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Speaking along the lines of crappy construction tales, I once went to repair a cable drop to a new-build home and discovered that the drop was a-ok, but the house wiring was hosed. I had to refer her back to the builder. H/O stated "I'm not surprised, when we moved in the hot and cold water lines were swapped." Poor lady was getting water from the heater filling her toilet tanks for about a week.
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Aug 7, 2013 10:48
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Oh man, I bet her toilets were always nice and warm, though! What a brilliant idea.
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Aug 7, 2013 14:21
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At first I thought it was a brilliant idea. Two seconds later I realized that it would only be warm after flushing. 
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Aug 7, 2013 15:37
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:At first I thought it was a brilliant idea. Two seconds later I realized that it would only be warm after flushing. Flush before you sit down.
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Aug 7, 2013 16:17
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:At first I thought it was a brilliant idea. Two seconds later I realized that it would only be warm after flushing. Just need to crap more often, like every half hour.
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Aug 7, 2013 16:17
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Motronic posted:Minimum ring to meet standard in the US is 75 VAC. Yeah, just a standard idling line is 45-50 volts. I'd have to test again but I think ring is usually more like 90 volts.
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Aug 7, 2013 17:54
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Detroit Q. Spider posted:Yeah, just a standard idling line is 45-50 volts. I'd have to test again but I think ring is usually more like 90 volts. On most POTS lines in the former Bell Atlantic area they shoot for 88 VAC. Not sure about other areas, but I'm sure it's quite similar. Many older phones with actual bell ringers won't work with ATAs, even the ones supplied by the likes of Verizon (for Fios phone) and Comcast because they don't quite produce enough voltage and/or amperage to make something like that ring properly. Also, leaning your arm across a 66 block when you have ring on one of the pairs feels a whole lot like you just got stabbed with a pen knife.
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Aug 7, 2013 18:08
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Farmdizzle posted:Speaking along the lines of crappy construction tales, I once went to repair a cable drop to a new-build home and discovered that the drop was a-ok, but the house wiring was hosed. I had to refer her back to the builder. I had that in my last apartment, where I lived for just over a year. It was terrible. Hot water greatly accelerated the wear on the rubber items, and ripped through the slumlord-grade flapper and valves like they were made of paper. The toilet was broken every few months because of this, and was the only toilet in the unit. If it broke on a weekend, you'd spend the weekend fishing around inside the tank to manually actuate the flapper. I'd sometimes get black streaks of rubber inside the toilet bowl too. Maintenance refused to fix the hot water source problem, so I just had to live with it. The toilet was sort of lousy too, and was prone to log jams. Doing two or three flushes to get rid of a turd plus paperwork is annoying no matter what, but when the 2nd flush fills the bowl with hot water and makes poop soup, it's even more unpleasant. Blistex posted:Flush before you sit down. No, flush twice before you sit down.
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Aug 7, 2013 20:34
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canyoneer posted:Maintenance refused to fix the hot water source problem, so I just had to live with it. The toilet was sort of lousy too, and was prone to log jams. Doing two or three flushes to get rid of a turd plus paperwork is annoying no matter what, but when the 2nd flush fills the bowl with hot water and makes poop soup, it's even more unpleasant. User failed to provide proper tank cooling solution, closed won't fix.
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Aug 7, 2013 20:38
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canyoneer posted:I had that in my last apartment, where I lived for just over a year. It was terrible. Hot water greatly accelerated the wear on the rubber items, and ripped through the slumlord-grade flapper and valves like they were made of paper. The toilet was broken every few months because of this, and was the only toilet in the unit. If it broke on a weekend, you'd spend the weekend fishing around inside the tank to manually actuate the flapper. I'd sometimes get black streaks of rubber inside the toilet bowl too. Poop soup aside, was the toilet warm sitting on it?
