Dirty Work

Once in a while I make it my mission to vacuum up the floating rafts of dog hair that haunt the back corners of my hall closets. One of closets is the utility closet and it houses the AC evaporator coil, our water heater and a tower of tools. I realized as I was sucking up the fluffs of dog hair that there was water on the floor of the closet. Upon closer inspection I realized there was water on the tool tower as well, and the towel I set under the AC evaporator coil was completely soaked. Cue my horror as I realized that water originating from my condo might be damaging the ceiling and walls of the condo beneath mine. So I quickly tore up every plank of laminated wood on the floor and the underlayment beneath it. I set up a box fan to dry it all out and then set about trying to remedy the leak.

I knew the leak was coming from the overflowing drain pan under the evaporator. The drain pan was overflowing because there was a clog in the drain line that carried the condensate away from pan and to our sewer pipes. I needed to empty the water from the drain pan, but there was no good way to do it because the pan was fixed in place and access to the pan was in a narrow space. I tried to use a transfer pipet to pull the water out of the pan, but it took a very long time because of the amount of water that had built up. A transfer pipet is only meant to move 2 mL at a time. So I dug around in my boxes of random-junk-that-could-be-useful-someday and found a 10 mL syringe, which certainly was more efficient than the pipet, and then I found a 50 mL syringe (I think it came from the hospital visit when my middle child had acute appendicitis) which was even better. But then WAIT! I remembered that under some cabinet somewhere I had a little sitz bath setup (unused from the birth of child #3) and with it was some clear tubing. I felt very proud of myself as I repurposed the tubing to siphon the condensate out of the drain pan.

In about 6 hours I had a full 2.5 gallon bucket of water collected from the AIR in my condo. Is that not wild??? I know the air in Charleston is humid, but I had never come anywhere near to quantifying it.

Obviously I can't go on like this forever, siphoning water out of the drain pan to prevent it from overflowing when obviously I need to address the underlying cause of the water buildup, which is the clogged drain line. Which is why tomorrow we build a new drain line!