This ought to be made into a sticky so that we all can come here to vent when our days go this badly.
Enjoy my misadventures from today!
___________________
All in all, today was a pretty crappy day.
We *were* going to see a movie, but two hours before we were to leave my wife reminded me that I needed to take care of the two remaining outdoor spigots (actually called a sillcock, as I learned today).
One has been dripping since we moved in eight years ago. The other recently cracked and was dribbling a continuous stream 24/7. We have been too broke to get a plumber and I was actually afraid of the simple job due to ignorance of the topic.
The third tap was one of those "Southern" deals that turns into a nightmare when the temps drop into the low 20º (or "hard freeze") range. It was an 18" tall bare steel pipe sticking up in the yard from the main *before* the main entered the house. It that line cracked all the water in the house would have to be shut off until it was repaired. We never used it, so I had it removed last winter.
I save everything, and I used that to measure the threads and the pipe OD/ID, then confirmed that the other two matched exactly. They did. (I had not yet learned that plumbing thread pitches and count have been pretty much universal since the time of Abraham. Now I know.)
I found everything I needed at our local Ace Hardware for fairly cheap.
We got home and started to try and break loose the first one. It felt like the pipe had come loose down in the wall, like it was unscrewing inside but not at the tap. Great. I sprayed them both with penetrating oil before I started. I figured I had not allowed this first one enough time.
Off to the other one.
It simply would not budge. The steel pipe flexed some and I feared it would shatter and leave us without water in the house until a plumber came to save my ass in the hyper-expensive manner that is their wont. So I sprayed more penetrant on it, smacked it with a small sledge hammer and promised myself to get out the torch and apply some heat to the joint if it did not come loose after another half hour.
Back to the other one.
I discovered an inner set of wrench flats I had not seen before because the morons who installed the plastic siding back in the 1980s buried it. I used two pipe wrenches and this saw the sillcock break loose cleanly. SUCCESS!
I installed the new one with some teflon tape and tightened it up. Oddly, it felt like it was getting easier to turn at is tightened.
Back to the one I thought might require some heat to bust it loose.
I noted that it had a collar on it for the main ground for the house. (Seriously? WTF, Mississippi building codes?) I locked my Vise-grips to that and a large wrench to the flats on the sillcock and it came loose easily. SUCCESS, AGAIN!
I installed the other spigot with teflon tape and had my wife run out to the front yard to turn the water back on.
It did not leak or drip and it worked very well. I was pretty pleased about this. I got up and walked to the back of the house and I heard it: torrents of rushing water!
I expect to see my joint leaking or a crack in the new spigot. No. It was horrible. Water was gushing out around the pipe and down the wall!
I ran around front and hollered for my wife to turn off the water and to get back to the back with me.
I then swept off the carport slab around where I had been working, planted my butt in the cold, wet stuff, and started to look for the leak.
The first thing I tried was to tighten the sillcock one more full turn as my wife thought she counted three turns off but only two back on.
Well, that destroyed everything. It *had* been getting easier to turn as I tightened it. The newer part of the house does not use steel water pipes but COPPER, and I had twisted the freaking pipe back and forth earlier. This final twist caused the whole pipe to fall out of the wall. The stub was about four inches long, and...
Luckily/terribly (depending on how you look at it) that wall is collapsing due to a huge roof leak. (We have been dealing with this issue and it will one day be sorted.) Termites and rot have caused the shiplapped plank wall and the clapboard siding to disintegrate over the decades beneath the tacky, plastic siding. We had been getting mice and stuff because there was a huge hole hidden by the plastic siding that even the home inspector missed, and I believe the previous owners did not know about.
Anyway, this hole also left the hot and cold lines to the washing machine exposed to the cold. These lines were freezing up in the wall every February, and to combat this we had to rug up this silly, Rube Goldberg device to allow both lines to drip all night into the sink that is about ten feet away. But hey, it worked/works.
I ripped out the siding and cut it off about four feet from the corner of the house so that this gaping hole was exposed and I could see what was up with these pipes.
It was horrible. EVERYTHING including the sill plates are rotted or termite-chewed to nothing.
