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Motronic posted:By go/no go I mean it in the sense that, unlike waste lines, you turn the water on and it's obvious if you've really screwed up because it will immediately start leaking. Ahh, I was reading that as "there are situations where you should not be using pex" not "it's obvious it's not installed properly because water isn't coming out or it's leaking when you open your cutoff"
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Feb 16, 2021 16:23
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tater_salad posted:Any tips / advice on where I can research this. I do plan on eventually replacing my 40 year old iron supply pipes with PEX and wouldn't mind some advice on go/nogo and basic installation. PEX for supply lines really is as easy as it seems. The main systems are PEX-B with crimp or clamp fittings and PEX-A with expansion fittings. The former is what is most common for DIYers, where expansion PEX (Uponor is the main brand here) is preferred by pros due to its ease of use. IMHO, the advantages to PEX-A (Uponor) are massively overstated, and the cost difference for the pipe and fittings (and cost of tools) isn't justified. My preferred setup is PEX-B with the stainless clamp rings (Oetiker) and brass fittings. SupplyHouse.com or PexUniverse.com are great sources for all the fittings/parts you need at like 1/2 the cost of HD/L. With fittings costing a dollar or two each online, buy a good number more than you think you'll need. Nothing worse than needing an elbow or t and not having it, and then having to pay retail markup at HD. Typically, the most involved part is transitioning to whatever plumbing you have or need to interface with. You need to have a plan for what PEX->NPT or PEX->CPVC or PEX-Copper fittings you need to transition back and forth. Detailed plans/diagrams with all fittings labeled and counted for a parts list well before you start ripping will make the actual job go much faster.
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Feb 16, 2021 17:21
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Bioshuffle posted:
I cleared the p trap, reconnected everything, and poured boiling water down the sink. It still didn't clear the clog. Can I rule out an ice blockage? Or could it be the surface area is so small that even boiling water wouldn't be enough to melt everything? Called a plumber and they said they won't come out until the weather improves.
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Feb 16, 2021 18:26
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Bioshuffle posted:I cleared the p trap, reconnected everything, and poured boiling water down the sink. It still didn't clear the clog. Can I rule out an ice blockage? Or could it be the surface area is so small that even boiling water wouldn't be enough to melt everything? Is that an outside wall? If yes, it's probably frozen. Probably a good idea to leave your taps dripping to keep water flowing to prevent your feeds from freezing.
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Feb 17, 2021 04:19
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My brother-in-law was cranking on his 1990s vintage water heater. That looks like a galvanized steel pipe extension.  He snapped it off trying to get it out because it was rusted to the water heater. Now the threaded part is still in the water heater threads. I told him to call a professional. Is that even salvageable?
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Feb 17, 2021 04:53
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FogHelmut posted:My brother-in-law was cranking on his 1990s vintage water heater. While *maybe* salvageable in terms of removing the broken off part of that stub, no, he shouldn't bother, and should get a new water heater. Besides, a water heater from the 90s is basically a timebomb at this point anyways. That is way more life that he should have gotten out of it.
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Feb 17, 2021 05:29
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Absolutely replace
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Feb 17, 2021 07:11
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Is that galvanized pipe extension normal?
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Feb 17, 2021 07:21
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Jaded burnout I don't think you'll have any problems plumbing your bathroom. I'd absolutely find a good word-of-mouth tiler though, knowing how exacting your standards are you won't want to learn on your own house.
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Feb 17, 2021 08:10
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cakesmith handyman posted:Jaded burnout I don't think you'll have any problems plumbing your bathroom. I'd absolutely find a good word-of-mouth tiler though, knowing how exacting your standards are you won't want to learn on your own house. Fair enough. I can probably get in the folks that tiled my kitchen floor. They did a good job.
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Feb 17, 2021 10:39
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FogHelmut posted:Is that galvanized pipe extension normal? Yes. Although brass would be better. I fabbed mine out of 3/4" copper & two male nipples, because I am a nut.
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Feb 17, 2021 14:58
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Messadiah posted:Is that an outside wall? It is an outside wall, and I've been dripping the water nonstop into a bucket. Could opening the cabinet doors have made a difference at all? Also, would it be worth it to take the p-trap apart and fish down the drain with a wire hanger and see if I can break through the ice that way? This was recommended as a potential solution by a friend, but I don't want to risk damaging anything more than it is already.
