Where is Manuel Labour when you need him?

[John Hill]

A couple of days of real hard yakka around here. 

The house is near 30 years old and some of the plastic plumbing is starting have 'issues'.

This latest project involved replacing the black plastic pipe that came from the street and which unfortunately run under a concrete wall and under a concrete path.

A new route was dug from the street to the garage requiring knocking a hole through the concrete (solid) wall and of course digging a trench which required lifting some pavers, fortunately no big deal with the pavers, the trench was just hard work and the hole through the wall required four 10 mm holes then breaking out with a cold chisel.

The route then was up an internal garage wall and into the space below the floor above.  This is extremely congested and it required a lot of bending and poking to find a way through to the space I had uncovered by sawing  a nice escape hatch in the floor of one of the bathrooms where the new feed could be teed into the main line.

I had anticipated that the only other task would be to turn off the old stop cock and so isolate the old pipe from the street.  The stop cock would not turn off!  It screws down OK but does not close and I cannot do much about it as some (fortunately not me) clod has set the stop cock in concrete!

Nothing for it but to break into the laundry wall close to the old entry and plug the line. Now it just so happens that I still have a roll of 30 year old wallpaper what would match that wall but instead I chose to glue up a framed piece of surplus (never throw anything away) shower lining as a splashback over the laundry wash tub, I trust this meets with approval when the domestic executive gets back from visiting relatives.

The plumbing I used is a range of plastic which uses just firm hand pressure to put the various fittings on the fairly flexible 22mm plastic line.  Of course everything is brightly coloured and my wife remarked that it looked like 'Plumbers Lego'!  It was as easy as that to use too, just a knife as the only tool and after 24 hours no detectable leaks so I can fill the trench in and relay the pavers.  I also have to glue down that trap I cut in the bathroom floor and relay the carpet, I am really glad we do not have a tiled bathroom!

[bogstandard]

I am coming across the same sort of problems John.

My house was built in 1940, which at that time, they used lead and cast iron for plumbing and waste. The house was 'modernised' in the very late 70's, which replaced everything with some sort of plastic. It was just after that when I purchased the house.

It now seems that the old piping wasn't UV protected, so it has started to deteriorate, especially the sealed joints on the exposed soil pipes. The sealing rings have all 'popped' apart.

Now the problem. The old piping was all in imperial measurement, and it now seems that modern piping is all metric, so it is not just a matter of replacing one part, but the whole lot. Big bucks.

John

[John Hill]

John, what we had was a plastic pipe in from the street that would spring a pinhole leak which showed as a soggy patch in the lawn, so I would dig down and fix the leak. Weeks latere there would be another and so on.  Incidently the first repair I did was an emergency job where I just put a simple hose clamp around the pipe and gave it a squeeze which closed the hole.  It eventually got so bad that I had left the trench open and it stayed that way for months.


The pipes put in our house when we had it built is plastic for cold and copper for hot, I remember the plumber telling me that it should be good for 30 years.  Oh dear!  30 years have almost gone by!  So far the copper looks good but the plastic is I think a time-bomb.  It is thin grey tubing which they discovered after some years does not like to be bent.  It seems to be good on straight runs though so we might be lucky as the plumber did seem to use a lot of metal elbows.

Yes, we too have exposed plastic waste pipes on the back of the house and it maybe fortunate that years ago my wife thought I should paint them to make them less obvious being a different shade of white to the house.  Lets hope the paint has protected against UV somewhat.

You might find that your plumber has adapter for every conversion possible from imperial to metric, mine certainly did and I found that the various plastic plumbing makers are not all compatible either so he has another big box to handle that.  Maybe the job would not be quite as expensive as you might think, it depends on how good the access is to wall cavities etc, as far as actually installing the plastic plumbing I think Bandit could be trained to do most of it.

[bogstandard]

Luckily John, I did most of the internal stuff myself before I became disabled, so now it is a matter of having to pay someone to get the rest of the job done.
One thing I really hate doing, when I know I have the skills to do it myself. The mind is willing etc.


John

[tumutbound]

I've just been told about a leak in my rental/retirement property. Still to get the details but not looking forward to it.
All the plumbing is embedded in the concrete slab the house is built on.

Just what I need! I was only starting to deal with the white ant problem

[Darren]

Ours is a white Elephant, cost more than the rent we get for it........

[tumutbound]

Ours is a white Elephant, cost more than the rent we get for it........ :

Mine costs more that the rent I get but I can claim any loss against my income tax so it works out pretty well.
At least it did when I was employed. ...