Back to the stub of copper pipe and new sillcock: I opened up the wall because the break was right near the corner. I knew where the junction with the washer was and cut it open from outside up to that point because that wall is garbage and needs to be rebuilt, but the inner one is passable for now. The destruction needed to be the done to the already ruined face of the wall.
My only solution I could see was one of expediency. We have no outdoor lights. The water was OFF and we both needed to hit the bathroom and the shower. It was IMPERATIVE that we get the water back on NOW.
I had to do some hacking. The break occurred about four inches into the wall, meaning that it was buried INSIDE the hole drilled through a stud, and the space between the corner stud and the regular one was only about five inches. Very tight...
I used a lot of my brass instrument repair skills and tools to do this, and the soldering is super ugly (but neater than the stuff that was there originally). However, I did not have any sort of flame protectors for inside the wall pocket, and there is old school tar paper and insulation that is not flame proof. I had to point the flame UP and it kept getting into the wall and I would spray it with cooling water, over and over.
The laundry room filled with smoke and we had to stop and check everywhere for fire. We were freaking out that I may have just started a fire in the wall that we would not find until it burned through the wall!
Turns out that it was fine. The hot and cold lines and the drain pipe were all right there, and the open, boxed in hole in the wall they enter the room from allowed every wisp of smoke inside. We aired it out. We have been checking all over and up in the attic every half hour for two hours now to see if there is any fresh smoke smells. I think we dodged a major bullet this time.
After all the drama and the burning of copious amounts of sunlight I got the stump in the wall trimmed and cleaned up. but it was ovalized at this point and I could not get the damned coupler on to solder it in place. SHIT!
The space was tiny, but I managed to get it round with dent hammers and various grits of sand paper. I had to use peening rods to open up the coupler a tiny bit. After an hour of messing with this I finally got it to fit correctly. I could not rotate the pipe in the wall to inspect my joint and could not point the flame up to walk the solder around the bottom side of the joint, so I just heated the snot out of the coupling and hoped it would flow correctly and seal the joint fully.
Worst part over. My inspection mirror showed that it was sealed. I do not know whether it is sealed enough to withstand the water pressure 24/7 for years, so I will probably pull this all the way to the previous junction and replace it with a single piece of pipe. As I said: expediency. We *needed* the water to be on again.
Now I have some experience and when I get the parts and some wall materials I will fix all this mess.
So, there were not any simple ferrules at Ace. I had to cave in to that expediency and the setting sun and buy a threaded fitting. So what went onto the stub in the wall was only the one half. I cut a section of new copper pipe and soldered on the other half to it. Everything seemed to be good.
then I removed the copper fitting that steps up from the copper tube size to the .85" OD steel connector that threads to the sillcock itself. This was on there good and had to be wrenched off using my vice and a spud wrench; I got it, though, and it fit onto the end of the new pipe section. I soldered that end down. I checked my new pipe insert for leaks at both ends. It held compression fully.
I pushed the new pipe section through the hole in the wall and threaded it onto the new pipe fitting I had just soldered onto the stump of pipe in the wall. I used teflon tape and snugged the brass nut over the copper fitting tightly enough that I knew it would not leak, but not so tightly as to strip the soft threads in the copper parts.
So far, so good.
I installed the sillcock.
We crossed our fingers. My wife walked around front and turned on the water.
Nothing. Not a drip at any of the five joints (three soldered by me, two threaded and using the teflon tape).
I have been running laundry to see if the vibrations would work the nut in the wall loose. So far alles ist gut.
So our quick run to Ace and our quick change of the two spigots turned into a fight to beat sunset that lasted about four hours.
I thought we had burned down our house. We made four trips to Ace. They were quite amused as the parts we brought in to size for replacements became progressively more tragic looking.
But it seems that my first time sweat plumbing (using tools for musical instrument repair no less) came out really well.
Too bad I FUBARed the one spigot and had to rip out my rotted wall, but it needed to be done soon, anyway, so why not today? At least the process has started.
What a lousy, stressful day...
Check out the one pic of the twisted, coper pipe that caused all this bustle! Yay, ME! I can destroy pipe with the best of them. HAHAHA!!!
