re: Hints, tips & secrets of plumbing - No Banter please!
Some great tips here, i have a few. 1-Instead of buying those expensive strips to clean pipes in those hard to reach places prior to soldering. Why not get a roll of sanding paper and cut them into strips, its miles cheaper and does a better job.
2- You can get a neater finish on soldering if you apply a gentle heat to the joint and wipe away the excess melted flux that trickles down the pipe
3- You can also use a pencil to mark around the joint prior to soldering and the snots just fall off because it wont bond to the pencil mark
4-If you have a leak on a coupling on a waste pipe never fear, put some glue on the leaking part, put your wet vac on the end of the pipe and you can suck the glue into the leaking coupling.
5- you can put overflow pipes into your pipe bender and pull 45 degree bends and offsets, u cannot pull 90s tho lol.
6- I never really bung a tank you just stuff the cold feeds up with a plastic bag, tuck it in with a screw driver (not all the way of course) and voilà, it works, forget bungs lol
7-You can cut lead perfectly with your plastic pipe cutters that you would use on hep.
8-If you pull a 90 degree bend on 22mm pipes and file the burr you can slip hep pipe through it to get a tighter bend without kinking the pipe.
9-This I ONLY do when i forget my hole saw kit at home (which is all the time lool) you can heat up the end of your copper and use it to cut the nice hole in a cold water tank and any snots can be scraped off with a chisel it works a treat, trust me.
10- If you have a blackberry phone use it to store measurements of the most common things and material lists in it memo pad function ( i've set mine to my side button, so one press and hey presto).
11-the 15mm pipe came out of a 22x22x15 tee on a live heating system on one job, all i did was stuffed it with bread through the 15mm hole on the fitting and soldered a pipe to it, then put a ballafix to the end put the wet vac on and sucked the bread out.
12- You can make slip couplings with a socket former and a hacksaw, just knock in a longer socket and cut it with the hacksaw (not slice)
13- If you have a loose wall plug or its spinning a bit pack against it by slipping lil chips of wood beside it.
14- Try very hard not to use compression joints under the floor or in places you cannot later get to.
15- try to pull more bends under the floor and use less fittings which lowers the chances of you getting a leak.
16-drain a cylinder fast by putting the hose on the drain off, drain as usual and taking the top nut out or the immersion and slip a piece of 22mm pipe in there put your wet vac on the pipe using a cloth to cover the gap between the vac hose and the 22mm pipe, so u dont lose suction and your off, less than 10-15mins on a standard cylinder, you must be prepared to empty the vac a few times tho lol
To be honest i could bloody write a book on tricks, you guys got some good ones but i bet you have more, I just developed a way of doing things that lets me put up a combi and power flush;the system before half day with all neat pipework put in 2 by 6pm daily, its also to long to write down on here lol.
keep writting guys cheers
