Yuck! Faucet has been leaking for awhile!

After working through the aforementioned issues in the previous posts we happened upon some water in the middle of the basement.  Jen then noticed that it was coming from the floor above at the kitchen sink.

Since there was a plethora for "stuff" in the cabinet we hadn't noticed a problem until this water in the basement, but when we removed everything we could see that we had quite the mess under the sink.  It appears that the faucet has been leaking for quite awhile, the bottom of the shelf was mushy and black.

So it was time to replace the faucet.  Unfortunatly, the nuts had rusted and were difficult to remove.  Basically I ended up breaking them.  It was not a fun task under the sink with a mucky floor.  Eventually got it off though.

Not sure what all this is, probably minerals from the water...  Not a good look in any case...

The old shut off values wouldn't turn anymore, so I cut them off and soldered on new one.  I have to make sure that the pipes are still properly positioned so that they drain in the winter.  These pipes will move up and down now.

Once the old faucet was off and the new turn off values installed the faucet installed easily and Nick did most of the work.  It is nice to be able to hand off projects to other people.  I am hoping that the new faucet will drain properly, so we might be getting a new one.  The guy at Menards said this is their busiest time of the year!

 

New Life for the Water Heater

When we came up earlier this year we had to hot water, so we had to boil water on the stove to do dishes.  Not ideal!  I was thinking I was going to have to put in a new water heater, but I stopped by Appliance Depot and he recommended that I just check out the connections with a multimeter first.

Once I started doing a little reading I realized it might not be so bad.  The first thing I measured was the voltage at the heating element.  That is the bottom part with 2 wires going to it.  It measured 240V, so I knew the breaker was fine.

Then I shut off the breaker and did a continuity check, which resulted in no continuity.  I checked the bottom element as well and there was continuity there.  So I determined that the heating element needed to be replaced.

I could buy 1 heating element for $20 or a pack with 2 plus the thermostat for $25.  So I went with the later.

They normally have a 1.5 inch water heater heating element wrench that you can buy for $7, however they were out of them at the time.  So I went with $65 dollars worth of a socket and breaker bar.  I don't feel too bad about returning them after I used them, and I will pick up the $7 wrench when they are back in stock as it seems like something useful to have around with my spare heating element.
 

Here you can see the old heating element.  Not sure what happened to it, but it no longer has continuity.  Also interesting that it was a lot shorted then the new ones.  Same wattage though, which appears to be the important part.

Overall a simple fix and a big relief.  I wonder if I need to check the sacrificial rod in the water heater and if that could have caused the issue with the heating element.  I will have to read into that.

New Bunk Bed

We had ordered a bunkbed for the back bedroom at the cabin just about exactly a year ago and it finally came in.  I had hoped to use it in the winter when we don't open up the Eagle Nest.  But we didn't make it up this winter, so it wasn't a big lose.

Jen and Maddie worked on this project and did it almost entirely on their own.  I only helped with lifting the twin bed over the full bed.  They did a great job and it was comfortable to sleep on, and will provide for an extra bed in the future!

 

Toilet Trouble

We went up to the cabin for the second time this year so we had an idea of some of the issue we were looking forward to.  You can see the toilet fill mechanism cracked, so we had to manually control the shutoff value to fill the tank.

Fortunately, the fix was an $8 part from Menards.  It was a simple fix and Nick handled this one all by himself while I was working on other issues!