You ever have one of those little annoying drip, drip, drips that really isn’t a heck of a lot to be concerned with something you’ll get around to fixing one of these days kinda leaks. Well they are usually no big deal unless it’s situation over the top of your layout. Like may of you who are the builders of basement empires we encounter things the builders leave just to get in our way such is the case with my new yard section and a water line. On said line there is one of those taps installed that feeds the automatic ice maker in the frig directly above the yard. One nite last week while i was sitting here working on my computer I happened to look up and see this single drop of water on the bottom of this little valve. I was like what in the heck is that. I waited and didn’t see another drip so i proceed to investigate. I moved the extra coal train out of the way and much to my disgust I discovered a massive amount of water damage. Well not really massive but enough to really ruin my night. Evidently it had been leaking on tot he Homabed for months and with the water absorbing qualities of Homasote the water had saturated about a 36" piece of roadbed . So I had fun the next day removing the track that was secured down with latex adhesive caulking and drying out the plywood subroadbed with a heat gun. The valve has been relocated and the section of pipe that had the piecing vale has been replaced.
Now this has to be one of the weirdest things that could have happened but with my luck I should have expected it. So has anything thing strange and bizarre like this happened to any of you or am I the only one with this kinda luck?
as our house is 2 storey here no basement but area under house all the plumbing is just run under the floor. i had quite an established layout under our house and had the main water pipe in the house burst just above my layout. needless to say the whole layout was destroyed. so i feel the anguish you are experiencing.
What is even worse is to have the plumber he has to replace a length of pipe that ran in the ceiling of the basement over the railroad. It wasn’t dripping on the layout, but the pipe had to be removed which meant some plumbers helpers who had been born and raised in a barn had to trample a part of the layout to replace the part. Oh well, stuff happens.
Unfortunately, those little shut-off valves for refrigerator ice makers that just clamp over and then pierce a water pipe seem to be made to leak on purpose.
Stopping this leak could prove to be rather expensive if you have to call in a professional plumber, and then hope that he/she doesn’t damage your layout by having to stand on it to reach the water piping.
If that little valve is in the fully open position, sometimes slightly shutting it off will stop the leak.
I had a leaky dishwasher a couple years, before I started MRRing. I walk into the kitchen one day notice a little water squishing up between the Pergo. I turn off the dishwasher and I get someone out to look at it the next day. He pulls it out and I see there is more water back there that what I expected but still not a whole lot but I figure I should call my home owners insurance just to cover my rear. The send out an army of water clean up guys who proceed to rip to up my floor, cut a section of wall, remove most of my counters and cabinets to get it all. $10,000 later it is all cleaned up. It was all paid for my insurance and I even got a new heated tile floor put in the kitchen, which is what I should have had done when bought the house new.
With all the shortcuts the builder took in my house, I’m surprised something like that hasn’t happened yet (and because I said this, now it will, sure as the sun will rise). I’ve had shelves fall down, drawers fall apart, even kitchen cabinets fall off the wall.
I could go on. The only saving grace is that there aren’t a lot of utilities on the side of my basement where the layout is.
The house I live in is a pre-manufactured home. After four years of living there, (my parents bought it brand new), the hot water tank gave out and there was water everywhere. We cleaned up the water, got a new tank installed, and had the house inspected for mold. A few years later, the dish washer started leaking whenever it drained the dirty water. After getting a new one installed, the appliance guy noticed something was wrong when the new unit drained. He crawled under the house and saw that the builders of the house never hooked up the drain pipe and the water was draining into the crawl space. The appliance guy fixed that for free on the labor side. We had to make sure all of the wood around that pipe was OK. It was and we had to replace the insulation in that area.
I know of some other horror stories of people’s homes that I know, but I am not going to post them on here.