The Accidental Geyser

We washed a load of laundry last night! In our own house! Oh, function. How I’ve missed you.

The sink cabinet is in place, and the washer and dryer are up and running. I ran into a few problems along the way, but mostly things like needing a gas line that was 5′ instead of 4′ long. Easily fixable, just necessitating another trip for supplies. And I did have a water incident last night, but all is well now!

Here’s what happened. I finally had everything hooked up. Gas line to the dryer. Semi-rigid dryer duct all hooked up. Hot water to the washer, and cold water split to both the washer and steam dryer. The last piece of the working laundry room puzzle was the drain hose.

I replaced my washing machine with a Samsung FlexWash — a relatively new option on the market with a secondary washer. (Sounds useful, right? I’m pretty excited about it! Lowe’s is sponsoring the laundry room reveal, so they provided materials and appliances for this whole project.) There’s only one water inlet each for hot and cold and that installation was straightforward, but it has two separate drain hoses. They meet together at the end with a Y-shaped adapter, and that part goes into a standpipe drain. Ours is behind drywall with access through a washing machine outlet box.

I was about 12″ short, so I figured I would just hook up a universal washing machine hose extension and be good. Nope! I wasn’t thinking about the logistics until I read in the manual not to do it, but of course it makes sense. Water would flow into one hose, be pumped out, but then backflow into the other section if the adapter wasn’t right at the drain. OK, so plan B. Instead of one extension hose, I used two — in between the machine’s hoses and the connecting piece. There were no instruction and it wasn’t the easiest thing to figure out, but I bought reducing couplings and clamps and hoses and messed around until I got it. YAY! Ran a test cycle and thought all was well. Kind of loud while it was draining, but eh? I was watching the drain hoses and all of my connections, feeling pretty good about solving my problem and not seeing any leaks. Meanwhile, water was flooding into the cabinet two feet to my right! Wonderful.

I took out the old utility sink two months ago and never capped the plumbing. I turned off the water supply and left the remainder of the drain pipes alone, not thinking that it would be a problem. The utility sink and standpipe from the washer are connected behind the drywall where it’s out of sight, out of mind. So of course when the washer was draining, water flowed down the pipe and plenty came up and out of the old, uncapped utility sink drain! Secret cabinet geyser! I realized the problem pretty quickly, stopped the machine, and soaked up the water.

Back to the store before they closed. I bought a J-pipe, 12″ extension, and a cap suitable for high-pressure (something important to note, because not all PVC components are). This is a temporary fix because there will be a new sink in place soon enough, so I wrapped the pipe threads with plumber’s tape as opposed to using glue/cement before wrench-tightening the connections. I probably could have just used a cap alone, but I thought it would be best to raise the height to above where I assume the standpipe and sink drain meet behind the wall. I am not a plumbing professional! Take my solution with a big shoulder shrug and fingers crossed, but it worked! And somewhere around here I have a leak detector from when I went to visit Delta’s headquarters last year. I think the laundry room is a great place to set that thing up.