Why did braided hoses get hot on their own? The story of one coven

I called last weekend, one of my friends. He asked me to come to him, to deal with a strange situation related to the sink mixer in the bathroom.

What is the actual problem: He lives in an apartment on the 3rd floor of a five-story building (Khrushchev). The distribution of hot/cold water is made with steel pipes. The faucets are connected to the pipeline using ordinary braided flexible hoses that come with the faucet…

And the problem is that periodically these same hoses themselves heat up to such an extent that it starts to stink of burnt rubber. At the same time, no one uses water. Basically, it happens late in the evening. Here is such a mystery!

We agreed with him this way: as soon as the hoses start to heat up again, he calls me and I come. After all, you need to see the problem with your own eyes! On the same day he called me.

I will say right away that even before examining the problem, I had a version that the heating was somehow connected with the colossal current leakage from one of the neighbors. Therefore, just in case, I took a multimeter with pliers with me.

I go to the bathroom. Indeed, there is a smell of pallet rubber. Before touching the hose braid with my hands, I first checked the presence of voltage with a conventional indicator-screwdriver. And ... the feel did not let me down! Glowing!

I take pliers, set the measurement limit to 200A and check how much current flows through the hose braid. I had no doubt that the device would show some value ... but the reading honestly surprised me: 20-25A !!!! Where is the current from? Yes, and not small!

Either someone winds up a disk electric meter in the old fashioned way (although everyone has electronic ones without the possibility of manipulation), or ... someone uses a pipe as a ground electrode and it has a crazy leak (Although ... it will be a bit too much for a leak). Or ... I don’t even know ... our country is full of “Kulibins”, who sometimes do such a thing ....

The reason for what is happening is rather that someone changed the steel riser to a plastic one. If earlier the current was calmly directed through steel pipes to the ground, now an obstacle has appeared in its path! So the current found another way for itself: through a mixer and a braid of flexible sleeves of my friend.

We resolved the issue the next day. In the morning, while this leak was gone, we replaced the hoses with plastic tubes. And just in case, they did it in the kitchen as well. The problem disappeared.

But ... a couple of days later, the same flexible hose burned out at a neighbor from the second floor! It burned thoroughly: the water gushed at full pressure! Well at least he was at home! Managed to shut off the faucets.

The man did not begin to solve the problem on his own: he "raised" the housing office, and they, in turn, attracted the RES. I don’t know the details of the showdown, but my friend heard that the commission allegedly found some kind of jumper between the “zero” in the inlet shield of the house in the basement and ... a water pipe !!!! Who, when and why stuck it there - history is silent.

These are the Kulibins-saboteurs we have ...