customer says foreign matter is comming out of water pipes. House is 10-12 years old, has copper plumbing in slab. One portion ( bath tub in one bath) is discharging what looks like very small worm like material — perhaps some sort of algea or “slime” growing inside one particular section of the copper plumbing. I have no clue how to clean out this problem. Anyone seen anything like this – any ideas as to how to clean it out?
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Does it have the orginal waterheater?
That is about the time frame that water heaters where equiped with plastic dip tubes that disentegrated.
Here is a list with the brands and serial numbers.
http://www.911plumbing.com/waterheaters.html
Another possibility is that a valve part is disentegrating.
Also is the house on city water or a well?
maybe the well was drilled into a mezcal flavored aquifer <g>
listening for the secret.......searching for the sound...
Can't say without seeing the stuff, but it might be that there's an iron bacteria problem. What might be appearing are the "flocks" of iron bacteria. Is this house on a well? Does the water have iron content? If it is iron bacteria, it's not a health problem, but more info might lead to better potential diagnosis. There are measures to deal with eradicting the problem.
Thanks for your response -- The house is on city water supply and the stuff isn't metallic. What's really interesting is that the stuff only appears in one section of the system. I have checked the aerators on all other faucets and found nothing, so it has to be coming only through the section of pipe leading to that bath tub. Because the plumbing is in the slab, I can't figure out any way to get around it.
Thanks
Any chance this is coming from the valve assembly itself on that one tub and not the pipe leading to it?
Is this plumbed in rigid or flex copper? Reason I ask is if it was flex (not likely, I realize) you might be able to cut things apart and feed/pull a swab of some sort thru this line. Nah.....no such chance.
I'll go get some barley pop and see if that helps.
Knowledge is power, but only if applied in a timely fashion.
Dave,
Found myself thinking about your problem while we whacked down shingles yesterday. Here's a thought off the beaten path.........Do these folks have kids that use this bathtub alone?.....if you catch my drift. Kids have been known to squirt or stuff all manner of things in tub spouts.Knowledge is power, but only if applied in a timely fashion.
Nope -- but, thanks for the thought -- I think what we're going to have to do is find the branch o f the water supply going to this tub, cut it loose, then flow some clorine bleach through it. If--and that's the operative word here -- it is "slime" growing in the pipes, this will kill it. The problem is that the supply pipes come off a manifold that is hidden within a sheetrock wall, so it will be expensive to do this.
Is the wormlikematerial alive? Does it move at all, or ooze when you sqeeze it? Is the material coming out of the shower head AND/OR tub spout? How about the faucet in the same bathroom?
Did this bathroom, specfically the shower/ tub go unused for a prolonged period of time? My guess, if it is alive, the problem is between the spout and showerbody. Not so bad.
If the showerbody line was not used very much since construction ( I know this is a longshot) it may be that an exessive amount of flux was used during installation and it is finally coming free.
Other than that I dunno.