Sometimes I absolutely despise "private innovation". We have a broken bathtub hot water tap gasket, and nobody has ever seen the like of it before. It doesn't use any kind of normal cartridge either. No simple replacement possible. Therefore, we have to crack the tile and replace the whole tap set. Without that, water shoots out of the broken tap. You can see the bathtub tap pictures. In the interim, crack the tile and cap off the hot water line so that we can actually have a hot water shower tomorrow!
The problem arose because the hot water tap gasket had gotten old, so it didn't allow hot water out. It's Deanna's birthday and she really wanted a bath for her birthday. Being the ever handy hubby that I am, I had the brilliant idea to swap the taps. Then the cold wouldn't work properly, but the hot would come out. Everything worked fine until I tried to swap the taps back. Because I SUCK at plumbing, I think I put too much of the sealant on the inside threads. Which meant that when I tried to pull the gasket out, part of it didn't. Sometimes called "broke". You can imagine the cursing that was uttered when I realized the situation that we were in at 7pm at night.
Now there is a really cool web part of this story. Turns out that Deanna's parents have an awfully similar looking tap set called supergrif. I talked to the supergrif distributed and explained what had happened. They were confused, suggested I bring out the part. Rather than drive the 45 minutes each way, I put up the pictures on my site.
I then called Carla to chat about the setup. She says she's never seen anything like it, nobody at the distributer has seen anything like it, and it's not a supergrif part. Of course, the records from the previous owner are missing only 1 receipt from the bathroom reno, namely the bathtub faucet set.
So it was very cool talking to Carla about the stuff on the phone rather than going to Poco. But it was even cooler when I called up Deanna's Dad (who's a universe more handy than I am), and he says "the gasket in the picture is how long and wide"? I realize I didn't tell him I'd put up the pictures, and he was teledebugging our bathtub as well!
Now I'm supposed to be working on a TAG finding on extensibility and versioning, but I've been given a "Find" hot water message that has been marked with "MustUnderstand". :-) Good thing Jeff can come at 4pm to tap off the hot water line. Looks like we'll be starting our bathroom reno a little sooner than we thought.
