Dear Suzy,
I finally got e-mail just so you wouldn’t keep begging for letters! And, I do need advice:
My lovely old house has, of course, ancient plumbing. This summer I only used cold (as cold as it gets, anyway) water for my showers. Not running any water through the pipes must have allowed the minerals to really build up — the hot water comes out in a stream about as thick as a pencil, and it’s starting to get way too cool in the mornings for this to be any fun. The hot water heater is almost brand new, so it’s not the problem. Someone suggested replacing all my pipes; a nice idea eventually, but not for now. I remember reading somewhere a while back about a product that gets poured through the pipes (via the hot water heater I suppose) that dissolves the mineral build-up. Have you ever heard of this, or can you use your amazing research skills to find out for me ?
— Elizabeth F.
Dear Elizabeth,
Yes, I do have “amazing research skills” (which is French for “a telephone”). So I contacted my research associates at Crump Plumbing Supply and Deutchman Plumbing. “Is there any such magical goo?” I asked, with the frank zeal befitting a devoted investigator. The answer from both Robey at Crump and the spokesman for all the men at Deutchman was brief and depressing: No.
You know all those beautiful limestone formations we Austinites coo and crawl over? Blame them. They leach calcium carbonate into our groundwater which then carries it into our homes where it is deposited in our pipes. Outside of having the pipes replaced, the experts could only offer two other solutions: Deutchman recommend moving out of Central Texas, and Robey said a master plumber can “de-scale” your pipes with a round of harsh chemicals, a process which costs thousands of dollars and sounds quite nasty, to boot. (“There is another solution,” she smugly thinks, gazing lovingly out the window at her rainwater collection tanks, full of water with a hardness of zero.) Deutchman also reported hearing of some success with a weak solution of household vinegar poured into the water heater then flushed through the pipes, but they sounded less than enthusiastic about the potential for success.
Perhaps the pipes aren’t your problem. If the hot water trickle is limited to the shower, you may have a bad mixer (the thing the faucets are attached to which tells the hot and cold water what to do) which you’ll have to replace. Or you can do what my dad recently did to the broken mixer in the shower in my old room at their house. He knew I was coming to visit and he wanted my shower to work, yet he wasn’t looking forward to bashing a hole in the wall to get at the recalcitrant plumbing part. Instead, he fished two new copper lines (attached to the hot and cold supply lines in the attic) through two perfectly-sized holes in the ceiling of the shower, attaching them to the shower head with a Rube-Goldbergian series of tubes and faucets. The copper tubes are curved gracefully, lending his makeshift plumbing job the air of fine art. It’s beautiful. But of course I’d feel that way; he did it just for me.
Begging? Me? You bet. Send ’em to Suzebe@aol.com, fax `em to 512/858-1979, or snail mail ’em to the Chronicle. Oh, and Happy Birthday, dear Richard!
This article appears in October 24 • 1997 and October 24 • 1997 (Cover).