"a" wrote in message
. net...
Having done some plumbing work in my bathroom over the weekend, I'm now
faced with a problem of confidence... how long should I give it before I
can
be confident that I can go to work and not come home to a house full of
water? The stuff I did was a mixture of soldered joints (everywhere I
could)
and compression fittings (for isolation valves, connection to existing
pipe
which appeared to be a very slightly different diameter and in one place
where I thought waving a blowtorch around could result in setting my
hair
on
fire). Has anybody got any opinions on this?

It's really the compression fittings I'm unsure of - the soldered joints
all
seem fine, a couple of the compression ones dripped slightly after
turning
back on which in one case was solved by tightening it up (!) and the
other
by taking it apart and bunging more jointing compound in there.

I know how you feel, I did a load of work yesterday in the kitchen ready
for
a new sink and plumbed in an outside tap too. As you say the soldered
joints
are nice and easy (although I did chicken out in the end and used solder
ring fittings ) but the 15mm compression joints are a bit of a pig. I
was
familiar with 6mm comp before as I used to run a lot of that a few years
ago
for instrumentation, but the 15mm ones are a lot harder to do up (I dread
to
think what 22mm are like). So far I just have a couple of joints on the
valves that need nipping up but should be ok with a bit of luck.

As Chris said, anything major probably would have happened as soon as you
turned the water back on (and I guess mains pressure would test the joints
out quite well?).



In my limited experience (10-15 compression joints in an entire lifetime),
about 1/3 of them weep a bit
at first and most are cured by a further small tightening. After that, I
have never seen one suddenly explode or
for any weeping to get worse suddenly. The first ones I did, I was paranoid
about and turned off teh mains
before leaving the house for long so I sympathise :-).

Des