy, besides all the benefits wood chips bring to the garden before it takes its long winter nap, is the built-in physical fitness program it guarantees doing something useful, rather than 30 minutes of monotony on the NordicTrack.

As I tackle a truckload of chips, I am practicing both aerobic and anaerobic exercise. While the activity is not calculated on my diet/exercise iPhone app, I figure that it’s at least as demanding as carrying wood or shoveling snow, which would burn about 350 calories for 30 minutes activity. But, I frequently last for a full hour of steady work until I’m sweating and feeling the burn. 

And, it’s a total body workout. There’s stretching when spearing my pitchfork into the pile, bending my knees to take the pressure of the weight off my back, lifting with my arms to transfer the chips to my wheelbarrow, heavy duty weight pushing when I wend my way to the spot where the chips are deposited, and more stretching and pulling as I adjust the surface of the chips with a rake at their final destination.

What’s great about this exercise plan is that there are no club fees involved.  The chips are free, either from your municipality’s environmental or re-cycling department or from a tree service provider with whom you’re friendly. 

Chips should be dumped where it won’t be an eyesore to your neighbors. For many years I have had them dropped between the side of my garage and a tall stockade fence at my property line, but I still try to spread them as quickly as I can.

Once delivered, some people get alarmed when the chips start to smoke a bit from the heat generated by decomposition, but they will never get hot enough for combustion.  Another fear is that a layer of chips depletes the soil below of nitrogen, but that applies only to the uppermost layer which actually helps retard weed growth, and it’s not enough to harm plantings it surrounds. 

Through the years, I have found a number of uses for chips, but primarily they are for creating an insulating layer of natural material from three to six inches deep around ornamental trees and, with less thickness, where I do my summer annual plantings and over my perennials. I should note that one year, I was too generous with the chips and my perennials such as black-eyed Susans couldn’t make it through the thick layer to bloom for a full summer, but then came back the next summer when I moderated the thickness. 

My hosta and daylilies can leave rather ugly remains when they die down.  I cut those to the ground, cover the clipped leaves and stems with chips, and smooth out the surface with a metal rake, which I always use rather than plastic, because of its greater flexibility.     

Besides the joy that a good pile of wood chips can provide for mind and body, there are so many aesthetic and practical benefits to the garden in that mulching with the material:

• Ultimately saves labor in terms of far less weeding and less time watering;
• Is safer in that there is less need for chemical weed killers or herbicides;
• Stimulates growth in that mulched trees grow faster;
• Reduces soil compaction;
• Nourishes the soil by adding nutrients through decomposition;  and
• Increases earthworm population which allows for better aeration.

And simply in terms of aesthetics, the annual use of chips has helped me to sculpt my planting gardens at a higher level, and the color of the chips blends more naturally into the informal garden.

My mind and body feel in full harmony with my garden’s good looks by the time frost sets in. Then, I return to my NordicTrack until spring beckons me to my spring planting schedule, which really is my outside workout.

 Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (www.PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com). For questions or comments about the housing market, or selling or buying a home, he can be reached directly at 914-522-2076.

Fireman Joe Talks with Kids (and Us) about Fire Safety at Home

By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

When my daughter was a young child, I’m not so sure that I had planned a conscious fire safety program for our home, and I am now appalled by the thought. But, who knows? Maybe she knew more than I did about fire safety in the home if there was someone like “Fireman Joe” Pascarelli around to educate children in her school.

I had known Joe for a while, not as an educator but as a great house painter. He and his crew are very conscientious about their work, to the point of re-making a bed after moving it in and out of a bedroom when painting for one of my senior clients.

Only recently did I learn that Joe’s past includes having been a fireman in Mt. Vernon. He is now retired, but not before having had a traumatic experience that pointed him in the direction of educating children about fire safety. 

“I responded to a fire where a mother was in front of the home screaming that her child was still inside. She pleaded with me to save her baby, but sadly, I was there too late.”  That heart wrenching event was responsible for Joe having to “talk to somebody” for a while. “I decided to deal with it by reaching out to as many children as I could to tell them about how to save themselves and other family members if a fire breaks out in their homes.”

For more than 20 years, Joe has taken his “Fireman Joe” persona in full fireman gear to several elementary schools in the region. “Children should know what a fireman looks like on the job in their helmet and air mask so they won’t be afraid if one ever has to come to save them.”

In a large auditorium at the Van Cortlandtville Elementary School in Cortlandt, filled with first and second  graders, Joe began his presentation with the sound of a smoke alarm saying, “This sound can save lives.” He followed with a number of questions, the answers of which many second graders remembered from last year’s presentation.

They are reminded by Joe of what to do if they hear the smoke alarm in real life:  To get out of the house fast; to never hide from a fire under a bed or in a closet; and never stop to get pets or toys. In advance, they plan with their families a fire escape plan with two ways out of every room, usually a door and a window.  Also, they make sure that their bedroom door is closed at night when they are tucked in.

If there is smoke in the home, they are taught to crawl low under it, as Joe demonstrates in full gear. He also teaches them to “stop, drop and roll” if their clothes catch on fire, and to cover their faces with their hands for protection.

