A plumbing question - no Laverda content

Copper isn’t what it used to be either… plenty of expensive failures in the last decade or so. Poor quality with pinholes corroding through in a couple of years. Check the warranty offered, especially versus the top plastics that Hooksey mentioned. I seem to recall Rehau had a warranty here of decades. That sound right Hooksey?
 
Dellortoman said:
I think I'll stick with copper in future. I've re-plumbed 90% of the house in copper. Either hard drawn or annealed. The feed from the water main in the street is still the original galvanised steel pipe. There's plenty of pressure and flow through it, so as long as it doesn't spring a leak, I have no reason to dig it up and replace it.
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Water board feed from main to meter wont be Gal........be either copper or Poly.

Water meter to house may be Gal......? If so, only a matter of time before it lets go. :oops:
 
Especially when you wack the vertical gal with a lawnmower, free shower with every misadventure.... Dunno, Kembla copper has been the choice here, done all my own plumbing, 50/50 SnPb, zinc chloride ( taught how to make your own at high school ) flux. Old Yorkshire fittings were worth the extra, pre solder filled.

Pinholes, usually down to galvanic voltage gradients in the soil/surrounds. Switch mode power supplies produce third order harmonic currents ie 150hz in neutral(s) though mandated to be corrected these days. older "earth" connection to water pipes a no no, though still can be seen in old premises, sandy areas like here have equipotential bonding across the dwelling exterior, sure fire to have circulating currents.... seen neutrals on poly phase greater than the line currents and at 150Hz, acceptance engineer was totally lost when i clamp tested one installation, lines at 1.5KA, neutral 2.0KA at 150hz, goodness knows where and what the earth bounding at the kiosk was doing to mother earth. Full input current was 4KA j
 
Cathodic protection/sacrificial anodes in mechanical screwed Gal/Black steel pipework was a given back in my early days in the Petroleum Industry. Size and number of the Anodes depended on the surrounding ground conditions! Washed sand used exclusively as bedding material rnd Tanks and pipework! Was always a clump of clay stuck to the bottom of the tank as it was lowered in...........guaranteed on going wrk
;)
 
Fumes from Zinc Chloride is not to be sneezed at, silly pun yet valid. We used small filtered exhaust electric fans adjacent to the soldering job in electronics, just discarded a working item recently to the tip, therein a story, old technologies still working, being scrapped at the local tip, sad to say at the least. There are ways to mitigate hazards at work.

Nothing, let alone the cost of plastic plumbing tooling, can make me give up my copper plumbing. Even bought up big on stick solder, hundreds of copper joiners, elbows, T's et al on hand here. Even LPG is on the nose ( as the elite would have it ) for cooking, deferring to electricity.... not me. j.
 
Some interesting comments. What you use should be dictated by where you live and the temperature extremes you see.
Back when i drove a truck for a couple of years, I had to take a load of furniture to a restorer after copper pipes burst while the owner was away.
That was in Springfield - a small town in the Canterbury foothills known for it's snow and cold winters.
I lived at the time in Hororata which was a bit lower down and hence warmer but we still got frozen pipes.
The trick to surviving with pipes intact seems to be to use alkathene. It's sold really for farm use here but most of the outside lines incl any lines in from the mains seem to be plumbed using it. It can take a freeze without bursting or cracking.
I only had one of the braided flex lines - on the toilet cistern. Never gave a problem. Fitted not long before we bought the place and not disturbed for 23 years....
 
Dellortoman said:
I think I'll stick with copper in future. I've re-plumbed 90% of the house in copper. Either hard drawn or annealed. The feed from the water main in the street is still the original galvanised steel pipe. There's plenty of pressure and flow through it, so as long as it doesn't spring a leak, I have no reason to dig it up and replace it.
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Hi Cam,
When I was on Aurora Australis we had about 80 sinks. They all had flexibles on the hot and cold, and not one failed during the ships life (30 yrs).
But they were type approved by Lloyd's Register and pressure tested 1.5 times x design pressure.
Suppose you get what you pay for.
Paul
 
I borrowed a Ski Lodge in the Sierra Nevada from a mate's sister once, it took 1/2 a day to set it up and 1/2 a day including draining the toilet systins to put it back to bed. She gave us a 2-page checklist. What a pain that turned into.
 
G'day Paul (wogbikes). It's been a while since you showed up here. Next time I buy a flexible hose, I'll have to remember to specify Lloyd's Register compliant.

Vince. That draining of all the water systems reminds me of working in Antarctica. When doing concreter pours, we had to fully drain down the concrete batch plant after use. Sometimes that meant every day for months. I recall an occasion when someone forgot; we couldn't do any concrete pouring the following day because several of the pipes on the outside of the plant had frozen and burst. The day was spent repairing pipes.

Come to think of it, now that Paul has mentioned the Aurora Australis (Australia's previous Antarctic ship), I was on that ship's maiden voyage to Antarctica. It had a few teething problems, one of which was the domestic water system freezing. The story I was told, which Paul may be able to confirm or not (he was the ship's engineer), was that the ship builders, not being used to building ships for cold climates, ran the pipework fixed to the inside of the steel hull with uninsulated fixings. So there was a direct cold path from the steel skin of the ship to the pipes.

