6 problem solving skills I have learned the hard way — Part Two
This is the second part of the story — you can read the first part here.
Hope
That winter, when we got enlightened by Johnny, was a warm one — by the time he came to inspect the apartment, the temperatures were well over freezing point, so again — we had to wait one year to see the results of our hard labor.
So, did we fix the problem?
Nope.
Next winter, this winter — I hate to say this — the pipes froze, again.
I felt insanity slowly growing in my mind — all those years, all the attempts we made, all the quarrels with the housing association — nothing helped, everything was the same, same problem, no solution, no water.
I began dreaming about cold air. I imagined how it sneaks in between the cracks, how it finds its way through all that useless insulation, just to hug our pipes with its cold breath, making water freeze just under one night.
I tried visualizing the wall inside, to see what the problem might be, and to see what else we could try.
And yes, I did send a new message to our housing association.
Three weeks ago.
They are working on the case, they said — three weeks ago.
Sometimes I felt that they just wait with the answer until ice melts, however, this time the weather didn’t play nice — it had been below freezing point for several weeks.
What got the situation even more complicated was that we started to consider moving again, to another apartment (not because of the pipes though).
But how are we going to sell this one, with freezing pipes, cold walls? Do I have to take the case to court?
Or should I just hack our way around the freezing, by installing new water pipes on the inner side of the wall? That cost I didn’t want to take, so perhaps, get the housing association to pay for it… after all, we’ve been living with this problem for four winters and three years now, and they took their time responding to my mails, that’s for sure.
But what if… if it’s somehow, still our fault?
It felt risky, and we still knew nothing.
I had another look at the bathroom, for the 1000th time. I ran my hands over the cold tiles again, for the 1000th time.
Why on all Earth is this happening…?
Why are these walls so cold?
Walls… as in more than one?
Wait a sec.
The corner of the bathroom, where another wall connects, is also cold.
T̵h̵a̵t̵’̵s̵ ̵f̵i̵n̵e̵.̵ That’s understandable.
But it’s not just the corner, but a considerable part of the connecting wall, which is an internal one, is also cold.
I’d say it’s actually the coldest of all.
Why?
Back to the drawing board
So on the other side of the connecting wall, there’s our kitchen.
But it still didn’t make sense. What’s up with the temperature drop there?
I mentioned above that the central ventilation system pulls air from the apartment on two points — the bathroom and the kitchen.
In order to regulate the airflow if needed, both ventilation holes are equipped with adjustable covers, like this:
Or… are they?
The one in the bathroom was installed recently (well, what’s recently… three years ago…), and is visible, and we have tightened it a bit already, hoping that it causes less air being sucked in from outside (… it didn’t…).
The other one in the kitchen is behind some wooden decoration plates, above the cabinets. Those cover plates also had ventilation slots to allow air to travel, but as for the valve itself, I had never seen it.
Well, hope dies last, I grabbed the screwdriver — it was time to check!
What I saw behind the plate is what you see here:
And so I became ecstatic! You might ask, so what, it’s ugly, no big deal — it’s no wonder they hid it behind the decoration.
But wait — because this picture tells a story….
Once upon a time (in 2008), a brave soul who lived in this apartment before us, decided to facelift their kitchen. So out they went to the nearest interior design store, called HTH.
They paid a nice little sum to get a new kitchen delivered & built — and it was a nice kitchen indeed, you wouldn’t get a much better one, even today, 13 years later.
In order for the cabinets to have enough room, they had to decommission the door on that wall. All the walls are drywalls, so it wasn’t hard — just had to buy some extra plates, use them to cover the door frame, and job done.
The guy who was responsible for the job— let’s call him Dave, from HTH — must have had some sleepless nights the days before. By the time he realized that he successfully covered not just the door, but the ventilation hole as well, he also managed to mount all the cabinets, the oven and the fridge on top of all that.
So instead of unmounting all that again, Dave thought — well, a hole is just a hole, right? — so he grabbed his hammer, and blasted a hole in the drywall.
Air began to flow.
And there you go, it ventilates, see? —Dave said, and went home, job well done.
Or at least, that’s what he thought.
There was an airflow indeed, but you see, since the wall was now open, the system didn’t just suck air from the kitchen.