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Aug 7, 2013 21:13
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Motronic posted:On most POTS lines in the former Bell Atlantic area they shoot for 88 VAC. Not sure about other areas, but I'm sure it's quite similar. Many older phones with actual bell ringers won't work with ATAs, even the ones supplied by the likes of Verizon (for Fios phone) and Comcast because they don't quite produce enough voltage and/or amperage to make something like that ring properly. ...or if you're scaling a utility pole and your (sweaty) forearm brushes a dry rotted telephone drop, it's pretty invigorating. 
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Aug 7, 2013 23:28
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:Poop soup aside, was the toilet warm sitting on it? If it was particularly cold inside, and you had flushed twice beforehand, yes. Like a tiny little sauna for your balloon knot.
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Aug 7, 2013 23:58
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The 700 bed, 14 story dorm I lived in my sophomore year had this problem, the butt sauna was quite pleasant except there was NO cold water to be found on the lower floors. This made taking a shower an exercise in pain tolerance, I'd often have to let the steam get my body wet and briefly scald myself to rinse. God help you if you had shampoo in your hair or something. Some of us would trek to the 7th floor or higher to find cold water. Riding a crowded elevator in nothing but a towel is all part of the college experience, right?  After a few weeks of this, we came up with a record of the situation: 1. It usually happened mid-morning, but not every day 2. It never happened on the weekends 3. Generally things would get back to normal mid-day 4. Only the first couple floors had this problem, I lived on the 3rd. The final piece of the puzzle came in the form of a Friday Night puke cleanup in the dorm's lobby, where instead of calling night maintenance, the RAs on duty opted to make the offending puker (drunk) help in the cleanup. Shortly after, the toilets on my floor were steaming again. Why? Well... We discovered the janitor's closet in the lobby had a sink with two faucets, one for hot and one for cold. These faucets were bridged with garden hose and a T fixture, and at the end of the T there was another hose with an on/off valve. With both faucets open and the valve on the T closed, hot water pressurized from the boilers in the basement would backflow into the building's cold water supply, heating the water going to the toilets, urinals, showers, water fountains and sinks on the lower floors piping hot. Whatever janitor came in in the morning would fill his mop bucket mixing the hot and cold water, and would just shut the T valve off while he went about his mopping. This explained why it never happened on the weekend until that point. Thankfully after talking with the building manager, it never happened again.
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Aug 8, 2013 10:13
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Motronic posted:Also, leaning your arm across a 66 block when you have ring on one of the pairs feels a whole lot like you just got stabbed with a pen knife. I learned pretty quick not to count the pairs down the block by touching them with my finger. It's a dangerous game.
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Aug 8, 2013 13:07
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This isn't a crappy construction tale but I figured it'd be the best thread to ask the question. Was at a local amusement park and at a brand new ride (built within last 2-years) inside the coaster-car entrance/exit area I noticed the Enlighten me? c0ldfuse fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Aug 9, 2013 |
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Aug 9, 2013 19:16
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I don't know much about actually building stuff, because I work in a different trade so maybe someone will correct me. Unless those are literally just individual 2X's that they built into a truss, it is pretty common for the truss maker to "sandwich" together the 2X's, basically gluing them together into a single unit. It is much cheaper to build them this way, as large lumber is costly. Edit: Looking at the top left connection in actually looks like those are actually individual boards, but I can't say for certain.
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Aug 9, 2013 21:01
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Yeah that's pretty normal, as are glue-lam beams made out of many small pieces. It's all engineered to hell.
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Aug 9, 2013 21:08
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah that's pretty normal, as are glue-lam beams made out of many small pieces. It's all engineered to hell. I recognize this fact, curious as to if there was a possible reason to use multiple compared to single beam outside of cost.
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Aug 9, 2013 21:27
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c0ldfuse posted:I recognize this fact, curious as to if there was a possible reason to use multiple compared to single beam outside of cost. Engineering sometimes means that the alternative methods were carefully compared, and the most cost-effective option that meets the requirements was selected. And sometimes engineering means someone slapped it on the plans because they saw it that way once, it went out to the contractor that way, he saw how stupid it was, but said 'gently caress it' and just builds it.
