Infrastucture

Grant.

The landlord said you can take the piping.

Buy it off the landlord. Technically it's all his copper. :v

I will buy that copper from you. I have a pool heater I want to build and don't want to pay retail.

Yeah I noticed that. I think Tyler had those taps taken apart years ago during the sink refurbishment and they were pretty rough. Either new washers and seals will fix it or the ice split the valves. The taps will need to be completely dismantled.

Hot water should be working now.

I was in and removed most of the remaining pipe we abandoned and relocated everything we pulled out into the hallway. I have also put the tiles back into the bathroom ceiling. We can replace the water damaged tiles in the hallway with spare tiles under the basement stairs.

While pulling the old cold water line out from the front of the building I found where it had started leaking and it seems the galvanized pipe had almost completely corroded itself shut AND through. I cut the pipe in half and it's sitting on the table in the lounge for people to look at.

The fittings for the mud room sink are in the orange Home Depot bucket in the lounge with all my tools. I also selected a piece of copper pipe we can reuse to plumb it back in. We need a pair of new valves in the kitchen with winter bleeds on them, that way we can drain it down when it gets cold.

At this point the space has dried out and we have water service fully restored but the kitchen, lounge, hack room, electronics room, office and the fab shop are not ready for use again. On the other hand the wood shop, clay space, classroom, design lab and craftorium are good to be used again.

Just getting things straightened out on the top floor today and will get into the basement tomorrow.

The kitchen tap on the top floor is now leaking from its joints when it gets turned on and the hot water is intermittent from that tap - not sure what else is going on with the plumbing in that sink fixture but I thought I better report the problem here. Maybe John or Grant can take a peak at it and advise?

The work being done here by some key people has been waaaay beyond the call of duty - THANK YOU.

I got some more help from Matt Greenwood. With a solid days effort we were able to finish the plumbing project. Mostly. Yesterday saw the kiln room plumbing replaced with pex. The kitchen has pex run and the excess steel piping removed from the kitchen. Pex was run to the wing.

Today we have the toilets and batthroom sinks working on both levels. The washer works on cold water.

Still to be done is the mud room sink. There is a cracked hot water valve base running to the parts washer. Repairing that will allow for hot water to also run to the washer.

The space is still in chaos. There is much cleaning and putting away of things that needs to be done. James was making serious progress on getting the laser running.

You guys are doing amazing work

I checked and while you do have automatic bleeders they didn't take the black plastic caps off the tops when they installed, so they never worked and since you are the top of the building they were completely air-bound. I'll send you a video later. The baseboards on the South wall, along the East wall and along the North wall should all now be giving off heat and you can adjust it if you need to using the black valves.

I could not get your baseboard heater in the bathroom to work. The valve is full-open and there's water in the lines but you might have either the feeder or the return plugged somewhere. I'll come back in a week to check to see if you have accumulated more air. I could hear there was more trapped in the line I couldn't immediately get out.

Also your hot and cold water is now turned back on. We have the water heaters turned down in the basement while we work on the pipes.

For the rest of the building we ended up removing the old plumbing to the kitchen and the kiln room and replacing it with PEX. We also removed a number of dead legs that were left over that we never previously removed but were now leaking or were just kinda jank. We are nearly complete running new lines to the south wing but the bathrooms are still out of service. There's at least another day of work replacing the plumbing in there. We have plenty of pipe and fittings now that I can use to repair the mud room sink.

John give me a call when you have a moment and we'll make arrangements.

I left a message on your phone.

The radiators on the top floor were not producing heat last I checked. There is a small space heater running though.

Thank you.

I will try to come down this afternoon when I get a chance.

Thanks guys.

I'll be bringing down two propane torches, lighting and another tin of plumbing flux. I'm just about to head out.

I'm going shopping for parts. If anyone has plumbing tools like pex crimpers and torches that would be great.

You will have no water service upstairs currently. Likewise unless your radiators auto-vent they will be completely air bound and we can hear it from the third floor pipes. We will need you in the building to restore water service to you because we will need to listen for leaks all the way up the building.

I have to go into town tomorrow to drop off parts for the space but I am okay with a Monday meeting at some time.

Giant thank you's to John, Nicholas, James, Grant and Brad for the major emergency efforts! Also to anyone else that has been part of addressing this issue.

I'll be around the building again Monday afternoon and ensure access to the storage in the basement.

Merry Christmas and all the best in 2023.

VW

Sounds like an incredible amount of effort, way to go guys!

For infrastructure improvements, I've got an Andrew Sheret wholesale account - if we want to get Pex and fittings I can facilitate that. I'm sure a few of us have the tools already.

Thanks John

It was great to see the makers come together including our landlord who spent the day with the guys In the cold doing what he can do. As we discussed today it would be good to do some isolation valves and some drains just incase we have any other issues. Dis we want to meet up on Monday to go over a plan for what is wanted and needed ?

