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The world of pipe fittings

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Re: The world of pipe fittings

#141

Post by TEP_Kim_Il_Sung »

jaggederest wrote: post #129
Scoundreller wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More recently, beyond pH control, cities are doing orthophosphte corrosion control. Nearly universal in UK but hit and miss in other places. https://www.haldimandcounty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Or... A big source of lead can be recently sweated copper lines (takes a while for the corrosion control to coat it), but lead solder isn’t supposed to be in potable use anymore. And old fixtures! Even newer “lead-free” f…

Yes I've found it's very frustrating looking for "genuinely zero lead" brass and bronze. Almost all scrap has lead in it to some degree, and even new metal often has a trace.

Remove about 82% of lead from bronze using this one weird trick!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250155103_Removal_o...

Re: The world of pipe fittings

#142

Post by nemo44x »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #17
thedanbob wrote: post #6

I had a major plumbing problem some time ago (leak in the house’s main line) and paid a plumber way too much to dig a hole and fix it. I of course wasn’t about to pay him to fill the hole back up, and while it was open I took a good look. That’s when I discovered PEX. PEX is wonderful: easy to work with, inexpensive, simple to fix if you screw something up. I wish all plumbing was PEX. I briefly installed an NPT flow…

Came here to also plug PEX. A friend used it for his remodel, did most of the work himself, and set everything up so all the lines come down to a sort of "switchboard" panel in his basement, so that as he did more remodeling work in the future he could disconnect individual loops trivially. It just makes so much sense and is so easy vs copper pipe. Amusingly he told me one of the plumbers he did get a bid from said s…

It’s also super easy and affordable to run extra lines that aren’t being used for future use. For instance, it might be you want to run a circulator across all your taps, but not today.

You can in many cases snake it as well.

Re: The world of pipe fittings

#144

Post by amluto »

rsync wrote: post #121
kennend3 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is NOT a pipe fitter but lived with one for many years.. It was odd reading this and I'm glad someone like you responded to correct things. > For what it’s worth, I tightly wrap the tape 10 times round the male thread and get an enraged mountain gorilla to tighten it up. Again, not a pipe fitter but this just screams "WRONG". If someone needs to use that much force to tighten it up, one can only assume…

"My roommate had a "unlimited BTU" gas fitter license (Canada Class "A") and this for a living and preferred "pipe dope"" I do this kind of thing a lot as we own and maintain our own water plant. My preferred sealant is the yellow PTFE tape that is used for natural gas. It is quite a bit thicker than the white tape, it sticks to threads better and it is easier to work with, in terms of manual dexterity. I never use t…

> ALSO, helpful hint: If you are mixing plastic pipe (like schedule 40/80) and metal pipe, always have metal female couplings and plastic male couplings. A metal male going into a plastic female is one tighten away from cracking the plastic.

Or buy transition fittings or "special reinforced" fittings. Or, if you trust them, use push-to-connect fittings -- SharkBite, John Guest, ProLock, etc. (ProLock appears to be a John Guest product that is also sold by SharkBite.)

I've seen plenty of female plastic threaded fittings break even when connected to male plastic threaded fittings. They're just not that strong under circumferential tension.

Re: The world of pipe fittings

#145

Post by frosted-flakes »

Scoundreller wrote: post #98
radlad wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's less durable than alternatives.

There’s definitely a “right” way and a “wrong” way to do it. Having each fixture connection being a “home run” without any fittings between source and destination really reduces a lot of vulnerabilities. Having a central manifold that lets you easily turn off any tap is nice too. A condo building I lived in did something wrong (I suspect) either a bad batch of PEX, or more likely, a batch that sat in the sun for a wh…

Home run plumbing also means a lot of pipes in the walls, so you end up with 20x more pipes in the walls and ceiling than is actually necessary, and 20+ valves, which are often made of plastic instead of brass because otherwise costs would balloon. In any case, the fittings aren't the weak point, the pipe is; a properly crimped joint or expansion joint will never leak. And often it's impossible to have no fittings on a run of pipe anyway.

In my opinion, traditional trunk and branch plumbing is far more flexible and just as reliable. It also allows for a hot water recirculation loop, which is impossible with home-run plumbing.

Re: The world of pipe fittings

#146

Post by mindslight »

sokoloff wrote: post #111
blincoln wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sinks are one of the few areas that I don't think one can get out of using threaded connections on the supply lines (haven't seen push-to-connect for that last leg yet). A lot of them use NPT threads, and NPT is very easy to put together in a way that will have a slow leak. Even a single drop every few minutes can cause big problems if left unattended for long enough. Also, a lot of the connections are in locations t…

The sink supply connections (usually from a shutoff valve) are compression threads (a parallel/straight thread). If the valve itself is threaded on, that inlet might be NPT (or might be compression), but the valve outlet will be compression, which uses a tapered ferrule to provide the seal and straight threads.

The faucets I've seen are generally NPS where the supply lines attach to the faucet, often with the retaining nuts (or whatever they're called) using the same threads and going on first.

To answer GGP's question, what's difficult about faucets is getting up behind the sink, with your back straddling the corner of the cabinet, reaching up with some sort of basin wrench that inevitably won't grip those bespoke retaining nuts well. Especially removing the old faucet where the retaining nuts are a bit seized.

Re: The world of pipe fittings

#147

Post by rzzzt »

Scoundreller wrote: post #117
Kaibeezy wrote: post #40

All this plumbing talk got me remembering the time I redid a bunch of the copper in a fixer-upper. Reading up on solder joints, I got into the underlying metallurgy, and discovered solder isn’t “glue”. You have to abrade it to remove the oxide, quickly cover the raw copper with flux, and then let the boiling flux draw the molten solder into the joint. It doesn’t take much, and you end up with a metal-metal-metal bond…

> and discovered solder isn’t “glue”. I see you’ve never had the chance to observe some of my PCB work!

"The bigger the glob, the better the job". Some solder joints are structural.

Re: The world of pipe fittings

#148

Post by mindslight »

hilbert42 wrote: post #135
mindslight wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only the way of the middle-aged. If you do it with just PTFE tape you'll be fine, but if you do it with all similar sundries, then you'll be oversaturated and once again won't be able to find anything without pawing through piles.

Right, see my reply to jcims but that's not all of matter. One could suppose I'm going senile and perhaps that's true but the fact is that I've been losing stuff like this since before I was a teenager. I've figured out the problem: my mind is thinking about all sorts of seemingly important stuff all the time but which in fact is mostly garbage, so my subconscious mind handles what my conscious mind consideres as pro…

My own working model is one of complexity building up over time. You can handle it fine as long as you don't have many fields of endeavor, you have plenty of time to periodically focus on them, keep the stuff organized, can fully finish a project and button it up, etc. But then things happen where you're forced to clear out your mental cache, or even screw up your organization/storage system for whatever, and it comes crashing down. Then all the complexity you were managing gets in your way, and the problem snowballs unless you regain some bandwidth and take steps to mitigate the decay.

Re: The world of pipe fittings

#150

Post by frosted-flakes »

mildchalupa wrote: post #27

The Teflon tape is only to be used as a friction modifier as NPT and other tapered threads seal on the threads. Reduced friction means that you can get enough load to deform the metal threads and create a seal. Be careful to not add tape to the first 2 threads as small pieces of Teflon tape can break off and get stuck into valves and things within appliances causing them to leak. There is nothing wrong with pipe dope…

Crimped PEX fittings do not use o-rings.
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