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Feb 17, 2021 19:31
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New vanity, new sinks, and new faucets for the penultimate part of this drat six month bathroom remodel. Almost there... Now knowing quite well that any plumbing job always somehow takes multiple trips no matter what, I try to always improve on what I learned in the past to get it right the first time. Got the proper faucet supplies and p traps. I forgot that I needed two extra coupler nuts/washers but my stash of parts bailed me out. I was cruising. So what did I forget? Vanities are taller than normal bathroom height. I didn't take it into account so I need to go back and get sink tailpipe extensions. 
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Feb 17, 2021 22:17
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C-Bangin' it 
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Motronic posted:Supply plumbing using PEX is pretty go/no go providing you do your research and know how/where to run it. You're obviously all good with that considering the scope of your project so far. That makes me feel a lot better about planning to hire a plumber to rough in the bathroom upgrade I intend to do this year. Granted, it's a slab so it'll be cutting, digging, fitting, and filling back in so it HAS to be right the first time.
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Feb 18, 2021 00:35
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angryrobots posted:That makes me feel a lot better about planning to hire a plumber to rough in the bathroom upgrade I intend to do this year. Granted, it's a slab so it'll be cutting, digging, fitting, and filling back in so it HAS to be right the first time. I only plumb from scratch if I really don't have another reasonable choice. It's like mudding sheetrock: if you don't do it every day you suck and you're way too slow. So if it's any significant amount of work or of high value hire it out to a pro.
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Feb 18, 2021 00:37
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Not sure if this is quite the place for it, but I’m wondering if this kind of kitchen faucet exists and what it would be called- I’m looking to have a normal kitchen faucet with the standard hot/cold safety mixer, but I’d like to have essentially a ‘Very Hot Water’ override button or lever or whatever that will let hotter than normal water in there. Our current kitchen faucet has a sliver of ‘normal’ hot water temperature and quickly veers into potentially dangerous hot water territory. Our water heater is set for the shower to have adequately hot water, and we’re just careful with the sink, but we’d like to have a more kid (and adult) safe option while still having limited access to the blazing hot stuff for cleaning. Do these exist? What do I search for?
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Feb 18, 2021 02:08
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BadSamaritan posted:I’m looking to have a normal kitchen faucet with the standard hot/cold safety mixer So your first problem is that's not standard at all. Kitchen faucets put out what your lines put into them from what I've seen. There are definitely anti-scald shower fixtures but that's a different thing. BadSamaritan posted:Our water heater is set for the shower to have adequately hot water, and we’re just careful with the sink, What does this mean? You water heater is inadequate for the length of the showers you take you you cranked it and now can turn op the cold? Or you really want a second degree burn shower? I'm guessing the former, and your solution is a thermostatic mixing valve on the water heater itself.
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Feb 18, 2021 02:15
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Motronic posted:So your first problem is that's not standard at all. Kitchen faucets put out what your lines put into them from what I've seen. There are definitely anti-scald shower fixtures but that's a different thing. Thanks. Sorry, obviously I don’t know much about plumbing or fixtures. I don’t think the sink has a safety mixer on it (mistype)- just a single faucet/lever hot and cold output that gets very hot and has a very narrow ‘normal’ hot range. Our shower, presumably with anti-scald, tends to run on the colder side of things and our hot water heater is adjusted to a set point where we have a comfortably hot shower. We don’t take particularly long or very hot showers. I only really mention the shower because we don’t really want to turn down our water heater, but we would like our sink to be less hot unless we go out of our way to get very hot water. I guess we’re looking for something like a kitchen sink fixture with anti-scald and an override?
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Feb 18, 2021 14:16
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BadSamaritan posted:I guess we’re looking for something like a kitchen sink fixture with anti-scald and an override? Which, to my knowledge, does not exist.
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Feb 18, 2021 16:35
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Motronic posted:Which, to my knowledge, does not exist. Aw shucks. Thanks anyway!
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Feb 18, 2021 17:19
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On demand in sink heaters are able to be set to "kill" - I don't know if they're still a thing but in my parents house there was a separate thing where if you turned it HARD ("child proofing") it spit out water hot enough to brew tea.
