Yesterday was not a good day. I supposed it does not quite qualify as a really bad day. But all sorts of things happened that I would really rather had not happened.
For starters I found out that removing the broken valve did not fix the problems we were having with the hot water in the particular riser in question. This did not surprise me. I already sort of knew that it was going to turn out like this.
You see, after we installed the new valve I put my hands on the pipes and found that the re-circulation line was cool. At the time, I hoped that this was just because we were running so much hot water in an effort to get the water to clear up that there was no hot water to re-circulate. But I did fully believe that even then.
The question I am now faced with is figuring out why is the hot water not recirculating? I figured out that hot water valve that we replaced was broke in part because the re-circulation line was warm where as the hot water line was stone cold. Thus, I knew that hot water was being forced up the re-circulation line. And that would only happen if the hot water valve was broken. After that the only challenge was finding which valve was broken.
Now the situation is reversed. The hot water line is hot, but the re-circulation line is cold.
There is a number of reason why this might be so. All I need to do is go through the system in a systematic way and I should be able to figure out what I need to do.
But I never did this because of all the other things that happened that I didn’t want to happen.
One day I will get it licked.
But by that point I might have the whole building re-plumbed.