Hey all,
This is more of a fun question than anything super professional. I need to start with some background though. My wife and I just bought an old house that was built in 1935. Fixer upper for a good deal. Naturally, that means I get to put a lot of my professional skills to use on my own place now. Structurally she's a beauty, but there are definitely some issues to be sorted out.
The plumbing is one such issue. There are pipes everywhere. Lots of fitted galvanized stuff that was disconnected and left in the walls when someone decided to re-plumb the house. They only half re-plumbed it though, as some of those old pipes are active yet, and some aren't. Some aren't hooked up to anything, but are capped off at the end, so there's still active water pressure in them. It's kind of a big maze where you try to follow the pipes and find out where it all goes, and what's working, and what isn't, occasionally knocking a hole in a wall to find out WTH is going on.
The house also has a hot water boiler and old-timey radiators, which I really like.
Tonight I started to consolidate the mess and remove a lot of the old stuff in preparation to run some new water lines. Some of the old pipes are running in exterior walls. Did I mention they're 2x4 walls, and there is NO insulation in the entire house? I don't know how the place didn't turn into a big geyser on one of our cold MN winter nights.
Here's the mystery part. The house has a walk up 3rd story attic, and the pipes run up there, where they poke up out of the floor and are capped off. Not only that, but they're way bigger up there - like 1 1/4" OD, and they decrease in size as they go down the house - down an exterior wall, of course, with several branches going off to the bathroom and down to the kitchen. In the basement they're only 3/4". It's like they plumbed it in reverse, and had a water heater up there or some kind of gravity feed tank.
I Googled it, and thought there might have been an expansion tank up there for an old steam boiler, but really don't know much about that stuff. Plus, the pipes aren't part of the radiator system. They were tied into the regular water system. I've already got an old disused expansion tank hanging in the basement joists above the boiler - which is new and has its own small, modern tank.
AND - the attic joists weren't beefed up for extra weight. They're just 2x6s. 16" on center.
So now I'm just curious as heck about it. Someone on here knows what's up, I can feel it.
Cheers,
-JR
This is more of a fun question than anything super professional. I need to start with some background though. My wife and I just bought an old house that was built in 1935. Fixer upper for a good deal. Naturally, that means I get to put a lot of my professional skills to use on my own place now. Structurally she's a beauty, but there are definitely some issues to be sorted out.
The plumbing is one such issue. There are pipes everywhere. Lots of fitted galvanized stuff that was disconnected and left in the walls when someone decided to re-plumb the house. They only half re-plumbed it though, as some of those old pipes are active yet, and some aren't. Some aren't hooked up to anything, but are capped off at the end, so there's still active water pressure in them. It's kind of a big maze where you try to follow the pipes and find out where it all goes, and what's working, and what isn't, occasionally knocking a hole in a wall to find out WTH is going on.
The house also has a hot water boiler and old-timey radiators, which I really like.
Tonight I started to consolidate the mess and remove a lot of the old stuff in preparation to run some new water lines. Some of the old pipes are running in exterior walls. Did I mention they're 2x4 walls, and there is NO insulation in the entire house? I don't know how the place didn't turn into a big geyser on one of our cold MN winter nights.
Here's the mystery part. The house has a walk up 3rd story attic, and the pipes run up there, where they poke up out of the floor and are capped off. Not only that, but they're way bigger up there - like 1 1/4" OD, and they decrease in size as they go down the house - down an exterior wall, of course, with several branches going off to the bathroom and down to the kitchen. In the basement they're only 3/4". It's like they plumbed it in reverse, and had a water heater up there or some kind of gravity feed tank.
I Googled it, and thought there might have been an expansion tank up there for an old steam boiler, but really don't know much about that stuff. Plus, the pipes aren't part of the radiator system. They were tied into the regular water system. I've already got an old disused expansion tank hanging in the basement joists above the boiler - which is new and has its own small, modern tank.
AND - the attic joists weren't beefed up for extra weight. They're just 2x6s. 16" on center.
So now I'm just curious as heck about it. Someone on here knows what's up, I can feel it.
Cheers,
-JR