Dave Yates: Contractor’s Corner

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I knew my day was going sideways when it was going to be necessary to change into a bathing suit and get wet in the customer’s master bath in order to find out what was causing a leak into the basement. 

As Texas settled into a deadly-serious Polar Vortex, you could predict the pattern emerging based on your own past experiences with bitter-cold sustained weather conditions: No-heat calls inundating your emergency calls; heating systems not able to keep up with demand; heating systems stressed to the breaking-point; followed by frozen water lines, water services and water mains; and then biblical flooding and damage once thawing temperatures arrived. 

If you have never been face-to-face with a run away boiler, I can assure you it makes your sphincter pucker!

I always hated the business side of being in business. After a hard day’s work, we would retire to our home office to do billing, write checks and fill in the books. 

Remember the wall-vented, gas-fired space heaters with standing pilots? 

I have far too many memories of freeze damage in "winterized" homes where the winterizing procedure consisted of shutting off the main valve, opening a basement drain in the potable water system, opening all faucets, flushing every toilet, adding automotive antifreeze to traps and toilet tanks/bowls, and turning off the heat. 

I was revisiting a boiler bid with customers for whom we've done other work in the past, and we were going over the two-year-old bid to replace their aging beast in the basement. 

Let’s be honest: More than a few customers have champagne tastes but exist on a beer budget. 

Forty-eight years ago, as a plumbing apprentice, we used ABS schedule 40 piping and fittings for DWV work. 

In 1976, while attending an American Legion Convention at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, 211 people became ill and 34 of them died from what was thought to be a previously unknown type of bacterial pneumonia.