a photoblog of what i did today.....

[glatt]

And while I was in there, I replaced the door gasket.


I freaking love this dishwasher. You can't buy one this good anymore. They are all high efficiency models today that take 6 hours to clean your dishes with an ounce of water.

I'm going to keep it going for as long as I can.

[Griff]

Nice work... and you remembered the name of the thread.

http://cellar.org/showthread.php?p=989756#post989756

[glatt]

holy cow, those photos are massive.

Stupid tapatalk. Sorry guys.

[Gravdigr]

Heh. I was looking at them on the Nook last night. It sizes to fit the pics, and I thought that's all there was, I thought you posted pics w/no text. The text got sized so small I didn't even know it was there.

Lots of detail, though.

[glatt]

I've posted before about my displeasure with our plumbing situation. Our house seems to get supplied with gritty water by our municipality. In addition to that, our pipes are 70 years old and are galvanized pipe. The zinc galvanized coating wears off over time, and spots where the pipes have been cut and threaded have no galvanization at all. So the steel pipes underneath start to rust and small chunks of rusty iron slough off into our water supply. They flow down stream and cause blockages in fixtures.

Here's a picture of the inlet valve of our dishwasher that I replaced over a year ago. It's got mostly flakes of mineral buildup that has probably come from a combination of the county water and my hot water heater, and there are also dark specks that come from my rusting pipes. It blocked the dishwasher water supply enough that it wasn't cleaning the dishes.


And this is a small section of pipe that lead to our boiler. To be fair, this was a side branch that seldom called for water, so it was a location where sediment was just asking to build up. I replaced this and a clogged pressure relief valve last spring.


I knew eventually I would have to replumb the house. And install a whole house water filter to keep the county's sand out of my water. So last week I planned it all out and ordered the parts from a supply house online. Got a special pex tool off Ebay too for $170.

Our basement is unfinished, which will help tremendously. A decade ago, I tiled the tub surround on the first floor bath, and I ran pex tubing up inside that wall while it was open. So there is tubing in place for the 2nd floor toilet and the 2nd floor shower. There is no tubing in place for the 2nd floor sink. So on Sunday, I decided it was time to tackle this most difficult part of the replumb project.

The 2nd floor bathroom sink shares a wall with the staircase. I decided the best path was to cut a hole in the plaster wall of the stairs that lead down into the unfinished basement. It's out of public view and a good spot for a hole. I stuck a mirror up in there to see what I could see.


You can see the exisisting pipe that leads to the 2nd floor sink. I plan to snake some pex tubing along side of those pipes.

So then we had to go upstairs to the bathroom 1.5 floors away and cut a hole under that sink. The cabinet has drawers, so we took the drawers out and had to reach through to get to the wall. Pain in the ass, but less work than pulling the sink.

[glatt]

My son was doing most of the work at this point. I want him to do as much as he can, and I'll pay him. He needs to keep busy this summer.

So he cut a hole out under the sink inside this cabinet. Tried to keep it neat so patching it would be easier later. He found it to be tiring working with a dull drywall saw reaching through the cabinet drawer openings. He did a good job though.


Then I got my cordless drill out and put a new spade bit in and started drilling down into the bottom plate. I though I just needed to drill through the bottom plate. I wasn't thinking at first that there would be the thickness of the joists and then the top plate of the ceiling below. When I got through the bottom plate of the second floor, the cordless drill battery started hitting the edge of the drywall hole and I couldn't get any deeper.

So I switched to my electric corded drill. It was smaller and could drill deeper and broke through. But I wasn't through the top plate yet. I needed to run off and buy a 16" spade bit.

So I did, and a fair bit of sweating and pushing in an awkward position later on the drill, I broke through the top plate of the floor below. There was actually a third framing member in there that I also had to drill through. No idea what that was. Maybe some diagonal bracing at the stairs.

Anyway, once I was fianlly through, we fished some wire through there, hooked it unto the red hot water side pex, and pulled it through.


And then down at the basement stairs hole, I drilled down into the first floor bottom plate and into the joist area and snaked the red tube into the basement.


So that went pretty well. Now for the blue tube.

I didn't take pictures of this, but I had a hell of a time getting a hole drilled for the blue tube. The spade bit would break through the bottom plate and then get steered off in the wrong direction and kept hitting the same nail. I tried 3 different holes to avoid that nail, but the lower framing members kept steering the bit to the nail.

Finally, I drilled a fourth hole and could drill it straight and miss the nail.

So we fed the blue tube down.

[glatt]

So here is where we stopped for now up in the bathroom. I'll make the connections later. It will be a big rushed job because I have to shut the water off to the house and need to make about 100 connections before we can turn the water back on again. Basically a day without plumbing.



And this is what it looks like inside the upstairs bathroom wall. See all the drilling I did without ever breaking through in any of those holes? This was while all contorted inside a freaking cabinet.



More as this project progresses. Maybe this weekend.

[BigV]

Bravo!

I am taking notes on the plumbing. I will go to school on you on this one. THANK YOU! we also have low water pressure... Probably not same cause, copper pipes here.

