Cooler woes!

So on Sunday (Mother's Day) after everyone left, we decided that we'd figure out where to turn on the water for the evaporative coolers (we have two) since it's getting a lot warmer here. We've been looking around the house for quite awhile trying to determine where the valve is, and we finally did find the valve in the basement and opened it up. After we heard a good amount of water flowing through the pipe, we decided that was good enough and turned it off after about 20 seconds.


We were going to go up on the roof to verify that the water was going into the cooler(s), so we headed upstairs. On the way up the stairs from the basement, we could hear dripping/pouring water ... when we got up to the main floor we looked over and saw it. To our horror, water was pouring out of the cooler vent onto our hardwood, rug, pillows, fireplace, etc and right in front of our big screen TV in the family room! There was a freaking waterfall in our family room!! After spewing all kinds of profane language very loudly, we got all the towels in the house and dried up all the water on the floor and put pots under where it was still dripping.  Luckily we only had that water on for about 20 seconds so it was pretty much done leaking.

Had to dry off the rug on the back porch for a day.

We took off the vent cover / diffuser and could see that there was a water pipe running up through the vent -- which was obviously where the leak was.  I couldn't really tell where the pipe was leaking from though ...

View up into the vent, with water line running through it.

Since I couldn't tell where the pipe was leaking from, I submitted a repair request on ServiceMagic.com.  The repair guy called almost immediately, and he said the best fix for this is not to fix the line but rather to install the lines on the outside of the house coming from the hose bib!  He said that on new installs, the homeowner has to literally scream and go crazy on him if they actually want him to install the water line on the inside of the house since it's such a bad idea.  The install on the outside is easy and safe, since any freezes or leaks won't cause damage to your home since it's all outside.

However, he quoted $250 to do this for us, which is a bit pricey.  I know that copper tubing is pricey, but not THAT pricey!  I figure I can do the work myself, so I will just get it done and save about $150 in the process.  We'll see how it goes!