Joel Hainley

On Friday night I had enough.  I have been dealing with a mostly useless shower for the better part of 4 years, coupled with bad water pressure everywhere in the house I decided it was time to do something about it. Time to replace all of the water pipes in the house. About 4 years ago I had replaced all of the kitchen lines with copper piping but the majority of the house was still running on galvanized lines. Galvanized pipes seem to do only one thing, get clogged and fail. So I decided it was time to bite the bullet and switch everything over to copper.

So Friday afternoon with very little ceremony and absolutely no fanfare I shutoff the main water in the house. I pulled out the sawzall, a couple of pipe wrenches, and a large dose of optimisim and started to demo the cold water pipes in the house.  Before I went to bed I had the cold water side removed from within the house.

Saturday morning I just had to deal with going back up the main water supply line until I found a logical place to tie into things. So I get up in the morning, make a pot of coffee ( stole water from the neighbors hosebib ) and got to digging. By 1pm I had a list of the major stuff that I needed so it was off to Home Depot to spend some money on parts.

The rest of Saturday was spent running cold water pipes back into the house, changing the flow of a couple of lines to make it easier to do repairs in the future. I went to bed mostly discouraged that I hadn’t made faster progress but at least things were moving along. Sunday I got up and continued working on the cold water side. I was almost done when I realized that I needed a pipe cutter that would fit close to a wall. Another trip to Home Depot and I had the cold side done. I turned on the water slowly and except for 1 small leak, it held. ( I eventually had another small leak appear after a few hours, but that was easily fixed ).

I learned one thing that has been very useful, if you put water into a system and then you have to solder it, the best thing to do is to get all of the water out of the pipes before you start soldering again. If you have water in those pipes it will never get warm enough to melt the solder. I was able to siphon the water out of one side, and the other time I had to use some pressurized air, but I was able to get it all out and get things buttoned up very neatly.

On Sunday afternoon, I started on the hot water side, I made fair progress but an overlooked part and general weariness ensured that I wasn’t able to get things done on Sunday. Having cold running water is better than having no water, and it shouldn’t take too long to get the rest of the hot water system done.

The water pressure on the cold water side is amazing, I don’t recall the water EVER running that well in the house. With this done, I guess you could say that the cold water system was optimized? Hopefully reusing the same pattern on the hot water side will have the same results.