Rerouted water lines

A little while back when I got my quarterly water bill, it became pretty obvious that something was leaking when the bill was $300 more than usual. After searching for obvious leaks, I came to find that the hot water handle to the shower of one of my tenant's apartment would not turn off all of the way. In case you were wondering, no, I can't read my tenants' minds.  So they are supposed to tell me when there are problems like this so that I can fix them immediately, but I digress.....

Well one thing leads to another and in the process of fixing the washer in the back of the shower handle cartridge, I had to shut off the water in order to do that. Since my building is shaped like a U, there are two main trunk lines from the basement with one hot and one cold each going to 3 units of that half of the building. Well the rocket scientists got the design half-right when they renovated my building by putting a shut off valve for both the hot and cold at the start of one of the trunks. It comes in handy for repairs like this so that I don't have to shut down the entire building to make a simple repair. But alas, this repair was on the trunk line of the other half of the building where they skipped out and didn't put shut off valves. So down goes the whole building until I fixed this leak.

Since I've gotten to understanding my building a little better and gone through numerous repairs with this same hassle, I had been meaning to add shut off valves of my own to this second side of the building. While I had the water to the entire building off, I took this as an opportunity to do just that.

The pipes run parallel, so the picture looks a little funky, but you get the idea. While adding these I also took the opportunity to fix another very messy configuration right before the trunk lines turn upwards into the 3 apartments. Unfortunately I never took a before picture, but imagine the hot and cold water lines in an X formation, but since they can't actually intersect that they awkwardly had one going above and the other going under. Lots of connections with potential sources for leaks, especially since none of it was actually supported correctly by clips to the joints.

My solution wasn't perfect by going around one pipe to get to the trunk line, but it reduced the number of connections and made it easier for any sane person looking at the pipes to easily follow them. Again just a couple things in the basement to improve the design of my system that I'd been meaning to get to, but this was the leak that got me to act on it.

In the future, I've decided I'm going to invest in separate meters for my apartments and pass the cost back to my tenants. In instances like this the extra $300 would fall on them to pay. Plus these new smart submeters that I'll get can actually detect leaks or running toilets or other things that are causing the water to be unusually high, and then alert me to it right way. Problem is that they are quite the investment upfront, even if their payback period is only around a year. I'm putting it on my to do list at this point.