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Aug 9, 2013 21:34
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Devor posted:Engineering sometimes means that the alternative methods were carefully compared, and the most cost-effective option that meets the requirements was selected. And sometimes engineering means someone designed a system that they consider safe/appropriate, the client sent it to the contractor, and the contractor turned around and told the client, "what the hell are you doing all that for? I can do it this way, meet code, and save you all this money". Then everyone crosses their fingers and hopes the building doesn't fall down.
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Aug 9, 2013 22:24
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I was watching a random History Channel show about the Titanic (amazingly this is actually historical) and a guy had a random good point. Paraphrasing : "Engineering is all about reducing cost and weight, anyone can make something strong, it takes an engineer to make it strong light and cheap". So anyway, yeah cost is the only reason there, but it's not a bad one.
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Aug 10, 2013 04:16
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Motronic posted:On most POTS lines in the former Bell Atlantic area they shoot for 88 VAC. Not sure about other areas, but I'm sure it's quite similar. Many older phones with actual bell ringers won't work with ATAs, even the ones supplied by the likes of Verizon (for Fios phone) and Comcast because they don't quite produce enough voltage and/or amperage to make something like that ring properly. There is almost nothing quite as hilarious as watching your buddy try to fix two-pair copper and then the phone rings. e: especially when he's in a ditch in the middle of the yard. And it was someone else's gently caress-up. Farmdizzle fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Aug 10, 2013 |
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Aug 10, 2013 04:28
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You Are A Elf posted:My folk's home with splitters upon splitters upon more splitters followed by one more splitter for the modem that's for both the Internet and phones will attest to that list. Just a clusterfuck of cabling and splitters on the outside and inside of their house that Comcast could have resolved both aesthetically and practically with just two more minutes of work and thought. Then my parents wonder why the cable is always pixelating and the modem is always dropping; it's all that loving signal loss from the splitters. Our house was like that, but with CATV splitters and filters. The first competent tech we got out brought in a two foot daisy chain of filters and splitters he'd pulled off the line, and credited us our bill since the first tech call due to obvious incompetence.
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Aug 10, 2013 06:06
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I did it. I found a horrible thing today. I opened up a wall to figure out why there was a junction box with 5' of cable hanging out of it and none of the outlets in the front bedroom worked. I took off a sheet of drywall and found a j-box with all its wires capped. No hole cut into the wall for this, just an empty box behind sheetrock. The wires weren't hot. In fact, they ran to an outlet in the same room. That outlet ran to the aforementioned j-box, which was on the other side of the wall at 7'. So I'm looking at this j-box with its outlet and I see four NM cables running to it. I can see two going into the wall (hopefully to the two outlets downstream) and two going to the ceiling (hopefully to the two j-boxes I can see. I pull the outlet out, and I'm confronted with Homeowner Refit Horror. The outlet only comes out about 2" from the wall, because that's all the wire that's available. Eight wires terminate on this device. Two screws and two stabs each side; hot and neutral. The ground was pigtailed. No wire was live in this assemblage, thankfully, nor ever had been. I pull all the wires off this porn star of an outlet, pigtail them so it's one hot, one neutral going in, and everything else is combined in the back of the box. Delete the hidden j-box and run its feed over to the light switch supplying the room. I now have power to the room. Success. Reinstall sheetrock (leaving gaps and spacing this time), and it's Miller Time. I found out later that the PO had an extension cord wrapped around the ceiling to provide power to this room. For thirty years. Both ends cut off, just tape holding it up there. When it would fall, more tape would go up without the old being removed. I thankfully never saw it in that state, and just had a room that never had power (and a mystery in the walls).
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Aug 10, 2013 06:30
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Papercut posted:And sometimes engineering means someone designed a system that they consider safe/appropriate, the client sent it to the contractor, and the contractor turned around and told the client, "what the hell are you doing all that for? I can do it this way, meet code, and save you all this money". Then everyone crosses their fingers and hopes the building doesn't fall down. That's the second-best possible outcome for the engineer! No liability if we weren't asked to review the changes. Almost as good as a project that never actually gets built.