This is down the list though. .

[glatt]

I should replace the hot water heater now too, but am going to hold off on it for now. It's old and full of sediment that won't drain completely out when I try to flush it. And when I inspect it from below with a flashlight and mirror, there is more rust than I would like to see. It might have another 2-3 years left in it or it might go tomorrow. But replacing it as part of this job is just too much to bite off at once. So I am going to install a filter after the hot water heater too. Keep the sediment in the tank from spreading to all the fixtures.

I'm replacing the kitchen faucet too, because it's beyond all hope of repair/cleaning. I don't want the new kitchen faucet to be clogged by the old hot water heater's sediment.

[classicman]

Good job documenting the work(er), better job doing the work.
I have two hot water heaters in my basement. The one I installed last year and the one I replaced is STILL down there. I should have never listened to the guy that told me to let it sit awhile and dry out so no rusty water leaks onto the carpets while removing it from the house.

[BigV]

I did the hot water heater last year, I'll post it and write it up here. Not too difficult. A 3 on a scale of 10.

[Gravdigr]

Good on ya getting Glattboy involved. Good training.

[glatt]

So I replumbed the house yesterday. I had gradually installed the majority of the pex tubing adjacent to the old galvanized pipes but needed to make all the connections at the the service entrance, each fixture, the water heater, and the boiler. I thought it would take some time, but had no idea that it would take so long. I got started at 8am and finished at 9pm, turned the water back on to check for leaks and then cleaned up and was done at 10pm.

The pex connections were the easy part. It was trying to take out the old galvanized fittings to make room for the pex connections that was hard. Some of those joints hadn't been touched in 70 years and were completely fused together. I wasn't even trying to remove all the old pipes yesterday. Just enough to get them out of the way for the pex connections.

So I learned a few things.

- There are times (although not too many) where you just wish you owned a sawzall. Yesterday was one of those times.
- A good pipe wrench is indispensable and nice to have, but it would have been even nicer to have one with a really long handle. 12 or 14 inches just isn't long enough for the leverage you need.
- Propane torches, one in each hand, will loosen many stubborn fittings enough that you can get them loose with the wrench. Wear leather gloves.
-When you don't need to be saving the integrity of a pipe and its threads, a hacksaw will just barely fit in between joists in some situations, but you'll get a real workout.
-A power saber saw with a metal cutting blade can do the trick sometimes, but is mostly not worth the effort, vibrations, and noise through the entire house.
- Home Depot pretty much sucks and doesn't have the fittings you need in the size you need. You will have to cobble something together and it won't be pretty.
-Don't assume anything about the old pipes and what you will be able to save and connect to.

Oh, and the main shutoff valve isn't going to work when you want it to. We had even had it replaced about 20 years ago when the original shutoff valve wasn't working. It seeped enough water to make sweating a new copper male threaded fitting virtually impossible. I was finally able to get it done by having my son hold two propane torches on the fitting while I held a shop vac nozzle just above the fitting to suck the seeping water out of it so it would heat up, and I used my other hand to hold the solder against the joint. I had tried the bread jammed in the pipe trick, but this was about an inch from the shutoff valve, and there was no room for a bread ball to be jammed in there. The good news is that the pex has a new ball valve to act as a main shutoff just 6 more inches downstream, so this shouldn't be a problem in the future.

[glatt]

I didn't take any pictures yesterday. Too busy and too hard to hold camera while straining against stubborn pipes.

But, here is a series of photos getting the upstairs bathroom sink plumbed. I did this on the rainy Saturday. Because these valves are hidden inside the cabinet, I just left the old ones in place and added the new ones next to them.

I pulled the red hot water pipe out into the area where I could reach it with the expander tool. The other end of this tube two floors below wasn't connect yet, so I could move it back and forth as needed to work on it. You place a white expander ring on the end of the tube and use the tool to stretch the tubing wide open. Is slowly shrinks back to its original size, but you have a couple seconds to get it inserted on the fitting.



No effort needed at all to put it on the fitting. You just slide it in place. But you do need to hold it in place for maybe 30 seconds while the tubing shrinks back down onto the fitting and clamps down hard. You see that black fitting has little prong like wings sticking out on the sides. That's the depth guage. You push the tubing on until it hits those prongs and then you just hold it in place for a bit.



So then I drilled a hole in the drywall for the new valve to go.



And I pushed the tubing back down into the wall toward the basement and poked the black elbow fitting out the hole I just drilled. You can see I also did the blue cold water side as well.

[glatt]

I pre-made these valve assemblies so I could poke them through the wall hole onto those elbows. There was no way for my expander tool to get into the cabinet to build these things up from the wall, so I did them out in the open. The escutcheon plate is a deep one that fits onto the valve, and then you expand the tubing and push it on inside that plate. I cut the tubing a little long so I could cut it to fit later.

Here, I am holding the tubing up against the drywall so I can measure where to cut it.



These special tubing cutters work extremely well.



I put a white expander ring onto the tubing. These rings help apply extra force against the fittings to keep the joint water tight.



And then I used the expander tool to stretch that tubing so it will fit on the elbow.