Things that go THRUMP in the night

We didn’t so much miss Halloween last night as ignored it. We never get more than a dozen or so kids anyway and with the kitchen and all the other Happy Crappy we’re doing, we needed supplies. So while the neighborhood children were laying a solid foundation for cavities and adult-onset diabetes, we were throwing money at Home Depot and Wal-Mart.

About 8:30 we got home and dragged our carcasses packages inside. We took another hour to unpack, check email, lock up, and so on. At 9:30, we were more than ready to go to bed. On the way into the restroom, Chelsea called out “What IS that noise?” Being in the kitchen and scurrying from dog door to back door to front door to lock up for the night, I replied “Sound? What sound?”

Sure enough, when I went into the hallway where she stood, I could hear a deep thrumming sound, as though there was a motor grinding away. There was no motor in that part of the house other than the AC (turned off).

Entering the bathroom, I placed my hand on what’s called the “wet wall”, the wall that caries all of our plumbing. It was vibrating like my dog does in a thunderstorm.

The cooler is directly above the bathroom area, but the vibrations continued even when the cooler turned off. Water pump in the cooler? Maybe.

I searched throughout the house all around that wet wall area. I found the vibrations all around it, but kept coming up empty. At one point I opened the closet were sits the water heater and grasped the intake pipe (the cool one). Sure enough the sound was muffled. It resumed in all its mysterious glory as soon as I let go of the pipe.

I went to the bathroom and ran the hot water in the tub (it’s the closest outlet to the heater). The noise reduced.

The water heater. The gas-powered tank of doom that sat in the closet like a time bomb for who-knows-how-long was building pressure.

Joy.

I only know one technical thing about water heaters: I have no business touching one. I don’t even know how to shut the fool thing off.

It was 10 minutes to 10PM, so I called my step-father Bob. Bob isn’t a plumber, but he has the advantage on me that he’s not afraid to get in too deep. He had just seen an episode of This Old House (which Bob calls Your Old House – appropriate under the circumstances), where this very issue was addressed. His advice to me was “turn the water heater off and try that”.

Uhm…Kay. How?

Ten minutes later Bob was walking in my living room to show me. While I was waiting, I ran the hot water out trying to relieve the pressure so we wouldn’t have our own miniature levee incident. I’ve been in the desert too long, wasting all that water was way too hard to do.

Bob turned off the water heater – no change.

“That sounds like a motor.” He said. I turned the cooler off – no change. Again we searched every inch of the house and that surrounding area – no motor alive or dead was in the vicinity.

“Water pump in the cooler?” I suggested.

There are two ways to test that theory, as the water pump does not have an off/on switch. I could go out and shut down the circuit breakers one by one and see if the noise stops, or climb on the roof. Shutting down the power means resetting all the clocks (even the most import one – the alarm) and then resetting all the electronic doodads and gadgets. I elected to go “upstairs”.

I don’t have a ladder that will reach the roof, so in order to do maintenance, I have to climb a tree to the top of a cinderblock fence, wrap myself in the tree branches to clear the eaves, untangle myself again to sit down on the roof (this entails leaning WAY over on the wall), sitting on the roof and scooting like a dog in reverse up the shingles until I can get my feet under me.

The cooler wasn’t making a sound. I opened it up. Silence. The pump was fine. In fact, I couldn’t hear the mystery noise at all from up there.

Getting down by reversing the process, in the dark, on Halloween night was LOADS of fun.

Again we searched. I checked the pump for the Jacuzzi bathtub – by yanking everything out of the closet and pulling open a panel screwed into the wall.

Nope.

Bob started on the kitchen and I tried the master bedroom’s closet and hallway and….

OK, if it’s a motor, then why is only the wet wall vibrating? Why is it that when I grasp the intake to the water heater the sound muffles?

Bob said “well when the whole house vibrates, grasping anything will alter the sound.”

But it was only that wall, only where the pipes were, not ….. well, then it would be coming from “upstream”…..

#PING# the little 15Watt bulb indicating my sluggish thought process lit up.

The water enters my house from a pipe that shoots straight from the ground next to the back wall. From there it splits into a “T”, one end of the split going into the house, the other hooked to the outside spigot. The spigot I use for watering. The spigot with the automatic timer attached to it. The spigot with the LEAKING automatic timer attached to it.

The valve of the timer wasn’t closing properly and that small leak was enough to start the pipes in the house shaking like a wet dog on nice carpet. I turned off the water to the spigot and from inside Chelsea yells “It stopped!”

It was another 20 minutes before we got everything put back together and the heater restarted.

Today, I have the glowing satisfaction of a mystery solved.

Or maybe it’s just the glowing somnambulism of getting to bed so late that I’m still feeling the pillow rubbing my face.

‘night.