In all the Australian Antarctic building design (and probably true of other cold climate buildings in Arctic regions), there's a thermal break between the outside and inside elements of the building to prevent condensation and ice forming on the inside. For example, windows are triple-glazed, and window and door frames had a plastic thermal barrier between outside and inside parts, and no bolts went all the way through.
 
Dellortoman said:
G'day Paul (wogbikes). It's been a while since you showed up here. Next time I buy a flexible hose, I'll have to remember to specify Lloyd's Register compliant.

Vince. That draining of all the water systems reminds me of working in Antarctica. When doing concreter pours, we had to fully drain down the concrete batch plant after use. Sometimes that meant every day for months. I recall an occasion when someone forgot; we couldn't do any concrete pouring the following day because several of the pipes on the outside of the plant had frozen and burst. The day was spent repairing pipes.

Come to think of it, now that Paul has mentioned the Aurora Australis (Australia's previous Antarctic ship), I was on that ship's maiden voyage to Antarctica. It had a few teething problems, one of which was the domestic water system freezing. The story I was told, which Paul may be able to confirm or not (he was the ship's engineer), was that the ship builders, not being used to building ships for cold climates, ran the pipework fixed to the inside of the steel hull with uninsulated fixings. So there was a direct cold path from the steel skin of the ship to the pipes.

In all the Australian Antarctic building design (and probably true of other cold climate buildings in Arctic regions), there's a thermal break between the outside and inside elements of the building to prevent condensation and ice forming on the inside. For example, windows are triple-glazed, and window and door frames had a plastic thermal barrier between outside and inside parts, and no bolts went all the way through.
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I read Scott’s account of his first expedition to the Antarctic, his shipbuilder was similarly unfamiliar with the requirements due to the cold. He was given the requirement for a double skin on the hull with insulation between, but used bolts all the way through to hold it all together. The guys had to break off the icicles every time they got into their bunks. The insulation didn’t work very well either, it was sheep fleece but was sodden before they’d got out of the dock…
Incredible story though, amazing what those blokes went through just to survive, let alone explore.
 
some tips, never cut ANY plastic pipe (especially push fit type) with a hacksaw, under a magnifying glass you will see that the ends of the pipe are like circular saws, if you do, and this can damage O rings. ALWAYS use a plastic pipe cutter, its a shear the best is Rothenberger, and then a deburr which gives a tiny lead in, even used fittings can go again if you do this.

Yorkshire (solder ring type) copper pipe fittings are for those who cannot use the (much cheaper) capilliary end feed type, and very often the holding chamber for the solder gets filled with corrosive flux (self cleaning, no steel wool these days) cant be good, and can give problems that the cheaper end feed will not, with no way of flushing the "held" bit of flux out.

Avoid cutting the copper tube with a hacksaw if at all possible (not always the case if cutting a pipe in situ) I have seen many steel radiators with pinholes at the top, caused by copper swarf and self cleaning flux atatching to the top of a rad and rotting a hole. (there is always a bit of air present)

Concrete (in all its forms) will corrode copper pipe, so if this is required wrap the pipe (double overlap) with Denso tape and if its a hot pipe with Denso Therm.You need a god 2" of concrete/mortar/plaster cover or the gease in the tape will bleed through to the surface.

Its a good idea to have a quarter turn (full bore) ball valve at the point of entry of the water main to the house, then if leaving home for more than a day or two, you can quickly shut off this valve. If a freeze occurs, where no storage tank is fitted, damage will be minimal and evident quickly when you turn it back on, if the house does have water storage tanks, the damage will be a bit more severe, but still hugely limited.

Pipe insulation bought in plumbing shops is usually crap and too thin, (the foam type) its a bastard to work with, difficult to get 100% coverage (vital) and even harder to make it stay on, should not even be on sale. dont buy it, go to an insulation supplier and buy, H&V (M&E3) Rockwool, with foil face, (in UK use Sheffield insulations) comes in many thicknesses, use the apropriate thickness, it has a self adhesive flap and you can buy foil tape from the same supplier for the joints and mitres etc, takes a little bit of skill learning but is well worth the effort, remember that your pipe clips will need spacing off to allow for the pipe thickness, in UK these take the form of a clip on spacer for plastic clips, (available in most plumbing shops but rarely asked for, if they blank you at the counter, you are in a crap shop) or you could use brass munsen rings and studding cut to length, together with a female back plate.

Throughly flush all pipes that have been soldered with a self cleaning flux and in the case of closed or semi closed circuits, eg heating, chilled water, secondary hot water, fill and refill several times and use a cleaner if you can be bothered, that is not actually vital as they are all water soluable, an inhibitor is always usefull as are magnetic filters, but you cant beat an old fashioned low loss header for a sump. (an expanded section of pipe, say 3" for a domestic heating system, entry and exit at the top, with a quarter turn valve at the lowest point, helps if that is installed in the lowest point of the system as well, an Ashford blister on the top of it can very often solve problems with systems that are difficult to bleed air from.

I could go on but hey! happing plumbing>
CLEM
 
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