"HeyBub" wrote in message
m...
Robert Green wrote:


Rare, but not unheard of:

Turning the main valve on rather quickly puts a pressure surge in
the pipes. If a joint or section of pipe was fragile, this sudden
surge could cause a failure.

Just jostling a section of fragile pipe can cause leaking. This
confirms my decision to search high and low for a new cartridge for
my kitchen sink instead of replacing the whole assembly. Old
plumbing is vengeful. Bother it enough and it will fight back. Hard.

Let us gather at the riv-er, the beautiful, the beautiful riv-er. Amen,
brother.

Regarding repairs, electrical work can kill you but only plumbing work can
make you want to kill. That and removing ancient wallpaper from a ceiling.

I learned that putting a new toilet in. Everything up the line from
what I was working on failed because the joints were old, calcified
and ready to go. And they went. A simple toilet replacement ended
up with torn up walls, multiple trips to the plumbing supply house
and visits to the neighbors to use their toilets. I did learn that
if you're going to be applying any serious force to an old pipe to
strap it down as well as you can to eliminate the chance of it acting
as a huge lever and damaging a joint upstream.

Same damn thing happened when the shower diverter valve failed.
After 70 years stuff happens.

Sometimes it's not the pipe's fault.

All this stuff should have been yanked years ago, but this was just a
temporary residence - until the market imploded. I'm thinking of Pexing the
whole damn setup. Thinking and thinking. (-:

A bit back I posted an expose regarding my attempt to replace a standard
hose bib with a quarter-turn valve.

Short version:
I put the wrench on the existing bib and gave it a little nudge. The pipe
holding the bib disintegrated! The pipe exited the brick veneer through a
junction between two bricks and was mortared into place. The mortar had
eaten (virtually) through the galvanized pipe.

I've had my share of hose bib problems. The person who installed the front
yard bib thought it would be a great idea to attach it ahead of the main
shut-off valve instead of running a foot extra of pipe to connect the valve
beyond it. Fortunately, when the water company was doing pipe work and shut
the water off at the street I took the opportunity to install an
electrically controlled whole-house shut-off almost at the point where the
street pipe enters the house, so now I can shut off all the water to the
house remotely. Turns out to be a very good thing to have more than one
shut-off valve because not long after the manual valve needed replacement.

This turned a straight-forward afternoon task in to a several hundred
curseword job as a 2x2' section of brick wall had to be removed to get to
the pipe on the other side. But wait, it gets better!

I had FOUR of these goddamn pipes to mess with, each with varying degrees
of
corruption.

I'm betting everyone here has a story of the small job that turned into the
job from hell, complete with desperate searches for replacement parts,
fixing one part only to have two other parts connected to that part fail,
etc. The jobs I really hate are the ones where you think you're correcting
a problem only to find out that you've spent hours fixing something that
wasn't broke

Still, I was lucky to have discovered the issue before a catastrophic
failure.

Catastrophic failures and medical emergencies seem to occur late on a Friday
night. With houses, it isn't so bad, but weekend medical emergencies have
been proven to be more fatal on average than your typical Monday morning
stress-induced heart attack.

--
Bobby G.