you never know when having an empty 400 gallon will come in handy

[mike31154]

Good to know major disaster averted. Has me thinking now. My house built in the '60s with copper pipes. Wonder if I should start thinking about replacing them? A year after I moved in I started noticing a 'water running' sound whenever my ear was close to the water meter. Kind of let it slide for a while since the sensitive little red pointer on the meter that shows you if you have a leaky tap or something wasn't moving. Eventually it bugged me enough that I investigated & found a wet spot in my front yard. Started digging down & sure enough ended up with a pool in the hole I dug. Front yard slopes down to the Avenue & I dug down a couple of feet before I figured out I wasn't going to reach the feed pipe digging by hand. Called contractor & he ended up digging down almost 10 feet until the pipe was uncovered. Repaired it with a pvc fitting. Apparently the fill they used in my yard had a lot of trash in it & a piece of metal resting on the copper pipe appears to have caused the corrosion. Dissimilar metals don't play nice when in contact over the years. It was a pinhole as well, but with city pressure at 120-130 psi I imagine a fair bit of water was lost through there. No idea how long the hole was there, could well have been there already when I bought the place in 2004. I think I had it repaired in '05 or '06. Also makes one wonder how many other leaks there are in a city or municipal system that go undetected for years.