For adults, besides having smoke alarms on each floor and preferably one in each bedroom,fire safety tips for homes are provided by the Home Safety Council.

Top tips include: When cooking, always stay in the kitchen, and anything that can burn should be kept three feet from the range top; in providing heat, space heaters should be kept at least three feet away from anything that would burn and should be turned off when leaving the room; gasoline should not be kept in the home because its vapors can explode with a tiny spark but,  if it must be kept, a special safety container should be used and preferably kept in an outside shed. 

Also the Council suggests that we all learn how and when to use a fire extinguisher.  My own suggestion for those of us who sleep on the second floor of our homes:  invest in emergency escape ladders which can be found at:    www.safehomeproducts.com.

The U. S. Consumer Department Safety Commission, whose job it is to research and investigate the causes and prevention of product-related deaths and administers fire safety laws, reports that the United States has one of the highest fire death and injury rates in the world, with more than 4,000 people dying each year in home fires. 

Whether for adults or children, the main ingredient of fire safety is education. “I’ve been talking to kids in school for a long time now,” Joe Pascarelli said, “and I know that one of my kids was responsible for saving his family from a house fire because of what he learned from me.”

Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (www.PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com). For questions or comments about the housing market, or selling or buying a home, he can be reached directly at 914-522-2076.

Living in a Home without Power: Tips and Reflections

 By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

On the first very cold night without electrical power during the recent storm with no name, I recalled a distant memory of my first experience camping out as a Boy Scout, wrapping myself in an inadequate sleeping bag inside my pup tent and fearing that I would surely freeze to death before morning. The memory is so vivid that I can still smell the waterproofing from the tent and the smoky air from the campsite’s extinguished fire.

In earlier episodes of occasionally losing power in our 18^th century home, my wife and I romanticized the events, suggesting that we enjoy the evening living as Dr. Ebenezer and Hannah White, the owners nearly 250 years ago. The weather must have been more temperate than it was last week and the length of time without power must have been very brief.    

Or, maybe it’s that we’re older now, but this time around, romance was supplanted by the survival instinct.

Before climbing into bed, my wife and I dressed in full sweats, with heavy socks on our feet. Somewhere I had read that most body heat escapes through the head, so I retrieved two woolen ski caps from the hall closet, put one on and gave the other to my wife, reminding her that Ebenezer and Hannah would have worn nightcaps to bed. When we were in full freezing night regalia, all in unmatched colors, and our caps with the pointy end sticking straight up, we looked much like gnome statues one would find on a front lawn.  One look at each other, and we both burst into laughter.

I suspect that in the 18^th century, there were not many children conceived on very cold nights. Who would ever find one’s partner recognizable enough or accessible enough in such a get-up to venture a romantic interlude? 

By the second day, as we settled into the acceptance of having no place to go or anything to do, we found that there were unexpected positive sides of a day at home without technology. I was not aware of it until it was gone, but we must have our television on all the time. Without it, our home was uncharacteristically quiet as a mouse, affording us time for thought and reflection.

In flickering candlelight, my wife and I learned a few things about each other that we hadn’t shared before, and we’ve lived together for more than two thirds of our lives so far. I also found time to read something other than newspapers during the day, and instead of watching Netflix, I listened to classical music for the first time in a while on my iPod until the battery ran out.

Besides the highly personalized moments at home, there are more sweeping effects of a storm, like having a strong sense of community with the other 2 million or more people left powerless. And, when our real estate office electricity came on, the agents gathered there to share who was still without power and who needed to take a shower at another’s home.

It’s at times like these that I also remember the motto of the Boy Scouts, “Be Prepared.” With the increased frequently of bad storms, I think that our little family is better prepared now than when weather seemed generally more moderate. While I don’t have the inclination to rough it up to the extent of some homeowners like the single mom I admire for gathering her own wood to keep warm when the heater goes out, I do now have a generator to guard against my sump pump failing, and I do take the precaution to keep it outside, rather than in the basement or garage, to avoid buildup of carbon monoxide.

We also remembered to turn off all our appliances. (One story circulating from this storm was that one homeowner was using her hair dryer when the electricity went off and when it returned, she was out, and the hair dryer started a fire).

Other tips we applied: We let a huge pile of ice cubes remain in our freezer which helped prolong the usability of our frozen foods and we made sure that we had a hand-operated can opener to use the canned foods we had stockpiled and a good supply of batteries for our flashlights. Also, on the way home when the snow started to fall, I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank. That came in handy for the next three days as I spent time re-juicing my cell phone and enjoying warmth with the motor running.

Other revelations: By the third morning of not shaving, I caught a glimpse in the mirror of how badly I look in the new stubby style some younger men now sport.  Also, I found that I actually prefer my home at a lower temperature on a regular basis.

I’m embarrassed to share this as the Home Guru, but even though we have a gas stove, I was not certain we could operate it without the electricity for the pilot light. When I posed the question, my wife assured me, “Honey, just turn on the gas and light a match.” Too bad I didn’t know her when I was in the Boy Scouts.

Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (www.PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com). For questions or comments about the housing market, or selling or buying a home, he can be reached directly at 914-522-2076.