So THAT is what was wrong with our water pipes!

For several months we'd been noticing air in our water pipes. Once or twice a week, we'd get up in the morning and when flushing the toilet or turning on the sink or shower faucet, there would be air belching out with the water. Neighbors did not have this problem. Our water bill was normal, so no leaks.

The culprit was the water softener drainage hose. The water softener is in our garage. The drain hose goes up from the softener, over across part of the attic area, and then down into the utility room to share a drain with the washing machine.

Here are pics of the water softener in the garage, the spot where the hose empties, and what I found when I crawled up in the attic to have a look:

...and here it is after I used some good ol' duct tape to hold the hose up next to a stud, allowing a more gentle curve:

This was all discovered while we had a guy from Culligan here. The softener had quit working, and during the US$235 repair, he got things working (had to replace a worn piston, a circuit board and a switch), but said that the drain hose should have a lot more flow to it. He was a big guy, so I took my little runt self up into the small recesses of the attic to see if something was kinked. They had done the original install a couple of years ago, but the warranty on that was over. Anyway, the kinked hose (no doubt got soft and fell over during the hot summer) had caused some other failures, which led to the softener pulling in air instead of the brine that it would normally pull. They sent another guy out (a little guy) on Friday to do a more permanent fix than my duct tape workaround :)

Oh well. Things are working well now, and Culligan is giving us free softener salt and completely free maintenance for the next year (which is normally US$209) ...so it kind of evens out. Kind of.