This is my attempt to provide assistance and insight to anyone who has High Water Bill / Exterior Plumbing Problems...and Very Little or No Practical Knowledge About How These Things Work. A kind of Learn From My Mistakes thing. It is not worth reading if you do not fall into this small category of potential readers. Just sayin'. But I ran into a lot of problems along the way to this Fix It, and if I'd known some of this stuff my problems would have been fewer. Or none, depending on how you feel about Lesson Three.
If you had to pass a test in order to become a home owner, I'd still be living in an apartment. And I'd probably be a hell of a lot happier. Not only am I ill equipped for this Home Ownership job in the sense that I have virtually no practical skills which would (or even could) be apropos...but I also do not have a lot of expendable income to hire people to do the things that need to be done. So I mostly rely on luck to get me through.
It's a strategy which has worked out pretty well, for the most part. But just a little shy of two years ago, I finally noticed that I had an extraordinarily high water bill. (They had been rising for some time, but I didn't even know enough to know that they were inordinately high for awhile.) And then this ensued. Ever since then I have been extremely paranoid about my water bills. I have even, at times, thought that I could hear water leaking out of the pipes in my front yard at night. Yeah, I know. But when all you have is fear, you play that card.
Well, The Fear came home to roost last week. I got my water bill on Thursday, and it was more than double what it had been the previous month. So I sprang into action. I called HomeServe as soon as they opened the next morning...
Lesson One: Pay for the Exterior Line Service. Both the Innie and the Outtie ones. This stuff costs thousands of dollars, and even if you don't break even (which I have...and then some), it's a lot better to pay it out $20 a month than a couple of thousand in one fell swoop.
...and they said that they would take it from there. Which is one hell of a relief right there. How do you know which plumber to call, how to get the underground lines marked, etcetera etcetera etcetera? I have the answer: Get HomeServe. Then they worry about all of that. Though, as you'll see, you will need to herd a few stray sheep along the way to the finish line.
I heard back from the plumbing company HomeServe contacted just a few hours later (the good news), but they wouldn't be able to send anyone out until Monday (the bad news). Another weekend of worrying and not sleeping very much. Monday morning 9:15 two guys arrived. I was elated. They used that special little wrench-y thing to open up the water meter box, looked at the dial that was spinning around, said, "Yep, you've got a leak." Then they closed the box and prepared to leave. Ummm...what? They told me that now people had to come out to mark the underground lines. Not person, people. LG&E, AT&T, Louisville Water (aka H2&O)...maybe some other people, too, I got a little lost along the way.
The first guy showed up at 2:45pm. Not too shabby. I went out to see if I could get any inside information. I asked him, "Why don't they just have one person who marks all of this stuff?" (I mean...really. It is the 21st century, you know. You'd think everything would already have been marked and put up on the internet somewhere. In holographic form.) He said, "I'm glad that they don't. I have to ticket 6 of these jobs an hour...." He went on, but he'd lost me at "don't." I went back inside. Just as I did, another marker guy pulled up. He marked his stuff in about a minute, then stood and talked to the first guy for twenty minutes. All I could think was, "I don't think you're going to get your six tickets this hour." But apparently he wasn't too concerned about that, since he sat in his truck for another fifteen minutes before he left. Finally the last guy showed up and marked his stuff. I immediately called the plumbing company's office and told the receptionist that everything was good and asked if they would be able to come out tomorrow morning. She said that she hadn't received a report from the last guy yet, but that she would check on it and get back to me.
She didn't get back to me.
Tuesday morning 8:30am another guy showed up and started hunting around. I went out to greet him. He told me that the previous guy had been unable to locate a gas line and that he had to come out for it. That seemed strange, because this guy...who had just pulled up a minute ago...was standing over top of a gas thingie in the ground and opening it up. That was the one the other guy had missed. Hmmm. ANYway...he finished up and left. I waited, confident that now the wheels of underground water justice would turn and my plumbers would arrive to excavate.
