DIYbanter - View Single Post - 30-year old building pipes

In article ,
says...

How do you blow epoxy into all the pipes without plugging up the
works??

I've seen it at work on big condo buildings, fascinating to watch.

They start with huge air compressors. Remove all the fixtures and cap
all the pipes except one circuit at a time. First they run sandblasting
grit through the pipes to clean them out -- they can even restore full
interior diamter on massively encrusted old galvanized pipe.

Then they blow through the epoxy -- the air flow makes it form a uniform
film on the walls of the pipe without plugging anything. You end up
with a continuous epoxy coating from one end of the line to the other.
They do need to bridge around any valves in the system, of course, so
the valves will still work. But that's no big deal, the valves are in
an exposed location so it's still a lot simpler than tearing open all
the walls.

Besides re-lining to prevent or repair leaks, it also encapsulates and
lead in the pipe or solder, so the system has also been used for lead
abatement in schools.

--
is Joshua Putnam
http://www.phred.org/~josh/
Braze your own bicycle frames. See
http://www.phred.org/~josh/build/build.html