Right around the time that our marathon of home-improvement projects was finally drawing to a close, Tracie noticed that the dryer had started making a funny smell. It appeared that its thermostat had died so it was running at full heat, all the time, regardless of its temperature setting. The laundry machines were far from what you’d call new when I assumed ownership of them about 10 years ago, so there was no question that the sensible thing to do was to replace the dryer. As long as we were replacing the dryer it made sense to replace the washer as well. We really didn’t like the notion of yet another person fiddling around in our house, but on the other hand the notion of the dryer bursting into flames was even less attractive.
Nor did we like the idea of doing an interminable amount of research into contemporary clothes-washing technology in an attempt to make an Informed Buying Decision about the washer and dryer, so we took the easy way out. Laundry is a daily ritual for Tracie’s mother, and her parents had just built and moved into a new house, so we asked them what they bought, and ordered the same thing. A few days later the machines showed up and a couple of remarkably polite and careful gentlemen installed them and took away the old ones. (They actually carried the machines up and down the 1.5 flights of steps between the street and the laundry room–none of those crude furniture dollies for these guys.)
So, all seemed to be well as the two machines quietly whirred through their first clotheless cycle (which we were told to do to rinse/burn out any residual stuff from the factory) until I noticed a growing puddle of water apparently coming out from under the washer. Yes, really.
I figured that it was probably not the washer itself, since the installer told me that it was tested at the factory and in fact still had some test water inside it when it arrived. I thought that it might be something simple like one of the supply lines leaking, so I wiggled it away from the wall and peered around and under it with a flashlight.
To cut the story slightly shorter, it was not the washer at all but the drain pipe in the wall behind the washer. The dryer venting had, for some idiot reason, been suspended from this pipe with a couple of tie-wraps. Apparently when the installer removed the old dryer and installed the new one, he managed to wrench a short section of pipe just hard enough to crack it near its fitting. This was a little hard to figure out at first because it wasn’t the same pipe that the washer drains through, but finally I noticed that the puddle grew only when Tracie was running water in the sink one storey above my head. By odd coincidence I had discovered just a few days ago that plastic pipe becomes brittle where it is glued into fittings, so it all suddenly made sense. I don’t really blame the installer because there was some evidence that the pipe had been leaking long before his arrival. The good news is that wall is unfinished and the floor is bare concrete and there’s a floor drain in just the right place, so this time we won’t have to hire Butch to repair more sheetrock.
The bad news, of course, is that I get to play plumber. As I write this I’ve made one trip to Home Depot and the local hardware store and have repaired the pipe at one end, only to discover that it was cracked at the other end also. So now we’re about to head to Home Depot yet again, both for more pipe fittings and for things to attach the dryer vent to a nearby stud rather than to the drain pipe.