I waited some more.
I finally decided that waiting was not a good strategy and called the office.
Lesson Two: Don't wait. Forget about feeling like you're being a pest. If you wait, someone will drop the ball. As you could infer from my anecdote about the first marker guy, the commitment level of the people who hold your water fate in their hands is not astonishly high. When a piece of the job has been finished and the next guy isn't standing there ready to go to work, call the person in charge. You don't have to "complain." Just inquire. Play dumb. Or, in my case, just allow your natural dumb to shine.
The receptionist told me that she hadn't received a report from the last guy. Sigh.
Another guy showed up an hour or two after that phone call, but I didn't have the strength to go out and talk to him...and I knew that the plumber's office was closed by then.
Wednesday morning. I called and talked to the (same) receptionist. Who was always very nice, by the way, she definitely wasn't a part of the problem. She said that she had still not received the report from the other guy. I told her that he had been and gone after I'd talked to her yesterday. She said she'd look again. She found his report. But it was too late to send the guys out because they were all booked for morning jobs...but that maybe a team could come out that afternoon. She said they would call me when they were on their way.
So I took Joe to work. I was going to do some grocery shopping before heading back, but something told me to go home right away. A minute or two after I got there, the plumbers pulled up. ESP is more efficient than texts, I guess. Or else my luck strategy was working better than I thought.
The plumber turned off the water and went to work on probing the lawn with a long metal stick. Apparently this was the leak detection equipment. For some reason I thought it would be a little more scientific...and a little less 14th century-ish. But--the good news--it worked. The bad news...the leak was underneath a tree which stood at the corner of my house. He couldn't do anything to repair the leak until the tree was gone and the stump ground down two feet.
Lesson Three: Find out where your water lines are located. If there are any trees or bushes growing anywhere near them, have them removed. It is only a matter of time before the roots put a hole through your water line. And that will cost you a lot more money than having the vegetation removed.
I was not very happy about this, as you can probably imagine. I kept thinking about the water leaking out of that pipe underground...which I now knew to be pretty close to the corner of my house, so it was (1) the money that it was costing me every minute that it continued to leak and (2) the damage that all of that water could do to the foundation of my house.
So needless to say, I got on the phone right away. My sister had just had some tree removal work done and had been really happy with the guy who did it. Not only did he do good work at a very good price, but he also knew my oldest son. So the trifecta. I called him and he said he would come out that evening to have a look and give me an estimate, and that if I was happy with that he could do the work the following morning.
I was feeling good...but then The Fear returned. What if he didn't make it out that evening? What if he couldn't get to the job right away? All my eggs were in his basket. So I went online to Angie's List and got some other company names. One of them called me shortly thereafter, and he came by an hour later. He was really nice, said that he could come out tomorrow afternoon and take the tree out and grind the stump down for $500...and when I mentioned that eventually I would like to have a big annoying bush removed from beside my front walkway, he said that he could take care of that for an additional $100. I thought of all the time that I had spent trying to keep that behemoth bush at bay...and failing--it had grown so large that I had to stand on a ladder just to try to trim the top...and it was definitely worth $100 to make it disappear. I was still waiting on the Trifecta Fellow, though, so I told Nice Guy that and asked if I could call him back later to say yeah or nay. He said sure.
An hour passed. No word from the Trifecta Fellow. It was getting dark. I texted him and asked if he was still going to be able to come out tonight. No answer. The Nice Guy called. He told me that he could get a team of guys together if they could come over at 7:30am, and that they could do the tree removal, bush removal, and grind both stumps for $540. I told him that that sounded great but that I still hadn't heard from the other guy and asked if I could get back to him within the hour.
Lesson Four: I felt like I "owed" the Trifecta Guy since I had called him first. That was a mistake. Nice Guy was offering a good deal from the start, had called and made the deal even better, and I should have gone ahead and said yes right then. Waiting could have resulted in me not being able to get the work done the next day. (Fortunately it didn't work out that way.)
