Some like it hot
I have a tale about home plumbing that weaves through several weeks of our lives and touches on humanity as well as home improvement. It will be long, so manage your fluid intake for the journey.
On August 21st, nearly a month ago, Shrop got in the shower while I was getting dressed in the bedroom. I heard a crash and presumed the shower caddy had come off the wall. I peeked into the bathroom and asked if everything was okay, and Shrop said, "Yes."
While I was starting breakfast, Shrop called down the stairs to ask for a pair of pliers. That was an odd request, but I've learned to get the pliers first and ask questions later. Upon delivering the tool to naked Shrop, I discovered that it wasn't the shower caddy that fell but Shrop himself that fell.
Shrop falling was unfathomable. Shrop never falls. And if he fell, he would catch himself or pop back up. Falling in the shower? No. I thought we had another 40 years before that was a possibility. But as Shrop says, even monkeys occasionally fall out of trees. Shrop was standing on one foot in the shower, washing the other with soap, when he lost his balance. Putting a soapy foot down onto shampoo remnants meant he went down hard.
While falling, Shrop ripped the shower handle off the wall, twisted the tub faucet, and bent the drain plug with his body when he landed. It was epic. Shrop used pliers to turn off the water and mentioned we would need to get someone to fix the shower. I scoffed and said I would fix it. He nodded and went on with his day, slightly bruised but confident in the capability of his life partner.
We are lucky to have a plumbing supply store in our neighborhood next to the local bar, sub shop, and 7-Eleven. A very knowledgeable and reasonable man also runs this plumbing store. I took the pieces that had ripped off the shower to him in a ziplock bag. He told me I needed a new cartridge, turned around behind him, and produced the exact part I needed for $24. Great. This should be easy.
Then I realized that the shower, like most showers, doesn't have a cut-off valve, so to replace the cartridge, I had to cut off the water at the street. Do you know how to cut the water off to your home at the street? Say if you were less lucky than we were and water sprayed all over your bathroom. Do you even have a water cut-off tool, bruh?
I was proud of myself that I owned two water cut-off tools. I think I brought one from our previous home and the other conveyed with the house. When I went to the closet where they lived, the newer one was nowhere to be found. How do you lose a water cut-off tool? No worries, I could use the one that came with the house.
The one that came with the house doesn't fit the valve at the street. The one I own is cast iron and resembles a medieval war hammer more than a plumbing tool. I can't find a picture of anything like it on the internet anywhere. The plumbing store owner doesn't know what it is. Dad doesn't know what it is. It's possible that back in 1947, when this house was built, the valves were a different size, but we'll never know. So I didn't actually own a water cut-off tool, let alone two. I just had a giant hunk of cast iron for home defense.
No problem. The plumbing store has water cut-off tools and they know where they are. I went back to see my plumber guy and picked that up. We were back in business.
I learned that while the internet says you only need to turn the valve a half turn (and I swear that's how it was at some other house I've lived in), you have to turn it 180 degrees at this house. Otherwise, you just create low water pressure. I sorted that out and installed the new $24 cartridge. It didn't look the same as the previous one (what was left of it), but it fit in the hole and water wasn't spraying at me, so I called it a win.
The only problem was that if you turned on the water to shower, the cartridge leaked. If you took a short shower, you might not notice the drips because they were inside the walls. But if Shrop took a "long shower" by his standards, it rained in the kitchen all morning. That was August 28th when I discovered that.
I went back to my plumbing guy. He didn't have another cartridge in stock and said it would be "next week" before he could get one. That's when I discovered that his shop only carried the OEM version and I could get the authentic Peerless brand from Amazon for $47. Sold. I didn't even return the other cartridge to my plumbing guy. He gave me $24 worth of help over the week.
Amazon said the new cartridge would arrive between 4 and 8 AM the following day. I was stunned that was even an option, but my phone buzzed at 4:16 AM, telling me my package was delivered. It took me a few days to get the time and energy to replace the cartridge. In the meantime, we had towels stuffed in the wall to absorb the slow leak.
