The Glade 4.0

"Daddy, there's a big puddle in the kitchen" are words you don't want to be awakened by from your 5 year old on a Saturday morning, but alas...that is the beginning of my story.

I shot out of bed because my son tells it like it is and I knew he wasn't making this up. I ran downstairs to find the ever spreading puddle in my kitchen along with the sound of gushing water. I quickly shut off the water main in my basement as the water is now raining through the basement drop ceiling onto my rack of board games. These, I quickly move and the water trickles out as it was only minutes between when my son heard the cracking noise, saw the puddle, told me and I got the water main switched off.

Initially I thought it was our faucet which has had a slow trickling leak that the plumber has already looked at for us twice that I thought failed spectacularly. As it turned out, it was a water filter that was coming off the cold water feed to a secondary spigot that we don't even use anymore. We have a water cooler for our cold drinking water.

Thought it was going to be an expensive Saturday call to a plumber to fix the problem, but all I had to do was remove the coupling from between the cold water feed and the lead to the main faucet. Father in law had some teflon tape and I tightened it down and we are all good.

If there is a way to have a good kitchen plumbing leak, that was it.

To add to my good karma weekend, I fell down the stairs from about 3-4 stairs from the floor and all I did was jam my pinky and get a small bruise on my back.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Cool story...

But how does a water filter just 'come loose' ?

poor installation in the first place. My parents had an internal main line just "come loose" shortly after they built their house.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Midgen:

There was a gasket or seal where the filter screwed together with the housing. The gasket popped out, kind of like a hernia. Nothing broke or came loose. The seal popped and water followed along with it.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Atta boy Sean, you done good.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

At least your plumbing makes sense. Under my kitchen sink there's a valve that, if opened, will cause water to start pooling under the refrigerator.

Sounds like a ice/water dispenser?

So just got around to removing the whole filter from under the sink now that it failed and had been isolated.

Getting a better look at it now that it is out shows me the extent of the damage. A seal didn't simply pop out causing the flood. The plastic housing COMPLETELY cracked almost all the way around. Spectacular failure as it turns out.

This is the second water filter that was in the house that has failed like that. There was another in the basement that had a similar failure, but less catastrophic.

I understand that the water system is pressurized, but what is it about these water filters that cause them to crack and fail as such? Impurities in the water eating away at them?

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

You're supposed to replace them every 90 to 180 days in most cases.

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