Alert! Alarm!

My beloved bride had a cool idea today. We have a Sonos audio system in our living room. It’s how we get surround sound and movie theater audio goodness. She wanted to upgrade the system. Good idea, right? She ordered a new beam and we went to Best Buy to pick it up.

After, while we were still in the parking lot, she had another great idea. Wanna go for a mini road trip somewhere? Sure! How about the ocean? Sure! Off we went. 

When we got home a couple hours later, Jen heard a noise. Oh wait! You don’t know the back story. Hold on a second while I fill you in.

Back story: Our house used to have a garage. Years ago we had it remodeled into a primary bedroom suite with an attached bathroom. The outflow pipe from the bathroom was far away from the outflow for the rest of the house and we had to have a pump installed. The pump is under the floor with a little trap door to get to it. That trap door had not been opened in the 500 years since we finished the remodel. It is located in a closet and we had put a big closet organizer into the closet and part of it was sitting on the trap door.

Okay, back to the main story. When we got home from the ocean a couple of hours later, Jen heard a noise. She was standing next to the bathroom and I was on the other side of the room. I thought the noise was a bird being loud and obnoxious outside. She said no, it wasn’t a bird. I then thought it was the mini-split system’s door being squeaky. She said no, it was not the mini-split. I stood next to her so that I could hear what she was hearing and I heard it too. 

There were two sounds. One as an alarm beeping like crazy. The other was the pump running more or less continuously. I went into the closet with the trap door and sure enough, the beeping was coming from there. Well, shit.

We both had a job to do from that point. Mine was to clear almost everything out of the closet (there was a lot of stuff in there) and open the trap door. Jen’s was to find a plumber. Oh yeah, it’s Independence Day. A national holiday. Almost everyone in the country had the day off (except for the poor staff at Best Buy). 

I was able to get to the pump. I had to move almost an entire wardrobe and partially disassemble the organizer but I did it. Jen was able to eventually get a plumber on the phone who could not come help tonight but did offer to help talk us through shutting down the pump until they could come… on Monday. While she was giving the plummer the details I found that the alarm beep was tied to a flashing red light with a label that said to open the unit to see what was causing the alarm. Well, I wasn’t doing that. There was also a button that said push to silence alarm. I pushed it. Oh what a relief.

So the alarm was still going off but it was silent now and at the plumber’s suggestion we killed the power to the pump from the circuit box. The situation has been remedied for now. On Monday the plumber will come and tell us that we need to replace the unit which should cost $10000000000000. Would that be preferable to finding out there is a clog in the sewage pipe? I don’t know. Would it be preferable to finding out there is a leak in the sewage pipe? Probably. I mean, our house doesn’t smell like donald trump so I don’t think our en suite bathroom is shitting itself. We’ll find out on Monday though.

Eventually we were able to relax and that lead to us putting up the new Sonos system. It got a little annoying trying to link everything together in their app, but eventually it all worked and now we are watching Project Hail Mary (again) and enjoying the kick ass audio.

Tomorrow I think I am going to go into Boston really early in the morning and wander around Beacon Hill and the riverwalk along the Charles with my cameras. I’m also officially into the 50 Songs in 90 Days Challenge, so there will be music to make too.

One thing is for sure… we are not going to use the primary bedroom suite’s bathroom for a couple of days.