Brilliant!

I often post that I am lucky enough to have a spouse who is Very Handy. He can fix just about anything. In fact, when he can't fix something, I start to worry!

But he is BRILLIANT.

Case in point: we discovered yesterday that we have a substantial water leak in the basement somewhere -- the carpet in the workout area downstairs is in varying states of damp --> soaked across most of the room.

But we couldn't SEE any source of the water. It was somewhat obvious that it had to come from the utility room somewhere, but the floor was dry. There was no spot near the baseboard along any wall where the carpet was "more wet" to indicate a leak, there were no pipes in any of the other walls, no sign of water on any of the walls or baseboards, and the really, really wet spot was in the middle of the room. Huh? How?

We briefly thought that it was actually seeping up from the floor, but that made no sense at all.

So, we st up the fans to start to dry things out, to see if we could find the source o the problem.

Now, I have a really serious phobia about water in the house -- having lived in an old house with various leaks and weirdness, the sound of running water in the house freaks me out, and the thought that we had water from SOMEWHERE leaking into the basement made me very, very anxious. When the Adorable Husband simply shrugged and said we were doing all we could and had no idea what was going on...well, I mgiht have been a bit snarky, too.

So the Adorable Husband, after dinner, sets off downstairs to find the source of the problem - humoring me, of course. About an hour later, he emerges triumphantly from the basement...we have a humidifier on our furnace, which has a drain pipe that is wired to the drain in the floor. It was not "leaking" or missing the drain...but the drain itself was silted in and after about ten minutes, it filled in entirely, and the water runoff from the humidifier filled in the small depression and was wicked up by the carpet. It would only happen when the heat was on -- which it was quite often last week, but hasn't been for a week, and only when it twa son often enough to fill up the drain and overflow. We hadn't been down in the basement for a week or so, so the carpet has been sittig down there, soaking for a at least week, even though th eheat hasn't run in at least that long. Ugh.

We apparently hit the right combination of temperatue and furnace activity to cause the problem. I'm really surprised at the amount of water that travelled along a low point in the concrete and into the other room. Wow. Luckily, it is absolutely clean water, so I hope if we get it dried out, we won't have weird mold problems.

But Yeah! for patient, handy Adorable husband!