6 problem solving skills I have learned the hard way — Part One

The beginning

We moved to a new apartment early 2016 — and we did it very quickly, because our previous home was a rental, where the contract was terminated by the owner unexpectedly.

A few months later we decided to modernize one of the bathrooms — which had to be a complete overhaul, first tearing it down to bare walls, then rebuilding it from there.
So we hired a professional team, who delivered a relatively decent result four weeks later.

Then winter came — and along with it:

The symptoms

One morning, there was no water coming from the bathroom tap anymore — while we still had water in other parts of the apartment.
Grabbed my mobile, called the plumber who did the job, and he came already that afternoon.

We quickly realized what had happened — the pipes froze!

There were three extra circumstances that led to this —

1. The bathroom’s wall, on which the tap had been mounted, was an external wall.
2. During the bathroom rebuild, the pipes for the now problematic tap had been moved behind the bathroom’s walls for aesthetic reasons.
3. The building in which the apartment is located, was itself undergoing a rehabilitation project (driven by the housing association), part of which was changing the walls’ external insulation.

Me and the plumber walked around the building, up the scaffolds, where we saw that half of the insulation was missing right behind where my bathroom was, and the pipes were out, exposed to open air (open, -5°C air).

There wasn’t much to do at that moment — I waited for the external rehabilitation to finish, while my plumber asked the workers to pay a bit of extra attention to the insulation around the pipes.
The weather also got warmer not so long after, we got water back, so job done, happy times, right?

Nope. Next winter, the pipes froze again.
This became:

The problem

So we had no tap water in the bathroom, which was, to say the least, impractical.
On the top of that, something that had been unconsciously bothering us for a while, became apparent — it was unreasonably cold in the bathroom!

We measured the wall’s temperature, and there was around 8°C temperature drop in various places, (the coldest spot being 12°C) especially around the points where the sink & the cabinets were mounted.
Next to the cabinets we could even feel cold air blowing in.

It very much seemed like something was wrong with that wall. Together with the extra insulation that had been put in, there was supposed to be 30 centimeters of glass wool, then wood plates, then bathroom plates, then tiles on the top of all that — still, the surface of the bathroom tiles was as cold as it was.

Our working theory became that the wall was not insulated properly. We made a desperate attempt to warm up the water pipes by blowing hot air on the bathroom tiles, from the inside.
In other words, tried warming up a 10mm thick stone tile, behind that a 15mm thick plastic bathroom plate, behind that a 10mm thick wooden plate, behind that the air in the wall… with that the exterior protective pipe, with the actual frozen pipe inside.

Guess what — it didn’t work.
So began:

The case

I sent a message to the housing association, describing the events leading up to that point. Can’t say that they were lightning fast, but finally they responded.

One week after, the subcontractor who did the external work, sent two men to inspect the wall. They insisted that our workers had done a terrible job, among other things they put the pipes behind the wall, and forgotten to insulate the wall boxes for the electric outlets (which then allowed cold air to come in).
They unmounted the wall cabinets, and put silicone everywhere.

So did this help?

Nope.

I contacted our plumber again to ask him about the pipes in the wall & the wall boxes.
He paid me a visit, and took some pictures with a thermal camera that showed the same temperature difference as what we measured on the surface of the bathroom tiles.
It turned out that the corners were the coldest — and as such it must be something wrong with the insulation, he said.
Before this, I had doubts — what if the subcontractor was right, and we should not have put the pipes in the wall? What if it was our plumber’s fault?
But the more we thought about it the less it made sense. Cold air blowing in? Across more than 30 centimeters of insulation? That couldn’t be.

So I contacted the housing association again.

The next plan coming from them was that they hire someone to tear down the bathroom walls (from the inside) to try to fix the problem by replacing/adding glass wool where needed.
Needless to say — allowing them to effectively destroy our new bathroom was out of the question.

The third suggestion they gave was that they get the subcontractor to open the walls from the outside, but only if we agree to pay the costs when they prove that there was nothing wrong with the insulation.
The apartment was on the 3rd floor, so with scaffolds & such it would have cost around $15.000 at that time.
Was it an attractive offer?

Nope.

Then I asked — why do we, uneducated people, must guess what might had been wrong with the bathroom wall? Why can’t we ask someone, who knows this stuff, and is impartial in this case?

So then they came:

Consultants to the rescue

Luckily the housing association agreed to hire construction experts, consultants, ones that they had worked with before and were seen as reliable.
As reliable they seemed, so useless they turned out to be — they concluded that both parties (the subcontractor who worked on the insulation, and our workers who renovated the bathroom) claimed that they had done everything right, so it was not possible to tell what the problem might be — without opening the wall, that is. What a conclusion, right? Couldn’t have figured this out myself.

The funny thing with freezing is, that obviously, it happens only when it’s cold outside. So when weather got warmer, it was no point in trying to find anything using e.g thermal cameras and such anymore.
We had to wait almost one year to continue the investigation.

Next winter — drumrolls — the pipes froze again.

This time another guy, from another company came to inspect the apartment — meet Johnny.
Johnny seemed to know what he was doing — he knew the structure of the building down to the nitty-gritty details.
He discovered two things. For one, all the ventilation ducts (the ones on the top of the window frames) were closed; second, that the threshold under the doors inside were too high, leaving no room for air to move between rooms (under the doors).

Side note — the air in the apartment was meant to be kept fresh by sucking out used air on two points of the apartment. One of these points was in the bathroom, another one was in the kitchen. Fresh air then would come in via the small gaps over the windows, then travel under the doors through all the rooms.

And Johnny was right, we indeed had closed the window ventilation, because cold air had been blowing in there like crazy — it’s no joke to have warming turned on if cold, -10°C air from the outside cools everything down.
I had no idea about the thresholds though.
But it made sense, right? Not letting air in where it should come in would cause air being sucked in via other channels, like, via the holes in the wall.

The bottom line was, he told us that there’s no point in further investigation before we fix those two problems.

So we felt guilty, because it all just made sense.
We were ashamed.
We did what he asked.
We opened the ventilation ducts.
We replaced the thresholds.
We had hope.

Read on — you can find the second part here.