DIYbanter - View Single Post - Installing new vacuum breaker on a hose bib

Erma1ina

David Nebenzahl wrote:

On 10/3/2008 3:58 AM spake thus:

On Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:25:32 -0700, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

It was something of a bitch. I noticed the setscrew on the new one
I bought, but couldn't see or feel any such screw on the old one,
just a round bump. So I just torqued the **** out of it with a pipe
wrench (crescent wrench holding the valve body). I threaded the new
breaker on, then tightened the setscrew. After just a few turns, it
promptly broke off, apparently just as it was designed to do (I
could see it had a narrow shank).

I'd remove those set screws and use standard ones.

I probably will next time. But they're obviously made to snap off on
installation: why is that? (That bump I felt on the old one was the
shank of the broken setscrew.) Makes it really hard to remove them.

By the way, after testing it I could see why these are good things to
install: after turning on the hose bib and letting the hose reel fill
up, I closed the bib, whereupon a large gush of water sprayed out of the
anti-siphon valve. Had it not been there, all that water would have gone
back inside the house plumbing, along with whatever crap was in the hose
(or in a pool the hose was thrown into, in some cases).

--
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

- Paulo Freire

David, if you live in an area where freezing occurs, you should install
that anti-siphon valve so that it can be removed from the hose bib
because it prevents the bib from being emptied of water even after the
hose is removed.

I use the kind of anti-siphon valve you're talking about and removed
that set-screw before installing it because tightening the set screw
prevents the valve from being unscrewed from the hose bib. I live in the
Midwest where freezing is a certainty.