A nasty faucet…

Sometime small incidents can escalate out of proportion. I’ll try to make that story clear, short and simple. 

As my son and I were installing some broken tiles on May 1, and I was trying to clean our tools, I noticed that my outdoor watering hose was woefully lacking pressure. I assumed there was still ice in it. In the ensuing days, I tried to thaw it, change the spigot, the reel, then the hose itself, to absolutely no avail. Thru elimination, the next element was the faucet itself. 

I examined at it and realized that it was indeed the problem. It’s a freeze-free outdoor faucet, that I started to take apart, hoping I’d clear some obstruction or change a faulty seal, but all this without any success. That’s when I noticed some wet cement falling apart around the outside wall, next to the faucet, that I realized that it might have burst. 

While I always take good care of not leaving the reel hose connected to the faucet in late fall, I might have been taken by surprise by an early, unusual October frost that permanently damaged it by bursting its foot long interior mechanism, and flooded the interior wall through all my subsequent attempts to test the system. 

This forced me to take apart portion of the wall in order to cure the problem ten days after I first noticed the it. At the end of the story, a huge amount of work for a minor incident.