Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

[Phil]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Annoying drip from new new basin waste?

Wrap PTFE around the thread on the brass waste and then fit the flat washer or coned basin mate then tighten the nut. Nothing worse than that slow teardrop spiraling down the thread just when you thought you've finished.

Since I've used PTFE I've not had a single leak.

 

[WaterTight]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

I've a couple of tips for anyone like me who satisfies the two conditions of owning an expensive freezing machine and also being an idiot.

1) If working on rads/primary pipes remember to tell the customer that the heating must be cold by the time you arrive.

2) When you arrive remember to check the heating is not due to come on.

I did neither of these on a job earlier and upon swapping a rad and filling it up put my tools away and then came back amazed to find it was now hot. Lu-cky.

 

[WHPES]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Remember to regularly sharpen the blades on your plastic pipe cutters to ensure a clean and easy cut.

 

[southcoastboile]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

if you get an iscolation valve leak from the spindle after turning it off to drain down a boiler drain down completely, layer it with flux and solder around the spindle, have done this a few times, you cant turn the valve back off but atleast it stops the leak untill you can gt hold of a new valve which can sometimes be a long wait

 

[Mr leaky]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

if you tighten a compression fitting onto a pipe and realize you have made a mistake you can remove olives with a flat file basically you tap the olive with the file and rotate the pipe slowly the olive can then be removed they can then be re-used some people say they leak but personally i have had no problems there are a few other tips on u tube that i have found the link is bellow

TheTomplum's Channel - YouTube

another thing i do is i write down faults in a small book so i can go back to it in the future it helps me remember things i would otherwise forget such as what ohm readings you should get from certain components, formulas and rules

 

[Guest123]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

This isn't really a plumbing tip but a matter of courtesy that my customers really appreciate. When working on a bathroom, the smells from open soil pipes. wastes and every day materials like flux, silicone etc can be very off putting, especially as it's someones home. I now always put a air freshener in the stripped out bathroom and the one that squirts out a scent on a timer.

 

[Steve @ TheHeatingHub]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

always keep half a length of imperial in ya van

 

[dontknowitall]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

I find a couple of sheets of newspaper stops the smells and also soaks up the extra drips of water.

 

[fuzzy]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

use the correct tool for the job

 

[GQuigley67]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

buy one of those LED head lights they are the muts nuts for under floors and other confined spaces

 

[SimonJohns]

Mapp gas for soldering when a pipe has a slight amount of water in it

Making sure you always have an open end when soldering with a slight amount of water. The steam will blow the solder out of fitting

 

[Steve001]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Use your blow lamp to heat up a screwdriver tip to undo screws and ballofix vales that' are covered with paint

 

[REDSAW]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

put the blowlamp on the pipe slice for a few minutes then tell the apprentice to cut some pipe.
shuts them up for the rest of the day!.

 

[REDSAW]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

neat end feed soldering?.

a 15mm pipe end feed requires 15mm of solder, 22mm pipe fitting = 22mm of solder = no snot.

 

[REDSAW]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Did some wazzer in collage tell you that :lol:

lol,
i think it was the copper guild?. something to do with yorkies too, the solder in them is the fitting circumfrance divied by 2 = dia.?. or pie rsed.
some days when i feel lazy i just lay solder across pipe like a robot. seems to work well.

 

[WHPES]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Use your blow lamp to heat up a screwdriver tip to undo screws and ballofix vales that' are covered with paint

if you don't mind losing the temper of your screwdriver tip, making it go bendy, and throwing it away afterwards.

Keep an old worn screwdriver for doing this, not your best ones!

 

[GQuigley67]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

angling the screwdriver and hitting it with a hammer scraping the paint out usually does it for me

 

[Kerryt]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Don't just support the ends of the worktop on trestles. Support the narrow edge portions that will remain after the sink hole has been cut. Otherwise the centre stretch of the worktop chases the cutout bit to the floor...

 

[Best]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Don't turn the sink upside down on worktop & mark around it, as you do, & then cut on that mark instead of first marking it 12mm or so inside that line for actual cut. I haven't done this, but knew of a fitter who did & then the sink fell through the hole he had cut!

 

[Guest123]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

i guess that's happened to you then. i put the worktop in place then cut the sink hole.

Same here. That's the way I do it and if it's a round bowl sink, I use a router fixed in place in the middle to cut a perfect circle.

 

[Rayner]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Buy yourself a metal bucket! I'm an apprentice and bought one with my own money for emptying tanks in lofts and such. Gone through about 100 plastic ones but my metal one is still going!

 

[Barry98]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Buy yourself a metal bucket! I'm an apprentice and bought one with my own money for emptying tanks in lofts and such. Gone through about 100 plastic ones but my metal one is still going!

that sounds like a lot of up and down why not just use your hose drop it in run down to bath and syphon out ?

 

[MatthewHurt]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

If trying to remove something that's going to spill some water and its to awkward to get a tray etc. Underneath it.. Baby's Nappies will soak up a suprising amount of water!

 

[MatthewHurt]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Also just add to Bartdudes earlier post, I superglue 3 magnets (of the same size) to the bottom of a small tupaware tub and then you can drop in screws when servicing and keep the different sized screws seperate from each other so you don't spend ages trying to remember which screw came from where

 

[broggo]

re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!

Leak Detection spray gets brown sludge marks out of carpets