I was thinking I'd post a long one, but now I just committed myself to 10 minutes, so I better be quick. (Remember: post first, read next. Fix blogroll.)
Right, so it's cold. -35 C, which is about -30 F. Which is fine except for when you have to go out.
Last year we bought a piece of investment property: a condo. Actually, our company did, but whatever. So we rent it out. Currently, the tenants are a pair of college students; cousins.
Their cold water doesn't work in the bathroom, they call to report at 7:45 this morning. My wife took the call, so I don't know if they cheerfully reported it. The unit is right next to the boiler room, so the hot water is HOT, so I expect they weren't very cheerful. We'll get on it, we said.
The same thing happened a week ago, too: no cold water in the bathroom. Hot works fine in the bathroom; hot and cold in the kitchen; but no cold in the bathroom.
We contact the management company. No way they can send a plumber out, and are we sure it's not our fault? "There's a shutoff valve for the bathroom, you know."
"Not in our unit, there isn't." In most of the units of this type, there is, but in ours, the last two feet of the storage closet are cut off so that there can be a boiler room in the building. "Perhaps the valve of which you speak is accessible through the boiler room?"
In which case it's not our problem, being accessible only through the community property, we tell the management company.
But it only affects your unit, they tell us. And since they have nothing to lose, they do nothing. They win.
I am let into the boiler room by Bullwinkle [not his real name], the condo association president. I look at the pipes and detect nothing obvious wrong. We get the management company's plumber to finally come out, and by then the problem has gone away. Perhaps it's the temperature. The plumber points out that the combustion air intake for the boiler room, a large one foot by two foot vent, is only a foot away from the access panel that covers this valve.
We tell the tenants to leave the cold water running, just a little, in the bathroom, to prevent the pipes freezing.
And do they listen?
Obviously not, since the silly valve froze again this morning. So we went to Home Depot where for the first time in my life I received competent help. The cross-eyed guy who works at 9:00 AM on Wednesdays at South Edmonton Common -- he knows his plumbing. So we bought a heating tape and some insulation. At 9:50 my wife dropped me off at the building. Around 10:00 Bullwinkle showed up to open the boiler room. By 10:30 I had the heating tape installed. A cab picked me up at 10:40 ("Expect a twenty-minute wait," I'd been told just minutes before), and I was doing my volunteer librarian duties before 11:00.
And at 1:00, when we went by to check, the cold water was working again. Even though it's still -35 C.