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Feb 18, 2021 19:39
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H110Hawk posted:On demand in sink heaters are able to be set to "kill" - I don't know if they're still a thing but in my parents house there was a separate thing where if you turned it HARD ("child proofing") it spit out water hot enough to brew tea. Yeah, those are still around. But of course it's just a little electric "hot shot" heater under the sink that's constantly keeping water at a near boil so they're not terribly efficient.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:33
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I’m a little surprised such a thing wouldn’t exist, considering how common it is to bathe babies and wash little kid hands in kitchen sinks, along with how nice it is to have Hot water readily available in a decent quantity for dishes and cleaning. But no, apparently voice activated IoT kitchen faucets exist instead.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:44
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Just went down in my crawl space to investigate my pipes and discovered my kitchen sink waste line has cracked. I get to wait in line a month or two for a plumber now. I might try fixing it myself since I want to move it over in the wall anyway.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:51
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BadSamaritan posted:I’m a little surprised such a thing wouldn’t exist, considering how common it is to bathe babies and wash little kid hands in kitchen sinks, along with how nice it is to have Hot water readily available in a decent quantity for dishes and cleaning. Uhhh....because you're not supposed to have your water heater set at a scalding temperature to begin with. That's code. To make things that aren't useful unless you choose to ignore code doesn't seem like a good business model. It's not clear what problem is trying to be solved here by having water this hot available. It's typically because of undersized hot water capacity so people crank it up and mix in more cold. Which should be addressed at a minimum by an anti-scald valve plumbed just past the hot water heater. You don't need water that hot for nearly any kind of cleaning, certainly not on a regular basis. The few places where you do, like inside of dishwasher, have their own booster heaters.
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Feb 18, 2021 21:13
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BadSamaritan posted:Thanks. Sorry, obviously I don’t know much about plumbing or fixtures. I don’t think the sink has a safety mixer on it (mistype)- just a single faucet/lever hot and cold output that gets very hot and has a very narrow ‘normal’ hot range. Unless I'm mistaken (and I could be), you can put a thermostatic mixing valve on your hot water heater, adjust the mixing valve in your shower to keep delivering sufficiently hot water, and not worry about scalding people at the other taps. Or you could install a thermostatic mixing valve at the sink, but that seems silly because you probably have more than one sink in your house.
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Feb 18, 2021 21:15
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BonerGhost posted:Unless I'm mistaken (and I could be), you can put a thermostatic mixing valve on your hot water heater, adjust the mixing valve in your shower to keep delivering sufficiently hot water, and not worry about scalding people at the other taps. Completely correct. And I'm going to point out as I have many times before: code is written in blood. Someone died or was at least serious hurt for like, everything you see in the books. The anti-scald thing is really basic but really dangerous and historically has hurt a lot of people. That's why it's so specific in the code these days. Please stop trying to get around it. You aren't smarter or luckier than the thousands and thousands of people (or those people's children and guests) who have been scalded. This is a solved problem, please stop trying to come up with a different way to do it.
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Feb 18, 2021 21:16
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Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck I found some asbestos pipe insulation in my house. Only about 6' total though. I don't want to deal with this bullshit.
SpartanIvy fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Feb 18, 2021 |
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Feb 18, 2021 22:06
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If you don't want to deal with it don't. Don't touch it if at all possible. Don't disturb it in any way. If its possible to encase it do it. Build a wooden box or something to put around it. Big enough that you can put it over the offending pipe/insulation without actually touching the pipe or insulation. Asbestos is perfectly safe IF....... BIG IF........... the fibres do not get disturbed and become airborne.
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Feb 18, 2021 22:45
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Would this be the right thread for sump pump questions? We have an UltraSump III that has two pumps, the main A/C powered pump, and a higher DC powered pump that runs off a big marine battery. We recently lost power, and found that the DC pump was working intermittently, and then eventually stopped completely. We thought the battery was just dead, but a new (incredibly expensive) battery didn't fix it. I'm thinking either the DC pump itself is toast, or the UltraSump controller is dead. At this point I think i'm just going to call in the UltraSump dealer in our area to take a look, but thought i'd check her to see if anyone had any ideas? Thankfully our power is back on, but it was a scary 48 hours where we could literally watch the water rise closer and closer to our furnace. Definitely investing in a generator and another emergency sump just in case something goes wrong with the battery backup again.
