A day defined by water leaving pluming in other-than-specified ways

vonbeck mentioned a couple days ago that the furnace in the basement which heats his floor was having some steam leaks. It's an OLD furnace and caught on fire once, but I managed to bodge it back together well enough to get another season out of it.

Just a little technology note: we have steam heat, with radiators.
( How radiators work )

So that's how a steam radiator heating system works. It's simple, it's middlin' efficient, it's pretty reliable.

But, over time, things can go wrong. Natural gas burns perfectly clean, however, dust bunnies don't. Over time, you get dust bunnies in your furnace, which burn, and cause soot, which can cause problems. And joints can loosen up, and leak steam.

The first-floor furnace was getting real close to the end of its lifespan, and when marquisedea went into the basement the other day, she saw steam venting into the basement, and it smelled damp. She called the fire department to come deal with it, which was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Speaking as a landlord: I really like it when my tenants do things which make it less likely for bad things to happen.

The fire department came, turned off that furnace, and tagged it with a "DO NOT TURN ON THIS FURNACE UNTIL IT'S SERVICED BY A LICENSED HVAC PERSON".

So, now we have to find a good HVAC person, or, far better, we need to get that sucker out, throw it away, and put a new system in. The one that they just tagged is REALLY not worth fixing.

New furnaces cost about a thousand dollars. I think we can probably deal with that, but it's not fun.

Then I started doing laundry.

And I heard spurting water after a time.

I think I figured out where THAT'S coming from, too. See, most of the time, when you hook up plumbing, you hook up your drains so that he waste water flows down. "Down" is a good way to get things to flow, because it's hard to get things to flow "up".

However, sometimes, it's unavoidable. Sometimes, the only way to fit something where you want it is to have the waste water flow "up". So they have "drain pumps". These are pumps which suck the water you need to get rid of into a bucket, and then pump the water out of the bucket UP, until you can get it to a place where the water can go DOWN.

I think the water is backing up in the drain pump. Oy.