More plumbing

Sorry for the delayed update. Either I'm working or tired and sleeping :).

I took friday off. Did some plumbing planning, and had a really good idea of what I was going to tackle on Saturday. Went to bed early :).

Saturday we woke up, visited a few plumbing suppliers to get all the fittings I needed, and then spent the rest of the day under the house in the crawlspace. Started with the kitchen. I cut the copper lines supplying the kitchen, added some tees, and ran the new CPVC lines to the bathroom. That took about 4 hours, including one extra trip to HD. No matter how much recon and planning I do, I keep running into unexpected things that cause me to have to alter the plan. In this case, I'd already crawled under the house and measured the copper lines at the kitchen to know what size fittings I'd need to tap into them. Worked brilliantly(with the caveat that I havne't tested my sweat joints yet) for the hot lines. Turns out the cold lines were, for some reason, about 1/32 larger diameter than the hot lines(crazy), which meant that my 3/8 tee wouldn't fit them. I have no idea why they're that size...they're not big enough to be the next larger standard size, so none of those fittings fit. I got luck and found that a "street elbow" of the next larger size fitting fit prefectly. A street elbow has a female fitting on one side and a male fitting on the other, instead of the standard female/female ends. Turns out that what's meant to be the male end worked perfectly as a female for my application. So I was able to rig up a joint using these fittings and some short lengths of the next larger size pipe. It's not pretty but it did the job.

After running the new lines to the bathroom, I switched gears(since I had to wait 2 hrs for the new CPVC joints to cure before testing) and removed all the old galv from the bathroom. I cut the supply line to the bathroom and capped it. I also cut the "output" line that's supply the front outside spigot that's being fed from the bathroom(with the intention of running a new line to that spigot from the new bathroom supply lines). After that, I was able to just sawzall the old galv in the bathroom and remove it. Then I went into the crawlspace again to fit the new line to the spigot. I removed the old spigot, and cut the existing galv supply to it(just to be clean). I ran into a problem, tho, when I went to fit the new spigot. The hole in the brick through which the spigot line runs is directly behind a large 2x8 floor joist that's almost contacting the exterior brick wall. This makes it impossible for me to fit anything to a new spigot inserted into the existing hole. There's just not enough room to work...much less add any additional fittings(i needed to put an elbow on it). So the plan now is to patch the existing hole, and drill a new hole about 2 inches lower which should allow me to clear the floor joist and work on the fittings with no problem.

After figuring all this out, it was time to test the new lines. I'd put valves on the new CPVC lines so that I could leave the water on in the house while I'm doing the rest of the finish plumbing in the room itself. So I opened these valves, and Allen turned on the water at the main. BAD BAD NEWS. No water came out of the new lines, but water DID come out of the "output" line that used to go to the front spigot. ARGH!! Turns out we had it backwards. What I thought was input TO the bathroom was actually output FROM the bathroom, and what I had thought was output to the front spigot was actually input from the street. Big big mistake. Now I have an uncapped line at the spigot that's between the bathroom and the street, AND I have an uncapped supply line to the bathroom, AND I capped off what turns out is the actual supply to the rest of the house. What a huge screw-up. In a nutshell, what I'd done is assumed that both hot and cold were already coming from the ktichen side of the house(I know for a fact the hot is...the water heater is over there). In reality, the street feeds the BR on the way to the back side of the house and the water heater. I'd run a test to confirm my theory, by opening the tap in the kitchen and putting my ear to the pipe in the BR and heard nothing. Then I closed the kitchen tap and opened the spigot at the front...definite sound of water travelling thru the pipes. This reinforced my theory that the supply was kitchen->Bathroom->front sipgot. I'm still not sure why, but that test was completely invalid.

So now I'm looking at a repair job to fix the mess I've made. Here's the plan: I'm going to connect what I now know as the input to the bathroom to the output of the bathroom with CPVC. This will, in effect, make the lines run the way that I had originally thought, and allow me to use the plumbing that I've already done. I'm also going to have to cap off the line to the front spigot, since it's before the bathroom in the lines and therefor gets supply no matter what I do in the bathroom. The new maps is essentially going to be Street->bypass bathroom(my new fix joint),house(water heater/kitchen), bathroom, spigot. I think this should solve the problem, and hopefully I won't have run into water pressure issues. I also thing I'm going to lose the back spigot as well for now. I discovered, when researching the situation after finding out I'd made a mistake, another line running FROM the bathroom, that'd been buried under the mass of AC ductwork. It heads toward the outside of the house in the opposite direction than everything else. I can only assume that it's feeding the spigot at the back of the house, since that's the only thing in remotely the same direction that uses water. I don't mind losing this one, as I'll just tap into the washing machine lines at a later time to fix that problem(those lines are probably 5 feet from the back spigot). Hopefully I'm right about this one, but we're all quickly learning how good my assumptions have been thus far.

Anyway, that's the plan for today. Went to Lowe's Depot today and got all the fittings I needed to make this situation right. I also invested in some pipe wrenches. I wish I had done that earlier...it would have saved me probably 2 hours worth of fussing with these old galvanized fittings. Oh well...living thru the pain makes the benefit of the tools apparent. I don't mind paying for something once I know it's worth it. Wrestling with these galv fittings with my channel locks and pliers was not fun. They're awesome tools and eventually did the trick, but it'll be much easier now that I have the right tools. Hopefully by this evening I'll be able to turn the water back on to the house and be able to use the kitchen and laundry room again. I'll also be able to inspect all my joints to make sure they're water tight. Everyone cross your fingers... :)