On August 31st, I replaced the cartridge. No leaks. I felt like a winner. It had been ten days and I was ready to call this problem solved.
Except the shower was lukewarm. I knew an anti-scald device was in there, but it shouldn't have made it that tepid. After some noodling around online, I realized there was an adjustment "ring" you could turn to set the maximum temperature for the shower. Okay, I turned it around to as hot as possible, and my instant read thermometer only read 102 degrees. I don't know about you, but that's not cozy when it's spitting out of a shower. I knew that "new" shower valves had features to save us from burning ourselves. Shrop said we should disable the anti-scald device, but I warned him about others who have been burned in showers and wasn't comfortable doing that. But I was still pissed the shower wasn't hot enough for me. The other two showers with handles from the 80s worked great, but I couldn't have a hot shower in my own damn bathroom. In desperation, I turned up the water heater "a smidge."
And then I almost burned my hands at every sink in the house. This wasn't working.
I don't just like hot showers for the comfort of them. I need that high heat to loosen my muscles.
On Monday, I went to pick up Ian from school and brought the dogs with me. Cash failed to hop in the way back and tumbled all over the driveway. To keep him from running off in a panic, I grabbed him and put him in the car "real quick." When I did that, something in my left rhomboid turned into a rock, and my back was all messed up. Great. This wasn't my first rodeo with muscle tightness.
I got home and coached Shrop through using the cups on my back. That helped some. But that same Monday, I realized I had picked up a cold from someone at the office last week. So I was coughing with a tight muscle in my back. Tuesday morning, I woke up with my face itching from an allergic reaction to something completely unknown. My shower was only lukewarm.
I went to bed last night with Sudafed, Mucinex DM, Benadryl, and Tylenol on board to become unconscious. None of them worked. All night, I lay in bed coughing, scratching my face, and trying to find a way to lie in the bed and not hurt. At 4 AM, I gave up and decided to take a shower. It was the worst shower I've ever had in this home.
I was determined to figure out how to get past the anti-scald device without actually risking our safety and violating my homeowner insurance policy. But I was too sick to mess with the stupid tub, and it didn't seem prudent to start at 4 AM.
This evening, I was back in the game. I brought all my tools upstairs and was going to investigate the shower valve. Max temp was 106 F. If I took the temperature regulator ring off, it went all over the place, losing pressure and ending at zero water flow on the other side. That's weird. I returned to my official max temp and started backing off that position to see when it got cold.
People. It got hotter. According to the instant-read thermometer, the maximum temperature my shower could produce was 136 F. It may have been even hotter, but that was enough to tell me something was wrong.
And that's when I realized I had installed the new official name-brand Peerless shower cartridge upside down. I didn't even think that was possible without it leaking. I guess that's the quality of name-brand parts if you can use them wrong and still not spray water all over the bathroom. You might melt your skin off, though, trying to get cold water.
I went back out to my old friend, the water valve at the street. I flipped the cartridge around and am pleased to say it works as expected. I also turned the water heater back down to something much more reasonable.
It has taken me 30 days to fix the shower. And that's with help! I talked to my neighbor, the contractor. I talked to my dad. I talked to the plumbing store guy. I used YouTube. As my old boss Harry would say, "What do stupid people do?"
I could have hired someone to do it. I've hired plumbers for almost this exact job before when the previous cartridge went bad and I couldn't deal with it. But I now have a water cut-off tool that works and know exactly where it is. I can tell you the water temperatures of all the showers in our house. I got comfortable messing with the water heater. I did clever things like closing the tub drain and laying a towel down so I didn't lose critical tiny parts down the pipes. I am very clear how tightly I need to tighten every screw in the shower assembly. I've wandered all over home improvement websites comparing shower kits. And I fixed the shower all by myself.
You can't know everything. And to understand how tight is tight enough, you have to break a few bolts sometimes. Thankfully, all my mistakes were easily managed. And I have earned my hot shower tonight.
Also, water cut-off tools are only $20 and could save your house thousands of dollars in water damage if something goes wrong. Just sayin'.
