“Is lime an acid or a base?” I asked.
“It’s a base,” someone said.
“Then how can it eat pipes?” I asked.
Everyone looked around the room. They knew that there was something in concrete that can hurt the pipes, but they weren’t so sure about the lime anymore, even though they had believed it all their professional lives.
I told them that I read in an old engineering book that if you were going to bury a pipe in concrete, and that if you wanted that pipe to last, you should surround it with (guess what?) lime. To prevent corrosion. Lime is a base and it counteracts the acid that’s in the concrete. The acid comes from the fly ash that the concrete people add to the concrete. Fly ash comes from coal-burning plants. It’s cheap and plentiful and it works so well with concrete. And it eats pipes. So we add lime. But hardly anyone knows that.
Most folks in this business will say LIME! when you ask them what’s wrong with concrete. It’s the exact opposite of what’s true, but somewhere along the way we picked it up and we keep it going out of habit. We pass it from generation to generation, and isn’t that something?
And I can sit back and marvel at that right here with you because I’ve been known to pet a few air dogs myself.
Dan Holohan
Dan Holohan
"Plumbers Protect The Health Of The World."
