More Plumbing Woes

My path from the shop to the house takes me right past a door to the crawl space. I was done for the night and on my way in to get cleaned up for dinner when I heard water dripping. That's never a good sound coming from a crawl space. Sho-nuff, a pinhole leak had sprung in the last piece of copper pipe. I thought all the copper was long gone, but this piece was left because it has the tap in it for the icemaker. It had already soaked an area about 5-feet in diameter around the leak.

Plumbing is one of my least favorite systems to repair. I have a knack for turning a small drip into Niagara Falls. There is no "quick fix" for a pinhole leak or dripping faucet that my talented hands can't screw up. It's always that last 1/4 turn that splits the pipe wide open. It is absolutely incredible how much water can gush forth from a split pipe in the few seconds it takes to shut off the main supply. So, being older and wiser than once was the case, I am NOT going to start fiddling with this on a Saturday night. A small pinhole leak is much better than no water at all.

Sunday morning, the first thing on my list was "Fix Plumbing". I'm not sure what was at the top of the list before I discovered the leak. I rummaged in the shop and put together a bucket of tools and parts. My inventory had nothing to fit the 1/4" plastic line for the icemaker, so that would have to be disconnected and fixed later. Happily, the icemaker tap and leaky copper was in a dedicated pipe that only went to the laundry, and it had a valve! Even better it's one of the ball valves that I know will actually work. I could do this repair without turning the water off or draining the rest of the system. Close valve, cut PEX pipe on either side of the leak, remove copper pipe and fittings dating back to civil war era, replace with straight piece of PEX and two crimp unions.

My crimper is a manual set of plates that are clamped around the crimp sleeve with two bolts that have to be tightened with a wrench. It's painfully slow to use, but makes very nice crimped connections with the PEX copper bands. I also installed a 1/2" TEE and a ball valve for the icemaker connection. All I need now are fittings and adapters to go from 1/2" PEX to 1/4" plastic tubing.

Lowes had what we needed, but it took 30 minutes for Sharon and I to put together the combination of fittings and adapters from their display. Some were threaded fittings, some compression, and of course, PEX crimp. I built this rube goldberg adapter kit sitting in front of the TV. It is best to make sure everything fits and goes together as expected before crawling under the house.

Threaded fittings are lousy for sealing anything. If you look at the way threads are cut, even for a tapered plumbing thread, the male threads do not completely fill the female threads. There is always a void where the ridge of one thread fits into a valley. The only way to seal a threaded fitting is with some type of sealant on the threads. Teflon tape works, but always seems like a leak waiting to happen.

Success! Hopefully that is the last of the plumbing repairs for a while.