Plumbing |

By Ben James on August 21, 2013

Plumbing is boring, until something goes wrong. Then it’s really, really exciting. Water all over the place exciting. I’ll stick with boring, thank you very much.

We used Best Plumbing on the University Coop School project. Are they actually the best? I don’t have enough data to make that kind of determination (since I have not worked with every single plumber in existence), but I can tell you from my experience that they are pretty awesome. Mike Reed from Best made multiple site visits and made a lot of phone calls to me. He had a lot of questions. He wanted to make sure he got things right and that everything happened in the right sequence. That’s what you call being proactive.

The UCS project had a few plumbing challenges. There was a problem with water from the ground coming into the basement, so we had to install a system to collect this groundwater and pump it out of the building. The groundwater will be collected into a sump (in this case a basin cut right into the concrete floor) and then pumped up about eight feet and out into the sewer line. The water from the toilets and sinks will collect into a separate sump and be pumped out in the same way. Also, when doing the walk-through of the project, Mike noticed that a substantial section of the main sewer pipe exiting the building was sagging. Of course it was sagging, there was no support whatsoever. It had probably been like that for decades. It was a good call on Mike’s part and we went ahead with the repair.

Funny story: I notified everyone that the plumbing would be out of service for a short time while the sewer pipe was being replaced. Apparently we did not understand what that meant, and someone flushed a toilet, right on top of our plumbing technician’s head. Literally. I swear I didn’t laugh.