Enjoy my misadventures from today!
___________________
All in all, today was a pretty crappy day.
We *were* going to see a movie, but two hours before we were to leave my wife reminded me that I needed to take care of the two remaining outdoor spigots (actually called a sillcock, as I learned today).
One has been dripping since we moved in eight years ago. The other recently cracked and was dribbling a continuous stream 24/7. We have been too broke to get a plumber and I was actually afraid of the simple job due to ignorance of the topic.
The third tap was one of those "Southern" deals that turns into a nightmare when the temps drop into the low 20º (or "hard freeze") range. It was an 18" tall bare steel pipe sticking up in the yard from the main *before* the main entered the house. It that line cracked all the water in the house would have to be shut off until it was repaired. We never used it, so I had it removed last winter.
I save everything, and I used that to measure the threads and the pipe OD/ID, then confirmed that the other two matched exactly. They did. (I had not yet learned that plumbing thread pitches and count have been pretty much universal since the time of Abraham. Now I know.)
I found everything I needed at our local Ace Hardware for fairly cheap.
We got home and started to try and break loose the first one. It felt like the pipe had come loose down in the wall, like it was unscrewing inside but not at the tap. Great. I sprayed them both with penetrating oil before I started. I figured I had not allowed this first one enough time.
Off to the other one.
It simply would not budge. The steel pipe flexed some and I feared it would shatter and leave us without water in the house until a plumber came to save my ass in the hyper-expensive manner that is their wont. So I sprayed more penetrant on it, smacked it with a small sledge hammer and promised myself to get out the torch and apply some heat to the joint if it did not come loose after another half hour.
Back to the other one.
I discovered an inner set of wrench flats I had not seen before because the morons who installed the plastic siding back in the 1980s buried it. I used two pipe wrenches and this saw the sillcock break loose cleanly. SUCCESS!
I installed the new one with some teflon tape and tightened it up. Oddly, it felt like it was getting easier to turn at is tightened.
Back to the one I thought might require some heat to bust it loose.
I noted that it had a collar on it for the main ground for the house. (Seriously? WTF, Mississippi building codes?) I locked my Vise-grips to that and a large wrench to the flats on the sillcock and it came loose easily. SUCCESS, AGAIN!
I installed the other spigot with teflon tape and had my wife run out to the front yard to turn the water back on.
It did not leak or drip and it worked very well. I was pretty pleased about this. I got up and walked to the back of the house and I heard it: torrents of rushing water!
I expect to see my joint leaking or a crack in the new spigot. No. It was horrible. Water was gushing out around the pipe and down the wall!
I ran around front and hollered for my wife to turn off the water and to get back to the back with me.
I then swept off the carport slab around where I had been working, planted my butt in the cold, wet stuff, and started to look for the leak.
The first thing I tried was to tighten the sillcock one more full turn as my wife thought she counted three turns off but only two back on.
Well, that destroyed everything. It *had* been getting easier to turn as I tightened it. The newer part of the house does not use steel water pipes but COPPER, and I had twisted the freaking pipe back and forth earlier. This final twist caused the whole pipe to fall out of the wall. The stub was about four inches long, and...
Luckily/terribly (depending on how you look at it) that wall is collapsing due to a huge roof leak. (We have been dealing with this issue and it will one day be sorted.) Termites and rot have caused the shiplapped plank wall and the clapboard siding to disintegrate over the decades beneath the tacky, plastic siding. We had been getting mice and stuff because there was a huge hole hidden by the plastic siding that even the home inspector missed, and I believe the previous owners did not know about.
Anyway, this hole also left the hot and cold lines to the washing machine exposed to the cold. These lines were freezing up in the wall every February, and to combat this we had to rug up this silly, Rube Goldberg device to allow both lines to drip all night into the sink that is about ten feet away. But hey, it worked/works.
I ripped out the siding and cut it off about four feet from the corner of the house so that this gaping hole was exposed and I could see what was up with these pipes.
It was horrible. EVERYTHING including the sill plates are rotted or termite-chewed to nothing.