It also sucked air from the wall itself, and drywalls are mostly empty inside, so it sucked air from the connecting, external wall too —essentially establishing a flow of cold air form the outside, along & inside the bathroom wall, then in the kitchen wall, up to the ventilation hole:
And this was just one problem.
As you might see on the photo, there was no valve on the pipe either. There’s a considerable difference in cross-section size when you do have a valve, compared to when you don’t — and the larger the cross-section is, the more air can leave. No wonder we had a cyclone coming from the window ventilation slots when they were open.
The fact that without a valve you can’t even control the airflow is just the topping on the cake.
We immediately closed the ventilation with a plastic bag, around 8 o’clock that evening.
Sure, the kitchen needs fresh air, but to see if this makes any difference, we wanted to do something drastic.
By midnight, we had water back.
We had water back, despite that outside it still was, and had been freezing cold, for many weeks.
Why we didn’t have this problem before the bathroom rebuild, you ask? I say we probably had it, we just didn’t notice.
Maybe because the bathroom did not have tiles before — tiles are essentially stones, which feel colder in general. Maybe because we didn’t have pipes inside the wall then. Maybe because the gaps between the pipes and the insulation allowed for more air to travel.
But who cares now, really…?
Tidying up
I almost couldn’t believe it, but after all those years, we found the problem.
Of course, we could not leave the ventilation closed there.
I used an elastic pipe to channel the airflow away from the wall, put a valve on the other end of the pipe, and closed the wall with acrylic plates.
We got fresh air and water back.
Now it looks like this:
Takeaways?
A few days later, when we still had water, even on the coldest day of the winter, I began thinking.
Why didn’t I check the kitchen earlier? Why did this take three years to fix? Reflecting on what & how we were thinking, and what we did, I felt that I failed a bit as a software developer. To say the least, I should have been able to think more objectively.
Symptoms don’t always appear right where the problem is.
We were unbelievably focused on the wall itself. It must have been the problem, right? Bad insulation! It was cold, cold air was blowing in… except that all this had nothing to do with the real root cause.
Consider all the clues, not just the most apparent ones.
We did know that it wasn’t just the external facing wall that was cold. We noticed the problem with the kitchen wall a while back, but didn’t pay much attention to it — since it would be fixed if the main wall was fixed, right?
Except that it was the other way around, and actually, there was no reason for that wall to be cold, unless air travels in that direction… for some reason…
But the main symptom blinded us from seeing, and thinking about this.
Don’t assume. Check & verify.
For three years we always had assumed that the kitchen was okay — while in reality that was the only place in the whole apartment that we didn’t check, or change, as it was in a good enough condition.
Had we, even once, thought to verify that air inlet, we could have solved this problem much, much sooner.
Don’t do multiple changes in parallel. Ever.
At the very moment when there had been two parties who touched the wall, the finger pointing began.
This should be a no-brainier — the more you change, the more can go wrong, and less overview you have. When writing software, you have more control though —in real life, it’s easier said than done.
Self-confidence is good, but with a pinch of healthy self-doubt, it’s even better.
Luckily, during all the inspections and conversations I had about this, I never shouted at anyone. I never stated that you or them were at fault.
I always had this faint, but specific doubt about the origin of the problem — what if… what if it’s neither the subcontractor, nor our workers that caused this?
As slight the chance was, so much it mattered at the end — I could then tell everyone, including the housing association, what the root cause turned out to be, without feeling ashamed.
(Okay, I felt a bit ashamed, but still…)
As for self-doubt, it’s enough with just a healthy bit. Don’t assume that what’s there from before can’t be faulty.
The kitchen was there when we moved in. It worked well, looked nice.
People around me, and including me, get the feeling that construction quality these days is getting worse — stuff that was done decades ago, on the other hand, that’s the real thing, right? Everything perfect, and well done.
Well, nope.
Just because something has been there from before, done by others, and appears to be working as it should, doesn’t mean it’s not faulty in some way.
For quite some time now I have been thinking about this story, and I still find it fascinating how simple the answer was.
While I suspect the fascination will pass, the lessons it taught me — those I will probably (hopefully) never forget.