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Aug 10, 2013 07:18
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The guy that my aunt hired to renovate her place is an idiot. Here are some things he did:
Midrena fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Aug 10, 2013 |
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Aug 10, 2013 07:26
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when I think of all the clogging issues this will create, unless the debris is cleared out of the pipes.
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Farmdizzle posted:There is almost nothing quite as hilarious as watching your buddy try to fix two-pair copper and then the phone rings. Even more especially if you're the one who's calling him from your cell as you stand there and watch.
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Aug 10, 2013 13:10
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Motronic posted:Even more especially if you're the one who's calling him from your cell as you stand there and watch. If I'd had that phone number... hmm. But actually the best part is that our boss was standing right next to me and was laughing harder than I was.
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Aug 11, 2013 03:20
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A guy on site told me this one who heard it from a friend who knew a guy who was there and I haven't been able to find any record of this despite me searching for a good 2 minutes, so bear with me. This happened as part of a large casino resort construction so there's every chance it's been covered up especially due to the nature of gently caress up that occurred. I can't remember if it was the original casino built about 30 years ago or the recent annex they built 10 years ago but this particular building had a buoyancy raft type foundation due to the fact it was built on an old landfill. This raft was supposed to have a cast in sewer pipe that was to collect all the indoor plumbing from the hotel rooms and whatnot and feed it into the sewer main. The pipe was supposed to be suspended from the reo by some super expensive wiz bang brackets that were custom made to handle the weight of pipe. The brackets had definitely been delivered at the start of the job but when the day came to hang the sewer nobody could find them. Simply ordering in some new brackets would've taken weeks so the contractor decided to do a custom job and had his guys get out the oxy's bend up some left over reo to serve in its place. The concrete pour goes ahead and the pipe seems to hold up and the rest of the construction carries on. Some months after opening people start to notice a foul smell and an unusual amount of huge rats hanging about the place. Turns out the sewer pipe failed and months and months of poo poo had been bubbling up into the hollows in the raft. They ended up pumping all the poo poo out, suspending a new sewer pipe from the underside of one of the upper slabs and turning the raft into a series of underground car parks at the same time.
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Aug 11, 2013 12:57
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Farmdizzle posted:Poor lady was getting water from the heater filling her toilet tanks for about a week. That's actually a thing in Northern New England, people would run toilets from hot water to prevent them from freezing over.
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Aug 11, 2013 14:37
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Dragyn posted:While not technically a construction tale, but still crappy workmanship... As a follow-up. Comcast credited her $20 and had another tech come out and do this properly. 
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Aug 13, 2013 18:18
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I've got one here all you HVAC techs can play "spot the code violation" with. My bathroom ceiling started pouring water last night and since the property office isn't open at 9:30 on a Sunday I dropped the panel down and drained out just shy of 2 gallons of water from the access panel. We've had issues with water coming out of the panel before but never as severe as this, and the maintenence guys having always just told us(and the work orders) that the the drainpipes get clogged up with gunk and have to get cleared out once in a while. Here's the photo album: http://imgur.com/a/h2P2H#y0qVgKO I can tell you for sure they've been lying about it, as I can stick a finger through the drain holes easily and there isn't anything in there. The gigantic spreading rust spot across the galvanized boxes tells me they've been lying, and turning on the AC and watching water drip straight down the side of the catchpan and also out of the electrical junction box tells me they're lying. Great strap job too, heat exchangers are load-bearing right?
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Aug 26, 2013 15:18
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I'm not sure what I'm looking at exactly, but I'm pretty sure zip-tying a drip pan to the coils is not to code. I see they opted to just use the overflow pipe and plug the main drain. Usually when there are two pipes coming off the drip pan, the lower will go to a normal drain or outdoors and the higher overflow drain will go somewhere conspicuous but not terribly vulnerable to water damage. e: on second thought, is one pipe coming from each end of the tray? Oh... it also helps if the pipes actually slant down or have a lift pump to get them to the nearest drain. CopperHound fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Aug 27, 2013 |
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Aug 26, 2013 23:58
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CopperHound posted:I'm not sure what I'm looking at exactly, but I'm pretty sure zip-tying a drip pan to the coils is not to code. I don't know about the code where you are, but state code in Florida is that the lower pipe goes to the drain while the higher pipe goes to a float valve switch that shuts off power to the AC unit if the drain is clogged.
