Emergency Leak Control

Drip Control System
Originally uploaded by erink

Since Snowpocalypse! hit Pittsburgh and brought us 2 feet of snow in 40 hours, followed by another five inches two days later and another five inches six days after that, a lot of people are dealing with leaky houses.

My first rental duplex had a flat roof, so I have years of experience dealing with ice dams. My current house, which is otherwise pretty great, has aged box gutters that have been leaking for two years (mostly because I put off fixing them after the high-priced roofer did a bad job). That means that when we get ice dams, water leaks in some of our window frames from the gutters.

An ice dam is ice that forms in your downspout. Snow melts under the ice on the roof because your house is warm, but with the downspout blocked, there's nowhere for it to go. If you're unlucky, it goes down, through your roof or gutter and into your house. Unless you can get the downspout unfrozen or remove all the snow and ice from your roof, it's going to keep leaking.

So, not much you can do outside until spring. But inside, there are a few techniques you can use to control the water.

Obviously, you want to deploy buckets. But it's tough to get the buckets right under all the drips, and even when you have a well-placed bucket, once it starts to fill up there's a lot of splashing, and that gets your floor wet too.

The solution is plastic. Dry cleaning bags work great, and trash bags are good too. (If you don't split the trash bags open to cover more area, you usually can reuse them for trash afterward.) If you have big problems, you can try those plastic painting drop cloths, as long as they're not too heavy for the tape.

Here's what to do.

1. Tape the plastic bag up on the wall or window so that the dripping water falls onto it. You can use multiple pieces of plastic if you overlap the top piece in front of the bottom piece so the water falls down onto the second piece.
   
2. Make a plastic highway to the collection area (bucket or trash can or whatever). You actually can move the bucket several feet from the leak, as long as the bucket is the lowest point in the system and there's a clean path to the bucket.
3. Watch the water flow. If it's dripping off an edge, try to curl the plastic inward so that it funnels the water back toward the center.
4. If you still have trouble with splashing, move the bucket farther away from the wall. The more gradual slope will slow the water down and minimize splashes. Make sure you don't create a low point on the way to the bucket.

Here are some details of the drip collection system in my TV room.



The plastic is taped to the window frame with scotch tape. You can see the brown spots where the water was dripping. (Click through for a larger version on Flickr.)



Here is the bottom of the system. I had water leaking from underneath the bottom of the windowsill so I taped up another bag there. I used masking tape there because I was afraid Scotch tape would tear the paint (still not sure the masking tape won't, but whatever). I had to wait until the wall was dry to get the tape to stick. This picture also shows the transition from dry-cleaning plastic to trash bag. I taped the trash bag to the window to catch another drip, but you can just tape it to the top bag (it is also taped to the dry-cleaning bag, but that's hard to see).

If you're going to be away for a while, you can use a trash can instead of buckets, it holds more water. Also, drips usually stop a few hours after dark when the roof water refreezes, so that gives you a chance to regroup. But don't leave your bucket out of the system for long!

I've often wondered if strings would be useful, but I've never tried it. For example, if you have a drip on the ceiling can you tack up a string and get the water to preferentially run down the string into a bucket?

Oh, another few tips. If you can access your roof or gutters by leaning out a window (carefully!), you can sometimes help clear the ice. A hockey stick is a great tool for this. We use my old stick to flick ice out of the gutters and to chop up the ice into flippable pieces. Be careful not to damage your shingles, or to clobber someone on the ground. We also pour warm water into the gutters to melt the downspouts. After the first storm we were alternating pouring in buckets of water and pumping the standing water out of the downspouts with a tiny battery-operated pump (you could also use a straight siphon or a drill-mounted pump).

There are gutter heater cables you can use to help melt ice from your roof shingles and downspouts. They're not much help once the ice is up there, you have to have a roofer install them ahead of time.

So, hope this is helpful - or at least amusing.

Quest for Paczki - 2010 Edition

Much easier than last year. But still not as good as Jenny Lee's.

Joys of Working From Home

This is literally what just happened to me.

Every room in my house is nice and cozy, except the kitchen, which has two outside walls and a tile floor (and a bit of a draft around the floor). But the kitchen has the best light and a nice clear workspace, so I decide to work there. It's 12 degrees outside, so my feet are cold. I go upstairs to get a pair of socks.

On the way to my socks, I notice that the window in the TV room has started dripping again. We have elderly box gutters and were in denial about the drips for a year or so, which means that when snow starts melting from the sun, there are a few places where the water backs up and seeps through the box gutters and into the house at the window frame below the gutter. And we got 20" of snow on Friday night. I have a vast knowledge of how to rig dry-cleaning bags and buckets to deal with the drips, and we lean out the windows of the third floor clearing ice with a hockey stick and buckets of warm water. When you hear great crashing sounds, you know the downspouts are clearing and you're done.

So I head up to the third floor and start clearing the gutter above the TV room window. That goes pretty well, a little ice flicking and about four buckets of water, and I hear crashing sounds and the water drains well. I go to check on the other problem gutter, spend some time pitching ice out of it, and decide to use the tiny battery-operated pump (which I bought but never used for the basement flooding that has since been fixed) to drain some standing water out of that gutter. Okay. Third floor secured.

So I head downstairs to check on the TV room. And a mysterious water disaster has occurred. The bucket is askew and apparently a gallon or two of water has pooled on the carpet and run into the room, stopping to get soaked up by the big floor pillow we have there. Replace the bucket, pick up the floor pillow and get it drying in the bathroom, deploy all the ShamWows (you'll say "wow" every time!) I can find, along with some towels. Run downstairs to the basement twice, once for a plastic shelf gadget to get the bucket off the wet carpet and once for a fan to help the carpet dry. Hang soaked ShamWows in the bathroom to dry.

Check on the bedroom window for drips. Still dry.... Count my blessings. The front of the house didn't get much sun today.

Okay, everything's drying, nothing's actively dripping except some stragglers in the TV room that are going into the bucket. I need to change the wet band-aid on my thumb (I cut myself mysteriously while digging out my car yesterday). Okay. Back to the kitchen to work.

My feet are cold.