Being cocky gets you a kick in the teeth.

Comments Off on Being cocky gets you a kick in the teeth.

So, having cheerfully chatted to the people at work, and indeed the plumber, about my reasonable competence with plumbing the world decided I needed a reminder as to my place in the universe. Well, more accurately, I think I was a bit cocky.

So yesterday, after work, I set to on the temporary plumbing to run to the washing machine and the temporary ‘lead free’ cold tap in the kitchen. A fairly simple prospect, cut into the old pipe just after the stop cock, throw in a T piece, long straight run to the kitchen, another T to go off to the tap and another straight run down to the washer.

Easy.

Only, like I said, I didn’t perhaps take as much care as I should have for a job I’ve not done for a couple of years. The T piece in the kitchen? The solder didn’t flow properly on the underside (to be fair, the side nearest the floor) and I didn’t notice. That would have been okay, but then the joint to the old plumbing did not go well.

I scritched it with my steel wool, I fluxed it, and slapped it together and heated it, and heated it, and waited, and waited, and realised the solder was not going to flow. After digging out the actual *solder* as opposed to relying on the yorkshire joint, and slapping more flux and heat about I ended up with a joint which was looking like it’d leak. It did.

I pondered things, there were too many joints around to make life easy, so I decided to lop a chunk out of the old plumbing (it is, by now, 1800 on a Sunday), rootle around in the ‘plumbing stuff’ box. Find the four (yes, four) remaining straight joints. Ponder some more. Have a plan that uses three of them…

Make up a whole new section of pipes, carefully cleaning and fluxing the joints – now paranoia has struck and I spend ages doing each bit of pipe. Spend ages scritching the old pipework with the steel wool until glints in the half-light under the stairs. Put lots of flux on. Heat. The solder flows beautifully on the other joints, on these, it just sort of sits there mocking me. Eventually it looks like it’s done ‘something’. Stare at it optimistically. Turn on. Get impromptu shower as both straight joints fail (fortunately, the stopcock is right there, so it’s less than a second before it’s turned off again).

Whimper.

Debate crying.

Debate expense of calling a plumber to make two sodding joints on a sunday night.

Stare some more. Decide that I *know* you can ‘proper’ solder flux joints. Drain the water out as much as I can to get the pipes really hot – because my blow torch is completely unable to get the damn joints hot enough when there’s water within about 8 feet of them. Decide to fix the solder joint in the kitchen. After about 10 minutes of heating with my hideously erratic blowtorch (one way up it suddenly goes to max-flow and then goes out, the other way up it’ll sputter and just about put out enough gas to stay alight). Slather it in blobby solder, curse because it looks like crap and the tiles next to it are now dirty yellow-brown.

Go back into the under-stairs disaster. Look at the popped apart joints. Take them properly apart. Clean, again, flux, again, this time have the genius idea that I could tin the pipes like I would a wire. Tin both pipes, but one of them doesn’t want to tin so well – I put this down to the fact that it’s right by the stop-cock (anyone seeing how dumb I was being?) and I’m struggling to get the pipe really hot.

Manage to hodge the thing together, feed in solder. One straight joint looks like an accident in a solder factory, there’s so much solder hanging around it. The other is like Mr Blobby’s solder-based twin. Wait as the pipes cool. Turn the water on. Turn it off again, rapidly because water is gently spraying out of Mr Blobby.

Stare at the stop-cock pipe. My beloved comes home and endures my self flagellation as I – exhausted as it’s now after 2000 and I’ve been up since 0500 and currently stressed to high heaven by the fact that the house currently has no water supply at all – try and work out some solution. Realise that I’m being a dumbass. I never had to make more than one joint to the old plumbing. I’ve got spare olives for reusing compression joints. Fish out a new olive, take out the old pipe running from the compression jointed stopcock to the new plumbing, use my *last* straight joint and make a new joint – f’ing awful as it is – to the new pipework and lo, it only leaks from the compression joints which I never do up tight enough*.

Overnight there have been no explosions. I am still waiting for the straight-solder joint to the old plumbing to fail, but I do have a spare compression joint kicking around to replace it with if I need to. I’m not keen to because it’s a bitsa part. I think it probably dates back to my childhood and my dad unleashing me on the old cut-out plumbing with bits he’d taken off from the main house plumbing ‘cos it’s definately not as it came out of the packaging.

It’s messy, but it does, currently, work.

And it adds a sort of victorian slum style to our house:

Period feel

* I broke one once, and have since had no ability to do them up until I can see they’re leaking.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.