Plumbing Leak Freaky Facts

Plumbing leaks of all types can become really freaky after a while. Although you may not think that a little drip here and a little drip there may mean anything, the truth of the matter is that, sometimes they can get positively freaky.

Consider the ancient Chinese Water Torture, for instance. The drip, drip, drip of water on your forehead was said to drive a person insane. Of course, no one believed that to be possible, so a popular myth challenging show decided to see if you would go crazy when exposed to dripping water.

In all actuality, the myth was proved correct. Dripping water had an unsettling effect on one of the participants, and that means that any constant drip from a leak may cause you to go bananas! Better to get that dripping repaired than to suffer the consequences.

Freaky leaks have been appearing as pinholes in copper pipes. The pipes literally corrode through from the inside out and develop tiny little leaks through the copper. It has happened behind walls, under foundations and in basements, among other places where copper pipe is used to deliver water. No one knows why this occurs because water and copper do not react as corrosive together. But in communities from Andover, Massachusetts to Phoenix Arizona, and several other places around the U.S. and the world, mysterious pinholes are causing leaks in copper pipes when it should not be happening.

Plumbing leaks have been a problem since ancient times, but The Romans took seal and gasket making to an art form. The first compression seals may have been gold or copper wire pressed into place between pipe joints. Leather and horse-hair were used as washers and even finely machined lead pieces were fitted so tightly together that they didn’t leak. That the Romans had the best plumbing of the ancient world cannot be denied, of course the use of lead seals and pipes may have led to the downfall of the Roman Empire since everyone may have been slowly succumbing to lead poisoning.  And if that isn’t a freaky fact about leaking plumbing, I don’t know what is.

The worst leak in the universe happened on the Russian Mir Space Station. The toilet waste holding tanks began to overflow and leak into the space station proper. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem because a pump was engineered to eject the waste contents out into space. However, it was learned that someone forgot to install the pump that needed to do this, so when the storage tanks became full, they began to leak. A new pump was eventually sent up to the 2 cosmonauts and 1 astronaut, but until then, they had to make do with a freaky situation.

When is a leak not a leak you might ask? How about the incredibly high water bill that a couple was dealing with month after month? They couldn’t figure out where the leak was coming from because they knew they were not using up that much water.

Every inch of piping was inspected for a leak, but to no avail. The pipes and the pipe joints were all dry to the bone.

So when a video camera was set up, the answer became clear. Their pet little kitty had learned how to flush the toilet. There it sat for, sometimes hours, flushing the toilet and watching the water go down the drain. The kitty never did this when someone was home, but as soon as the couple left for work, the little feline decided to play.

The freakiest fact about leaking is that a dripping water faucet can potentially waste 3000 gallons per year, and a leaking toilet can waste 200 gallons of water per day. And that is about as freaky as it gets.