Poor Design

Yesterday I cleaned a sewer line from a basement: narrow, shallow, steep steps spiraling down through two landings.  What myopia, what idiocy, what sadism motivated plumbers to put the cleanout in the basement when it would have been as easy to put it outside?  The job wound up costing the customer $100 more that it should have.

A recent plumber had reworked some of the piping in the basement.  He glued the new cleanout plug into the cleanout, making it impossible to remove.  But the only reason to install a cleanout is so that you can remove the plug. Duh!

People gripe about charlatans in televangelism, but how many of those are operating?  A hundred?  There are many times more than that in the Memphis plumbing trade, and I suspect that it’s not a lot different in Omaha or Cincinnati.  They take the money, but they do the work poorly and it costs the customer more money down the road.

Bad Plumbing

I have to go by Code Enforcement and get approval for plans to renovate the plumbing in a nail salon owned and run by young Vietnamese folks, which is the bizop of choice for these people, it seems.  I’ve never seen plumbing this screwy.  (It was done by an American, by the way, who now cannot be found.) The water heater is connected to two little shutoff valves (“stops”) that originally fed a lavatory faucet.  It’s an electric unit; it pulls 4500 watts when it is heating water.  It has no 240v receptacle.  Oh no!  They have it plugged into a regular wall socket.  It would be the equivalent of running forty five lamps, each with a 100-watt bulb, out of one socket at your house.  How they’ve kept from burning the joint down is a mystery to me.  An electrical engineer stood by me, looking at it and shaking his head and mumbling.  It’s even a mystery to him.