Huge thank you to everyone who have been working tirelessly at the space these last few days to do damage control and stabilize the space. Thank you to John for detailing this on the forum and keeping everyone else in the loop. If there's anything that members without plumbing/electrical/general infrastructure knowledge (aka me) can do in the coming weel to lend a hand and take a load off your back let us know so others can pitch in and support you!

Amazing work John.

Since the damage is quite extensive I think we should just run purpose built new pex lines rather than trying to repair the copper lines. Starting over helps us abandon unused pipe stubs. We will need access to Vaughns' storage area on Monday and Tuesday.

Repairing equipment may be harder. The dishwasher might not have available parts. The cooler is probably pointless to repair. I suspect we will get water from the swamp cooler next.

So Monday we can make a drawing, draft a shopping list, and get things running again.

By now either you got the email, you saw the note on the door or you were part of the chaos, but the space is currently a bit of a mess.

Because we were down a boiler the building was not able to keep itself warm enough to survive -20 and below even though it has been able to do so in previous years. The reasons as to how we went into a big freeze like this was not really in our control. Reports about frozen plumbing started to come in last Monday and by Wednesday it was a fight to keep the kitchen free-flowing. By the next day we were confident the building had more or less frozen solid. If you had not already removed your resins, paints or other cold sensitive materials from the mud room consider it this point freeze damaged.

Electric heaters were brought in starting Thursday and by Friday evening we had the second boiler repaired. I've been on mop-up and watch while others helped with the initial cleanup and repairs since last night as the building thawed out. Please do not mess with the fans and dehumidifiers currently operating around the space. Even partially opened doors are like that for a reason right now.

So what do we know:

-The baseboard heater in the fab shop while it had warm water being circulated was able to freeze and split in multiple places once the building water supply was turned off. During the restart we turned the fab shop into a lake, but it mostly drained into the crawlspace where it's no issue. The baseboard heaters have now been repaired.

-The radiator in the office developed a plugged channel and while it too had circulation it also ruptured, flooding the office and the floor of the electronics room. Water was reported in the non-makerspace area downstairs. The ceiling below the office will have to come out eventually. The radiator was removed and the connections capped. unless someone wants to try repairing cast iron we'll need another long and low standing radiator.

-The utility sink in the mud room froze again. Does this every year but the valves in the kitchen don't have winter drains, so we popped the cold water faucet. I've closed it for now in the kitchen but we'll have to surgically pull the plumbing out of the wall form the kitchen side because the sink at this point is unified with the building.

-There's another leaking 1/2" galvanized steel pipe beside the valves for the hand sink. It must be a tiny leak and I'm not even sure where it goes upstairs. I've tagged it with tape and put a pan under the drip. The 12" piece of pipe will need to be replaced.

-The inlet solenoid on the dishwasher is leaking. We must of broken the housing in the freeze. I've unplugged and turned off the water to the dishwasher.

-The water line to the walk-in fridge compressor split again. We might of also blown apart the thermostat. This isn't a problem as we don't use this at all but I swear I drained that.

-The kitchen sink and the hand wash sink both survived. They are not leaking.

-The kiln room sink defrosted at about 2 this afternoon. I was waiting for it because I knew it was going to make a serious mess so I was there when it let loose. Both the hot and cold lines have ruptured in the floor access and rained down into the front entrance and hallway. I capped off the cold line down in the basement but ran out of time to cap the hot line, so the hot water is shut off at the water heaters and the thermostats are set to VACATION. It would be nice if we added a pair of valves here so we can isolate this next time.

-The bathrooms upstairs and downstairs have no water. The showers and washing machine also have no water. There are multiple breaks in the crawlspace under the building and likely in the walls of the showers. I heard that all thaw out around 12:30 this morning. The lines are closed in the boiler room and I've taken the cover off the access so I can blow air in to both dry it out and keep it from freezing until we can work on it. I have a string of utility lights we can run down the crawlspace so we can work on repairs.

The drains on the other hand have thawed out. You can pour a bucket of water into the toilet tank and you can flush, but we ask that until repairs are complete don't use the bathroom unless you can't make it to The Mustard Seed.

-The basement toilet is still frozen, but it never had a water supply anyways. Same with the sink, but the P-trap has split, so that will need to be capped or replaced. Whoever was storing boxes and supplies down in that bathroom, your stuff looks like it took a shower.

-Both lasers are down. The chiller didn't freeze but the rest of the system did and the water jackets inside the tubes ruptured. We have a spare 100W tube though.

-I never knew about this but there's a water line in the ceiling above the front entrance that looks like it split on an elbow. No idea where it goes but we might just be able to delete that line if it's remains from the old bathroom upstairs.

The building should be stabilized now. I don't expect any more pipes to thaw out and cause issues so we can still have Christmas and deal with it later once we got a game plan. In the meantime I've been mopping the floors to get the mud and ceiling dirt out and piling all the tools we have scattered about on the hack room table. Replacement ceiling tiles are stored in the basement underneath the stairs.

Likewise there is the contents of other rooms currently scattered around to dry out. Please respect it.