These are the joints that failed:
Also, here's some detail of that pipe that I was trying to describe as being just oversized enough to not fit my 3/8" copper sweat fittings:
(ignore the dial on the caliper...it's not accurate..the ruler scale is in CM)
And here's what I'm replacing them with:
So I spent a good 2 hours under the kitchen hooking in the new lines and gluing everything up. It's a dirty job, but at least I had a friend to keep me company...
And of course, on my very last joint, I had a small mishap when I knocked over my can of purple PVC primer. Unfortunately it was right in front of my face, so I ended up with primer in my eye. I don't think I've ever made the crawl to the exit that quickly before :P. Only water in the house is some refrigerated drinking water so I had to use that to flush the primer out of my eye. Talk about a brain freeze... Unfortunately it didn't do anything for the stain on my face :P.
Anyway, now that you've had your laugh, I'll continue...
Couldn't really do anything while I waited for the glue to dry, so the dogs and i played some frisbee in the sun(it was CHILLY). This was the first time the dogs have had any frisbee time since we've started the project.
After a couple of hours I was able to turn the water on and test. More good and bad news. Good news, none of my new joints are leaking(not exactly true, but the 2 leaks I have are easily fixable). The bad news is that I still have no pressure. The lines burped and gurgled for about 5 minutes, but no pressure. I fiddled with it for 2 more hours, turning everything on and off and on and off..letting it run, letting it sit closed, everything that I could think of to bleed the lines and get all the air out. It improved slightly, but settled into what is probabaly less than half of the original pressure we had to the kitchen.
So now I'm stumped. I don't exactly know what to do from here. If I knew what the real problem was, I could fix it, but I'm pretty much clueless. The thing that's really puzzling to me is that the kitchen has no pressure. I didn't alter the kitchen lines other than to put in my new tees. I would expect, once the lines have been bled, that the kitchen would have the same pressure that it did before I started. The only thing I can think of is that there's possibly some blockage or debris in the lines. I'm going to disassemble the faucet when I get home today and see if there's anything in there. I'll probably also disconnect the final supply lines to the faucet and see what the pressure there is like. The washing machine is in the same boat, only worse, so I'll probably disconnect and flush it as well.
oddly enough, new lines to the bathroom appear to have more pressure than the kitch does currently. It's hard for me to tell exactly how much pressure they have tho, since I don't have any fixtures in there right now and I can't really eyeball the flow. All I can tell is that it looks like it's flowing slightly more than the kitchen is. I could be completely wrong here tho, so I'm not basing any decisions on this.
Anyway, so now what? I'm looking at a couple of different options. The first, and the one that I would actually like to do, is to just replumb the whole house. I'm worried that the 3/8" copper lines under the kitchen(which is now the "hub") are just too small to support the amount of water needed(although I still can't explain why the kitchen had good pressure with the same lines before). I could create a supply map, run a new mainline into the house, run new distribution pipes, new lines ot the water heater, and new lines to all the fixtures. I feel pretty good that I could handle this. It wouldn't be fun work, but I bet when I was finished EVERYTHING in the house would have excellent pressure. I don't think it would even cost that much. The CPVC I'd use is really cheap, and I wouldn't have to drop 20 bucks here and there at each unusual joint I run into like I'm doing now, since they'd all be new joints. The problem with this solution is the timeline. I just don't think that, with our current living situation, that we have time for that job. I don't want to put the project 2 weeks(and that might be conservative) behind.
The other option that I have is to get some professional advice, or even professional help(haha, I know that's everyone is already thinking!). So I'm on the phone with some local plumbers this morning to see if anyone can come out and give me some consultation. It's entirely possible that I've made some small error in calculation or execution that's screwing me up. In fact, I hope this is the case. Maybe a professional will be able to diagnose what's going on and give me some alternatives. Stay tuned...
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