Back to the stub of copper pipe and new sillcock: I opened up the wall because the break was right near the corner. I knew where the junction with the washer was and cut it open from outside up to that point because that wall is garbage and needs to be rebuilt, but the inner one is passable for now. The destruction needed to be the done to the already ruined face of the wall.
My only solution I could see was one of expediency. We have no outdoor lights. The water was OFF and we both needed to hit the bathroom and the shower. It was IMPERATIVE that we get the water back on NOW.
I had to do some hacking. The break occurred about four inches into the wall, meaning that it was buried INSIDE the hole drilled through a stud, and the space between the corner stud and the regular one was only about five inches. Very tight...
I used a lot of my brass instrument repair skills and tools to do this, and the soldering is super ugly (but neater than the stuff that was there originally). However, I did not have any sort of flame protectors for inside the wall pocket, and there is old school tar paper and insulation that is not flame proof. I had to point the flame UP and it kept getting into the wall and I would spray it with cooling water, over and over.
The laundry room filled with smoke and we had to stop and check everywhere for fire. We were freaking out that I may have just started a fire in the wall that we would not find until it burned through the wall!
Turns out that it was fine. The hot and cold lines and the drain pipe were all right there, and the open, boxed in hole in the wall they enter the room from allowed every wisp of smoke inside. We aired it out. We have been checking all over and up in the attic every half hour for two hours now to see if there is any fresh smoke smells. I think we dodged a major bullet this time.
After all the drama and the burning of copious amounts of sunlight I got the stump in the wall trimmed and cleaned up. but it was ovalized at this point and I could not get the damned coupler on to solder it in place. SHIT!
The space was tiny, but I managed to get it round with dent hammers and various grits of sand paper. I had to use peening rods to open up the coupler a tiny bit. After an hour of messing with this I finally got it to fit correctly. I could not rotate the pipe in the wall to inspect my joint and could not point the flame up to walk the solder around the bottom side of the joint, so I just heated the snot out of the coupling and hoped it would flow correctly and seal the joint fully.
Worst part over. My inspection mirror showed that it was sealed. I do not know whether it is sealed enough to withstand the water pressure 24/7 for years, so I will probably pull this all the way to the previous junction and replace it with a single piece of pipe. As I said: expediency. We *needed* the water to be on again.
Now I have some experience and when I get the parts and some wall materials I will fix all this mess.
So, there were not any simple ferrules at Ace. I had to cave in to that expediency and the setting sun and buy a threaded fitting. So what went onto the stub in the wall was only the one half. I cut a section of new copper pipe and soldered on the other half to it. Everything seemed to be good.
then I removed the copper fitting that steps up from the copper tube size to the .85" OD steel connector that threads to the sillcock itself. This was on there good and had to be wrenched off using my vice and a spud wrench; I got it, though, and it fit onto the end of the new pipe section. I soldered that end down. I checked my new pipe insert for leaks at both ends. It held compression fully.
I pushed the new pipe section through the hole in the wall and threaded it onto the new pipe fitting I had just soldered onto the stump of pipe in the wall. I used teflon tape and snugged the brass nut over the copper fitting tightly enough that I knew it would not leak, but not so tightly as to strip the soft threads in the copper parts.
So far, so good.
I installed the sillcock.
We crossed our fingers. My wife walked around front and turned on the water.
Nothing. Not a drip at any of the five joints (three soldered by me, two threaded and using the teflon tape).
I have been running laundry to see if the vibrations would work the nut in the wall loose. So far alles ist gut.
So our quick run to Ace and our quick change of the two spigots turned into a fight to beat sunset that lasted about four hours.
I thought we had burned down our house. We made four trips to Ace. They were quite amused as the parts we brought in to size for replacements became progressively more tragic looking.
But it seems that my first time sweat plumbing (using tools for musical instrument repair no less) came out really well.
Too bad I FUBARed the one spigot and had to rip out my rotted wall, but it needed to be done soon, anyway, so why not today? At least the process has started.
What a lousy, stressful day...
Check out the one pic of the twisted, coper pipe that caused all this bustle! Yay, ME! I can destroy pipe with the best of them. HAHAHA!!!
