Freezing water main line

Froze a water main line live to replace water main shut off in meter pit with a new meter bar. Fun stuff. What's everyone working on at work today ? Unless its top secret haha

 

Opposite of you lol cleaning up floods

 

Those machines are awesome! As long as there is no flow in the line they kick ass! The first time I used one I was adding shut off/isolation valves in the drop ceiling of a hospital for every mop sink. Some of them were 2 inch lines. It was sketchy with the entire hospital live while I was soldering in ball valves. We had to do this so that we could change out all that mop sink faucets two ones with vacuum breakers.

 

O man. And I thought this was bad lol.

 

Working on a 2 inch water service today. It was old galvanized so we brought it in fresh with some type L.
The second tee is going to be an air chamber for hammer. The old-school plumbers like to put those in. They do work!

 

Your into the real deal. That's some hard work.

 

Luckily there is like three or four of us working on this at once. It takes a lot of load off our shoulders. Sometimes I’m cutting pipes sometimes I’m putting fittings together and frying them up. To be honest this is much easier than when I did residential and commercial service and repair. Now that I’m working for a school district we don’t have to worry about paying all the guys so that you still make money. We all just help each other knock it out.

When you’re out running calls you were pretty much on your own and under strict time constraints. Had to keep every little thing on the truck. Since I’m in a small school district we just shoot over to the supply house anytime we need anything extra. No more big payouts but the checks are always consistent!

 

I'm pretty much playing catch up at the office today but next spare weekend I get I'm swapping everything on my 1" service and correcting the galvy tee some jackass installed.

I'm strongly considering tearing the bush out and relocating it if possible, I can do without a carelessly planted bush.

Ball valve, pressure regulator, 3/4" hose valve and reconnect that sprinkler valve. Pretty standard shit.

 

Need a quote for my house Sir, come by

 

I built this on Saturday. I’m not much of a Carpenter but I can get it done. I tend to choose the rustic look so my fuck ups look like I meant it LOL

 

I’ll be right over!

 

That is real nice!

 

Soil "stack" for an old old old school wall mounter shitter???

 

Fixing a service line with a gas line over our head. (this is one of my workers)

 

Old galvanized pipe sucks when it gets like this on the inside. Lol

 

I hate galvanized pipe with a passion!

 

Yep that’s how most of our toilets are in the district. Usually there is a row of at least three. This one’s in the café

 

I like the use of Button Board, too ~ the predecessor to modern Drywall . . .

 

Storm drain issues! This is what happens when it doesn’t get maintenance for at least 60 years. This first photo was basically the end of the roots. The next photos are the roots heading in the other direction underneath the sidewalk. It also grew up into the branch lines for the roof drains. We put cleanouts every 50 feet or so and replaced one of the laterals and installed cleanouts on the others. We got these roots out by opening up the problem area and breaking the clay out. Then wrapping a chain around the roots and yanking them out with the backhoe. Yesterday one of the guys got the sewer machine stuck. I showed them how to get it out with the jetter LOL. The 6 inch line had roots the size of two of my thumbs and fine fibers throughout. Grew all the way into the 4 inch under the building.
Wish I would’ve taken more pictures of the rest of the problems. The operator of the backhoe refused to get his ass out of the seat (thinking he’s the boss), broke so many other things throughout this process. I told him where the waterlines were as we found them and fixed them down the run. And he’d hit them again in the new spot! This guy was really pissing me off LOL as soon as he would take a break I would hop in and get stuff done! (Not the dude behind me in the pics). I think he figured that since this was his site that he didn’t have to do any physical labor. We were all pissed off at him. I had to fix the same waterlines three times and re-splice (solder) all the irrigation wires as well. Hopefully we’ll get this all buttoned up on Monday.

 

You guys should get a bonus!! That’s a lot of work!!

 

I feel the same way! This time last year I redid one of the JV baseball fields. During the construction of our aquatic center the contractor destroyed it and our director let them walk because we were supposed to get a new field. Well we ran out of money. The bid to redo the entire field was over $200,000. Me and two coworkers were able to revive portions of the old irrigation and basically redid the entire field. All we got was some overtime on two Saturdays LOL! I think we did it for around $15,000 including our overtime. We were joking that they could kick us down with five or 10 grand a piece and still be ahead. We were hired as maintenance plumbers not installers! But you know how that goes. It’s fun to have the change of pace now and again. I like running the heavy equipment.

 

Those tree roots are knarly!! What tree is that??

 

Pine trees surrounding but I think the one right over the drain was an oak tree.

 

Old trees will just do so much damage to pipes all that time! Imagine the mess you'd face on the east coast! Busted pipes cuz of ice! Try that in December!