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Aug 27, 2013 00:55
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ShadowStalker posted:I don't know about the code where you are, but state code in Florida is that the lower pipe goes to the drain while the higher pipe goes to a float valve switch that shuts off power to the AC unit if the drain is clogged. Whether it's code or not where you are, that's called "sanity". Without a float you're begging for expensive property damage.
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Aug 27, 2013 01:10
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Motronic posted:A floor drain is not intended to be a sump drain. That's not what the sanitary sewer system is for. It's a drain for washing your floor and cleaning up spills. Seat Safety Switch posted:I wonder what kind of crappy construction tales houseboat repair types have to deal with. None of them ever get reported because people who live on a houseboat probably built by some nutter redneck are a special breed of insane and very tolerant of strange housing issues.   
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Aug 27, 2013 01:56
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kastein posted:Can or can't, it happens everywhere. Well, yeah. It definitely does. Including in my former borough administration building. When I said "can't" in that context I was getting my code enforcement on. I wouldn't hesitate to dump that stuff in the sanitary sewer, just make sure you do that AFTER you've been inspected.
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Aug 27, 2013 02:00
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One pipe goes to the outside drain, one pipe goes to an overflow that dumps into the shower, and none of it matters; the drains are slanted funny and the catchpan's job is currently being done by the junction box (thing with the sticker, it didn't get in focus but that sticker is a "240V service, this can kill you" warning) that contains the 240 volt supply, distribution blocks, and the switching relays. I have another picture I took later on today that shows water dripping merrily out of the corner of said box. Not running along the bottom of and dripping off the corner, but out of the box's corner. The catchpan itself is somehow not catching anything and seems to just be directing water down its side. I stuck a finger into it and while damp, had exactly jack squat for standing water in it. The drainpipes were totally clear as well, didn't even get mildew coming off onto my finger when I rubbed. I suppose the wiring photos needed a little explanation, my camera's focus sucks. They were just laying loose on top of the insulation that coats the access panel(and on top of each other), half the wiring nuts aren't screwed down all the way(bare wire exposed, not even some token electrical tape wrap going on here) and the access panel happened to be holding around 1.5 gallons of water until it started spilling out all over my bathroom floor last night. The best part is that I've called maintenence tickets about a drippy ceiling panel at least 7 times this summer and more last and know the guys have removed the panel to "clear the drains" every time, there's no other way to access the handler/condenser there. I could be wrong about this, but Stevie Wonder could see that giant rust spot and lovely wiring means something has been going wrong for a good long time. Especially when there is water dripping down the side and out the corner of the piece that contains all your high-voltage electrical connections. Kilersquirrel fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Aug 27, 2013 |
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Aug 27, 2013 02:11
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:At first I thought it was a brilliant idea. Two seconds later I realized that it would only be warm after flushing. I actually want to pipe in some hot water into our toilets. We don't have AC, our well water is SUPER cold even in the dead of summer, and the tanks sweat like crazy from June to September. If we use the toilet a lot, they actually shed quite a bit of water. We had to replace the sub floor under one toilet when we first bought the place, and we thought it was because the wax plug was installed wrong or something, because the whole area around the toilet was water damaged. It's on the "someday" list.
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Aug 27, 2013 20:36
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tiananman posted:I actually want to pipe in some hot water into our toilets. We don't have AC, our well water is SUPER cold even in the dead of summer, and the tanks sweat like crazy from June to September. If we use the toilet a lot, they actually shed quite a bit of water. We had to replace the sub floor under one toilet when we first bought the place, and we thought it was because the wax plug was installed wrong or something, because the whole area around the toilet was water damaged. Maybe something to insulate the tanks would be a better idea? What a lot of energy to use just heating toilet water so the tanks don't sweat.
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Aug 27, 2013 21:32
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