A failure at the Climax Pump Station in the Navajo Community neighborhood of San Carlos resulted in the loss of water pressure in a portion of the area, leading to yesterday’s boil water advisory. Whenever pressure isn’t maintained, there is a possibility of water siphoning back into the delivery system from household and landscape plumbing, so a boil water order is issued until pressure is restored and tests confirm water quality.During the outage, city workers connected a portable pump to nearby hydrants to maintain pressure so that faucets would still function.Here, someone proposed to save water by reducing the pressure in the net.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Boil Water Advisory
An item of interest for Israeli Water Engineers:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I think the concerns about backflow are highly exaggerated and in most cases if there is backflow at all it will never get beyond the house in question no less down the street and into someone else's house. Meanwhile millions of $ are wasted on dishwasher air gaps, etc. (required in some US jurisdictions and not others where a high loop in the dishwasher drain hose is considered sufficient). And yet no one is dying from contaminated water where there are no air gaps so all those millions spent are a complete waste of $.
The situation is similar w. venting - US codes (until recently) required very elaborate venting to the outside for each fixture so you had double the piping that required drilling thru the structure all the way to the roof plus all sorts of roof penetrations to leak. The concern being that the traps would be sucked dry. All that is needed is a simple one way valve to admit air. I had my plumber put these in my new kitchen and the inspector looked at them as if they were from Mars (but he had to permit them because they are finally in the code).
K
I have to confess that the one way air valves are too modern for me too, I have no confidence in them and prefer the passive air vents. I feel they need maintenance and people is unreliable and will blame the engineer for every failure.
The air valve I am using (Studor) is rated for X million cycles - many decades of use. If it becomes defective (e.g. you smell an odor of sewer gas ) you unscrew the valve and replace it - 5 minutes and $20 and you are good for another 20 years. There is no required maintenance. The alternative was to allow the plumbers to weaken my structure by cutting large holes for their vent pipes in my walls. There is a window directly above the kitchen sink so the vent would have had to have gone sideways thru several studs (vertical structural elements) before turning up to the roof. Plumbers just want to get their pipes thru and don't care how much structural damage they cause - they are like butchers who hack away at your carefully constructed carpentry (homes in the US have wooden load bearing elements).
K
Post a Comment