What Happened?
We started off with an old AC unit — 32 years and counting. The air handler has a coil that had a primary drain for the condensation, but the secondary was capped off.
The condensation drain line went down, into the wall, into the slab, and across the garage to the outside where there was an “innovative” drain with a “gooseneck” coming out fo the concrete. The gooseneck was an attempt when the concrete was poured to mitigate a clearly bad implementation by the original builder.
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- started with this…
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- which we decided to do a dry well — and cut into the concrete…
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- found this… which was totally wrong
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- so moved the AC compressors over, and started digging
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- and digging
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- and digging … until I had a 10 gallon hole. So rocky, hard to get to, concrete that overflowed when poured that had to be cut thru — figure most of a day of digging the damn hole
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- so, I lined it with weed block … cable tied the week block fabric around drain pipe to keep it inside the protected region..
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- then cut several pieces of perforated drain pipe and stacked it horizontally (to deal with the different levels and varying widths in the hole)
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- then covered it with river rock,
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- had to patch a bit of concrete and now that is done.
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- on the garage AC air handler unit … started like this…
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- water below in the air return…
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- had some mold starting…
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- but it doesn’t grow in gypsum, so that’s fine…
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- under the air handler in the “return” from the inside of the house…
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- stripped the paper off the drywall (the discoloration is paper not mold)
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- patched the drywall. Pink will dry white. Almost there. Need to texture and paint.
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- And another hour plus on Return vacuumed and spray throughout with a anti-microbial. texture the patch, and paint it clean the registers.
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- installed the beginning of the new secondary (that didn’t exist)
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- oh … and the funniest part? well, when I blew the pipe out, it was stubborn. when I got to about 70 psi, I heard a loud pop … like a gun shot… my spotter, got covered … the mud did a bank shot
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- huge mess to clean up eveywhere when the mud exploded out, and had to move the AC condensers back in place (nudged them over to dig the hole)