Let there be... hot water
Published: Mon, 08/29/16
Last Friday I restored hot water to a house with only cold water. The owners had only just moved in on the Monday and Venetia and I are redecorating the house. The immersion heater element was burned out and I happen to have a special box spanner in my plumbing tool box which enables removal of just that item. Apparently someone who has looked after the house before came in and turned on the boiler claiming that would restore hot water. Good plan, except that the whole heating system is drained down at present so there was no way a lit boiler in the garage was going to warm up a tank 10 or more metres away.
I knew system was drained down because I had already removed a radiator from the bathroom (to facilitate stripping wall paper). We took the radiator off with great care in order to avoid any water damage, but it was all a bit of an anticlimax when we discovered the system was as dry as our gardens have been for most of this summer.
I don’t claim to be a plumber, I just do quite a lot of plumbing jobs as part of our handyman work. I find plumbing rather fascinating though since there is always an element of discovering the hidden and unpredictable. I might think I know why a pipe is blocked or why there is no hot water but investigation very often reveals a completely different reason. In the example above turning on the boiler should have resulted in hot water in the tank. Taking off a radiator entailed real risk of water damage if not done correctly. Knowing the system was drained down would have meant also knowing both these results were impossible in this case. A very good example of a gap between assumption and actual reality. Intelligent assumptions about situations are good in the sense that you are prepared for the worse. Not changing your assumption when the reality does not match your expectation is a sign of madness.
To do plumbing you need to understand the basic principles of how water behaves and how common plumbing system’s are designed. You also need to know what can go wrong, stuck valves, nails through pipes and so on, so that you are ready to deal with such eventualities. But, perhaps most importantly, you need an open mind able to discover the actual cause of the problem so that the correct remedy can be applied.
Having solved one problem more knowledge and experience is then brought to the next situation, hopefully making it easier and quicker to sort out the next issue. Or, it may make you ready for a more ambitious problem to solve.
When we talk about past, present and future in Stav this is exactly what we mean. We have knowledge from past experience and education. We get confronted with situations which we assess according to previous experience. Resolving the situation should provide new experience and more knowledge for the next time. If we have very little prior knowledge then a situation may provide a dramatic learning curve. If we have a great deal of knowledge it may be difficult to see that a situation is actually different from anything we have seen before.
When asked what Stav is the only good answer is that it is a method of education. Teaching you to see, think, act, learn and grow in a cycle of seeing, thinking, acting and learning. It does not matter too much what the context is, sometimes it is plumbing that does it for me, so long as you are growing in the process.
regards
Graham
PS For the past couple of months I have been very busy doing the kind of stuff described above. I have also been doing a lot of training, both teaching and learning at a couple of camps. That is partly why you have not been hearing from me. Stand by for some major updates tomorrow.