Old House Handyman: Rot and rust make plumbing a least-favorite task
Plumbing stinks. And it's rotten.
Those are personal opinions based on years of experience. Of all old-house maintenance issues, those affecting plumbing are my least favorite. Because it stinks.
And in the past couple of weeks, I've seen how rotten it can be.
I've been wrestling with metal plumbing parts that have rusted and rotted away like the rear fenders of most any older-model Chevy Silverado pickup truck. (I have one, so I'm familiar with its rotten parts, having just installed plastic "fender flares" to cover up and protect what has become Swiss-cheese-like metal around the lip of the wheel wells.)
The latest plumbing issues came with a slight thud. I lifted the handle that was supposed to open the sink stopper in our upstairs bathroom, and the stopper went up and fell right back down into the drain. I pulled again, and nothing happened.
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So I did what most humans who hate plumbing would do: I walked away and hoped that it would heal itself.
Actually, because I was curious and a glutton for punishment, I went downstairs to the bathroom there and pulled the handle to close the stopper in that sink. There, I found the opposite problem. No matter how hard I pulled, I could not get that stopper to seal the drain tightly enough to hold water in the sink.
I suspected the "pop-up center rod assembly," which is a metal rod about 6.5 inches long and a quarter-inch in diameter with a plastic ball molded around it about an inch and a quarter from one end. That rod clips to another rod, which is the one I had been pulling and pushing at the faucet to open and close the stopper.
So I cleaned out the supplies in the cabinet under the upstairs sink and reached around the backside of the drain pipe to loosen the plastic nut that holds the ball rod in place. I came prepared with a pair of pliers but found that the nut was barely finger tight, which I thought could be part of the problem — especially since it had a slight leak.
But when I removed the ball rod, I found that the business end of the rod — that important inch-and-a-quarter that was supposed to be inside the drain pipe to lift the stopper — was gone.
It had rusted and rotted away.
And the same thing happened to the ball-rod assembly in the downstairs bathroom sink. What are the chances? Actually, the chances were pretty good, because both were installed about 20 years ago when we were doing a big wave of renovation.
Because I like to tempt fate, I checked the assembly that opens and closes the stopper in the downstairs bathroom tub drain and found that it was loose. So I got a screwdriver, and the instant I tried to tighten it, one of the two bolts broke off.
It, too, had rusted and rotted. The other bolt had rusted quite a bit, but it was still strong enough for me to back it out and remove the plate and lever that lifts and closes the drain stopper.
Now, I have a rusted nub of a bolt sticking out of the brass overflow tube, and I am looking for a good way to remove the rusted bolt so I can reinstall the plate and lever with new bolts.
Here's what all of these rotten parts have in common: They are all chrome-plated steel, and it clearly does not like being stuck inside drain pipes with soapy water.
I found replacement kits for all of my rotten plumbing parts at Ace, True Value and Do It Best hardware stores. Some of the kits are chrome-plated steel like the parts that rusted away in our sinks. And a couple of the stores had universal ball-rod kits with rods made of brass, which doesn't rust and is resistant to corrosion.
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The new plate and lever for the tub are chrome-plated steel, but when I finally remove the rusted nub of bolt and can install the new plate, I'm going to get brass bolts to hold it in place.
And hopefully, I'll be done with stinky, rotten plumbing for a while.
Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.
@youroldhouse
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Old House Handyman: Rotting and rusting make plumbing a nightmare
