Flexible water main.
I was once told that there is such thing as, sort of, metal flexible water main pipe.
Tbhat is fairly large diamter pipe made of metal which is not as brittle as cast iron
Is there?
What do you call it?
When I google I find pex and pvc and when I add metal to the search I get corrugated. But this is plain metal pipe that will bend a little.
Ductile iron.
Where is ductile iron pipe used?
Ductile iron pipe is pipe made of ductile cast iron commonly used for potable water transmission and distribution. This type of pipe is a direct development of earlier cast iron pipe, which it has superseded.
Depends what you mean by "a little".
"Ductile iron pipe" has bee available for a half century or so. It bends a bit more than earlier cast iron, but still pretty rigid.
ahhh
Well, what I was told is that it should have been used under the road in my n'hood, and because it wssn't, when a very heavy truck goes by, it can break the pipe that is underground.
Could ductile iron pipe be what he was talking about?
Or is there something else?
We had quite a few water main breaks when I first got here. They cost about $15,000 each time. Now they are less common but probably would cost I guess 40 thousand or more. I wonder if the builder saved a few dollars by using cheaper pipe, but it costs us a lot more.
Same answer to you, Danny.
So is that what the builder should have used?
I offered a column for the n'hood newsletter, for the new editor who did a great job on her first one and is looking for more material, and my first effort is just about cute, happy things.
If they want more, the second thing on my mind is that I think the quality of the houses was high, except for 3 things, and I'm tempted to list the 3 things but I wonder if that will just cause discontent in anyone who is short of money, or mad at their house for some other reason.
I haven't seen anything but plastic used for 40 years. It is so common that they had to change the electrical code since you can't count on a metal water pipe for your grounding electrode. I have a roll of it in my shed (3/4" PEX)
When we hooked up to city water in 2001, we used copper. I don't know what the city main is.
Cindy Hamilton
On Fri, 17 Sep 2021 23:22:50 -0400, micky posted for all of us to digest...
Could it be metal electrical conduit? Some sizes can be bent. What size is it?
A lot of that is regional preference and the union likes metal plumbing because it requires more skill and more labor. That is what they sell. It is the same with electrical. Chicago and New York just started relaxing the requirements for all metal wiring methods recently. In Chicago it was all 'wire in pipe", even 1&2 family residential. New York would allow metal flex. (Type AC or MC cable, sometimes erroneously called BX, a different, obsolete, product).
Down here metal plumbing had a bad reputation because the water eats in although it also gets blamed on stray voltage problems. Plastic is king. OTOH they were using plastic pipe underground for natural gas in the early 70s in Maryland. My house there had a plastic gas service. I do think the water pipe was copper tho. I never dug that up but we did hit a gas line. ;-)
No union was involved. The guy who did the trenching installed the exterior piping; we installed the interior. The plumbing inspector made sure everybody did their jobs correctly. And, of course, we watched the excavation contractor like a hawk.
There was a tiff between the county and the township over the directional drilling under the road to reach the water main on the other side. We were probably the best-inspected house on the block.
Cindy Hamilton
The unions have a lot of input to the code. If you look at the NFPA 70 (NEC) code ROP you see lots of input from the IBEW. The UA(PP) has the same level of input to the NPC. They have more input to the local amendments. A county commissioner certainly doesn't want a union phone bank campaigning against them in a union dominated state..
On Sat, 18 Sep 2021 19:56:31 -0400, snipped-for-privacy@aol.com posted for all of us to digest...
We had a contractor build a trash fire over an improperly buried plastic gas pipe on new construction. The only problem that it was summer. Couldn't do a weenie roast. Watching vinyl siding melt was somewhat amusing but we had seen that before. Took awhile for the gas co to shut the main down.
Not a gas line story, but a gas truck story. I happened to be visiting a friend in Rochester NY when a gas truck carrying 12,500 gallons of gasoline overturned and exploded.
This happened right next to the Kodak plant back in 2003. Kodak owned the houses on one side of the street (rentals) and decided to level them instead of rebuilding. The private homes on the opposite side of the road were damaged but it was mostly melted siding and heat damage as opposed to the destruction on the Kodak owned side.
The road carried thousands of Kodak workers, 3 shifts a day, to and from the plant. Traffic on the 3 lane roadway had to be diverted onto residential streets for over a week. The backups stretched for miles in every direction.
This happened on a road that is 7 lanes wide with 2 medians, so you can imagine how hot the fire must have been to have damaged houses on both sides.
On Mon, 20 Sep 2021 14:08:13 -0700 (PDT), Marilyn Manson posted for all of us to digest...
Now that would be a hazmat horror. The AFFF they used back then is a known carcinogen and would have to be a superfund site.
Probably no worse than what Kodak was dumping into the ground just a few blocks away.
In fact, Kodak had a waste treatment plant up the river about a mile from where the accident happened.
From the fireman's forum:
"An unknown quantity of fuel that didn't catch fire spilled into sewers, some of which empty into the nearby Genesee River."
Gasoline and Kodak waste. Now that makes for some good fishing.
The back hoe driver knew what to do. He folded the plastic pipe over like you shut down a garden hose and I taped it up until WGL showed up. They spliced the pipe under pressure and buried it again a little deeper. At first they acted like they were going to charge me until my mason pointed out the gas line was not 24" down which was code. They muttered amongst themselves and just drove away. I never heard about it again. The "dig" people did not mark it. They only marked the line in the right of way.
Shrug. I wouldn't be surprised if plastic is allowed in Michigan. We didn't even consider it. Since we were essentially the contractor on the job, we specified copper and that's what we got.
Cindy Hamilton
If you are wealthy you can pay for it with the Trump tax break
For us it was $11,000 for the bribes to the local government, plus almost that much to have the work done, 20 years ago. We were strongly motivated to get rid of our well and septic.
Cindy Hamilton
They don't give you a choice in most places. They simply put the water and sewer in the right of way and charge you for it. Then they condemn your well and septic so you have to hook up. When they proposed it here the price was going to be $40,000 or so for the front foot benefit plus whatever your plumber charged to hook it up. My neighborhood got a reprieve because the FugU (Florida Gulfcoast University) study said we were not the major source of nutrient pollution in the river. We also have public roads here so they own the road they will be tearing up. They pushed us off somewhere between 10 years to forever. The people who were blamed are poor (2 trailer parks and a trailer development of large individual lots). They also have private roads. The trailers with the lot typically sell for ~$80k, so a $50k assessment will be almost as much as the home is worth. Conspiracy people here think it is the yuppie way of getting rid of the "riff raff" and they were here decades before anyone in the village leadership left their home up north.
Most places. When they started building subdivisions on some of the empty cornfields on my road, the residents didn't like the idea at all. I think there may have been a lawsuit; this happened just before I bought my house.
The builder offered to run the water and sewer all down the road and pay the bribes to the township if the residents would just bow to the inevitable. The residents said "jam it", but the subdivision went in anyway. The builder ran the water and sewer up to the edge of their property, which is across the street, but a few feet inside my property line (if you extended an imaginary line across the street).
I hooked up because my well was sulfurous, the leach field was old and badly engineered, and the previous owner could not find a new place that would pass a perc test.
My next-door neighbor hooked up because his well had some contamination from an old heating oil tank. You'd think that would be moving throughout the aquifer, but perhaps so slowly that "they" will wait until people's water starts smelling and tasting like diesel.
I think all of the other pre-existing houses are still on well and septic.
Cindy Hamilton
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