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Feb 18, 2021 23:11
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wesleywillis posted:If you don't want to deal with it don't. It's not a matter of if I have to touch it, it's when. Those pipes are ancient and if they didn't burst in the cold spell we just got, I'll have to update them when I remodel the kitchen. I ordered an asbestos test kit for it (and a few other things I'll need to check down the line anyway), but I'm 99% sure it's asbestos. I also wonder if my crawl space dirt is covered in the stuff from where it was removed before because it wasn't on any of the other pipes when I moved in but I've found (and thrown away) a few pieces that looked like they could be the same stuff in hindsight. I always wear an N95 mask down there because of the dust but I don't think they're rated for asbestos.
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Feb 18, 2021 23:47
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SpartanIvy posted:Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck I found some asbestos pipe insulation in my house. Only about 6' total though. I don't want to deal with this bullshit. That stuff on the ground looks like drywall. The pipes look like they're wrapped in canvas & rags. Where is the asbestos?
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Feb 19, 2021 00:45
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Motronic posted:Uhhh....because you're not supposed to have your water heater set at a scalding temperature to begin with. That's code. To make things that aren't useful unless you choose to ignore code doesn't seem like a good business model. I mean, my hot water heater is set to the EPA recommended 120 degree set point. I’m not wanting to jerry rig something crazy here. I don’t usually want my tap water (or shower water) getting up that high regardless, but I do like to have the top end temp available in the kitchen. I just essentially want it available on the other side of a safety switch. I understand the confusion though, because people do some really dumb and dangerous stuff to their houses.
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Feb 19, 2021 00:56
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PainterofCrap posted:That stuff on the ground looks like drywall. The pipes look like they're wrapped in canvas & rags. Where is the asbestos? Yeah those bits on the ground are drywall I pulled out of the wall cavity. You can see on the left pipe that there is a blue rag wrapped and tied around it and then there's this fibrous paper like insulation, and then a burlap or canvas wrap on top of that tied off with twine and wire. The pipe on the left has had the fiber/paper and burlap fall off, exposing the blue rags over the pipe. Here are a couple of picture of a piece of the insulation I bagged. It was just sitting at the bottom of the wall cavity, so I did not have to disturb anything to bag it.    It doesn't seem like fiberglass to me, but maybe it's like, vintage fiberglass with a patina or something. e: Here's a picture of the same pipes in the crawlspace where you can see the one piece of insulation left down there, and some cement-like paste which has fallen off the pipe and Google is telling me is also probably asbestos. 
SpartanIvy fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 01:41
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Ja, test it first. I don't think it's asbestos...but test it for content anyway.
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Feb 19, 2021 02:43
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We were out of power for several days and ended up going to a friend's house that had power and being in the south with well below freezing temps nothing here is designed around that, so I shut off our water at the main and took out the meter so I could drain what I could out of the house to reduce the risk of pipes busting if they froze. However there was this plastic/rubber insert between the meter and the residential side, (it's inside of like a 4in' copper nipple) anyone know what it's for? I tried to pull it out but didn't put much effort in it as we had other issues to worry about, but was kind of curious in hindsight. If it's to reduce pressure, is there any downside to pulling it out or replacing the piece of pipe it's in?
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Feb 19, 2021 06:14
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Rakeris posted:We were out of power for several days and ended up going to a friend's house that had power and being in the south with well below freezing temps nothing here is designed around that, so I shut off our water at the main and took out the meter so I could drain what I could out of the house to reduce the risk of pipes busting if they froze. That's probably the one way check valve to make sure water doesn't back up from your pipes into the city water.
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Feb 19, 2021 06:17
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Is this the appropriate place to ask for a recommendation for a kitchen faucet? The builder-grade one I had gave out a few years ago, and the big-box store replacement I bought that same day because I desperately needed one decided to spring a major leak today. Single hole mount, either pull-down or pull-out. Don't need anything fancy, I just don't want to replace one again in 3 years.
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Feb 22, 2021 07:23
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TheMadMilkman posted:Is this the appropriate place to ask for a recommendation for a kitchen faucet? The builder-grade one I had gave out a few years ago, and the big-box store replacement I bought that same day because I desperately needed one decided to spring a major leak today. Go to a plumbing supply store, not a big box store. They will know what you want. You can drat near shop by weight - you're gonna be surprised ow much a nearly identical looking faucet will weigh compared to whatever you found at lowesdepot.
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Feb 22, 2021 17:36
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And be prepared to spend hundreds of dollars. I think ours was $450 from lowesdepot but it was in a completely different section from the $150 also fit stuff. If it wasn't Sunday I would have gone to the fixture store I drove past on my way there.
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Feb 22, 2021 21:56
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