house plumbing

Plumbing is a study in evolution. 

Few things in the building business have changed as much as plumbing. 

This week I added some new red and white plumbing pipe to replace some broken copper lines, from the house being empty last winter when it was quite cold. 

I remember when all fresh water ran in galvanized steel pipe, each piece cut to exact dimension and threaded on site. Drain pipes were all cast iron and were chinked with a thing called “oakum” and then hot led was poured in to seal the joint. 

When I was a kid our pastor built himself a new house and he plumbed the whole drain system in Copper! I looked with awe at those 4” Tees and Weys all in gleaming copper. Copper never caught on for drain. 

Along the way someone invented ABS plastic pipe, and you GLUED the stuff together. No hot lead, no solder, just a can of stinky sticky  black glue. 

Copper replaced galvanized steel pipe for fresh water a long time ago. There were a few steel pipe houses being built when I plumbed my house 37 years ago, but not many. Now copper has given way to a  new system that is another type of plastic, for BOTH hot and cold water. Cast iron was Black, ABS still is black, but this new stuff comes in half a dozen wild colors. 

For no real reason (I am not sure which line is hot and which is cold) I decided on red and white tubing for this project. It just seemed a waste not to use some of that Red pipe! I ran two lengths of pipe/tubing across the top of my cabinets, down the wall, then behind the cabinets to the location of the sink. All in ONE piece of bent tubing/pipe.

To join the new pipe you slip the end into a fitting, slide a copper ring on top of the joint and then with a tool that looks like a fair sized bolt cutter, you crimp the copper ring and there is a joint. It can swivel but it won’t leak. Wow. It is fast and it works.

To make it all even nuttier, there are fittings that are called Shark fittings. Just clean the mud off the end of the pipe and slip the fitting on. That is all. No glue even. I had a plumber agree with me that you can tell by looking that it won’t work, but it does and works very well.

The icing on the pipe is that you can remove  those shark fittings and use them again if you choose.
Amazing stuff

When I think of how things like the simple piping in a house has changed in my lifetime I really feel like an old guy!