A viewer from Nanaimo, BC has a bedroom ensuite far away from the hot water tank and wants to know how to cut down the long delay between turning on the hot water and getting hot water at the tap.Even if you could open the walls and add insulation to the pipe, it would not help the problem. Insu...
Bending a ridged pipe without having it kink and block the inside diameter requires the right tool for each type of pipe. The photo shows an electrical conduit bender.Ridged copper speedways for sinks should be bent using what looks like a large spring. This prevents kinking.When it comes to la...
When pipes go from a cottage down through the crawl space and into the ground, they risk freezing. Simply wrapping them in insulation will not protect them, especially if the wind manages to blow though the fiberglass.Dig down about a foot where the pipes go into the ground. Remove the insulati...
If you connect copper plumbing pipes directly to galvanized plumbing pipes, or even let a copper pipe touch a galvanized heating duct, you will get an electrolytic reaction between these two metals. The reaction is accelerated if the pipe is hot, so this is worse with hot water lines than cold o...
Insulating pipes that run through cold areas is necessary to keep them from freezing; even then you have to run the water occasionally or add some heat. You could leave the tap running a little during the very cold spells; that's how Grandpa kept them from freezing. You can also get thermostat ...
In the old days steel pipe ran right up and attached directly to the bottom of faucets. With the advent of copper piping, this too ran up and was hard connected to the bottom of the faucets. Both of these were serious plumbing installations that had to fit just right. Then someone invented a f...
Bending electrical conduit can be a difficult job if you don't have a professional conduit bender. The problem is that it tends to just collapse. Heating it will certainly help, but it still flattens out or kinks.Alfonz from Vernon B.C. has a real nifty technique. He fills the conduit with san...
Chris in Mississauga wants to put a pedestal sink on an outside wall but is worried about the pipes freezing.You are right to worry, Chris. When we put sinks on the outside walls, we need to run the plumbing pipes on the warm side of all that insulation, which means inside the sink cabinet. A p...
Some plumbers just keep on plumbing, and some, like Phil Groves Sewer Services from Burlington, Ontario keep looking for new ways to do old things. So Phil has a sewer camera that lets you see what is blocking your sewer line. He has a scanning device that allows him to walk across the front la...
Broken sewage lines can cause a back-up into the house, but also cause underground pollution outside the house. They do need to be fixed as soon as it is identified that there is a problem. When the line is destroyed by crushing, or shifting ground, or a tree root that has crushed it through ex...