He said sure. And then Trifecta Guy texted and told me that he wasn't going to be able to come out tonight, could he come in the morning for an estimate with an eye toward doing the work Saturday morning? So I told him that I was really wanting to have it done tomorrow and I'd have to go with another guy. Called Nice Guy back, got it scheduled.
Lesson Five: Always have a back up plan in place and ready to roll.
I woke up at 1:30am. I would swear that I heard water running. Managed to get myself back to sleep after an hour. Woke up at 5:30am, and that was that. So I went grocery shopping. Got back. It was still dark at 7:30. But fifteen minutes later, just as it began to lighten up a large truck pulled up in front of my house. There were three guys plus the Nice Guy, who said hi and got everybody going and then said he'd be back in an hour. And those other three guys didn't waste any time at all. The tree and the bush were gone by 8:30. The Nice Guy returned and told me that the stump grinding man would be by in an hour or two at the most, and that he would stop by later in the day to get my check.
Lesson Six: You undoubtedly know this, but I actually got burned on it before: don't pay until the work is done. And make sure that you have a written version of what the job entails. (I did that by texting Nice Guy to confirm the list of things to be done and the agreed upon price.) On the time I got burned, I paid when most of the work was done with the promise that the team would be back the next day to finish up. I never saw them again.
I really wanted to call the plumber and see if I could get scheduled for the afternoon, but Murphy's Law, you know? So I held myself in check and waited for the Stump Grinder.
But low and behold, in a mere thirty minutes a guy showed up with an awesome, 2,300 lb stump grinding robot. Yes, robot. See?
Is that some cool shit or what?
Well, I don't get out much.
ANYway, as the grinder was reducing the tree stump to mulch, I called the plumbing company back, talked to the same receptionist, and asked if there was any way that The Boys could come out this afternoon. She said she'd try...but it really just depended on when they finished up their morning jobs. And as for tomorrow...nope. It would have to go to Monday if nobody got loose today.
Fuuuuuuck.
But just as despair gained its footholds in my heart...the plumbers arrived. They quickly dug a shallow hole right beside my house...
...revealing the shitty little piece of copper that is responsible for bringing every drop of water into my house. The leak was further down the pipe, so I didn't know why they were digging here, but I soon found out.
They dug another hole right where the repair from December 2016 had been...
The little blue piece in the corner of the hole is a part of the repair section from the first leak. Here, the plumber has already cut it back to that he could get at the old copper pipe...who is Sir Not Appearing In This Film, but it is under the dirt.
And then...the work of genius begins. First, the old copper pipe near the house is cut...so that just a foot or so is left coming out of (actually going into) the house, and then new blue plastic-y (but a lot harder) pipe is attached to the old copper pipe.
And then at the other hole, the plumber attaches some grippy thing to the piece of copper pipe that's sticking out there...and he hooks the grippy thing to his digging machine with a chain, and then he backs up. It took a few tries, but eventually this is what happens:
Oh, and that leak...that very expensive leak? Here's what it looks like:
Two holes. So small that you might have trouble spotting them. So here you go:
Is that some shit or what?
So...it's over. I didn't have to pay anything for the plumbing portion of the festivities because of my HomeServe plan...and it would have cost at least $2,000 if I'd had to pay for it. Maybe even more. (I priced it last time before I knew what I was doing. In fact, I came damned close to paying for it out of pocket.) I did have to pay for the tree removal, and the high water bill...but Louisville H2&O does have a program which says it will reimburse you for 50% of the over your average monthly bill cost, so I submitted the paperwork for that right away. (You can do it online, and it only involves filling in a couple of brief things and attaching a copy of the proof that you fixed it receipt.) So I'm expecting to recoup at least a part of that expense.
So all in all, it was still a pretty big hit for a little fellow like me, but it could have but much, much worse, for sure. I was lucky to be able to get everything lined up so quickly, but persistence played a part in that, too.
The End.
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