Copper hooked to galvy

[cmac2012]

A nice young single father guy, cute modest house, I've done a number of small remodel jobs for him over the years, calls me telling me the hot water pressure in the kitchen sink and bath are really bad. Bathroom sink is strong though.

Kitchen faucet aerator is passing cold water just fine. He said the pressure drop off was sudden. I took the valve out, there was an oval piece of scale that was made for the opening, jammed in good but it disintegrated soon enough. Pressure was back in gangbusters fashion, dude was way happy. Bath valve is clean as a whistle however.

I went into the crawl space, all galvy except about the last 15 or 20 feet of the line going to the kitchen hot water. The kitchen cold had an approx 2 - 3 foot segment of copper going from just under the sub floor up to the faucet.

I was surprised that there wasn't more visible corrosion at the joining point on the hot water leg.

My instincts tell me I should replace this with a di-electric union. No idea if the piece of scale I removed is from an active scale farm just inside that joint. When I've seen similar in the past there was large sign of corrosion. The remodel (pre-flip) on this house was done 5 - 6 years ago. I'm surprised this looks fairly clean, others I've seen had large amounts of green funk.. Doesn't seem as though a bunch of teflon tape would prevent it, though it looks as though a lot was used.

I suspect a similarly bad joint is in place on the cold water side. Was a bit muddy so I didn't crawl over to see.

The bath hot water line is galvy all the way. It goes under the sink with a T then ends at the tub. I suspect more makes it to the tub than to the sink. The tub has a tile surround, but the bath valve has a closet between it and the hallway. Will make it easy to get in if we decide to add a run of copper. Wouldn't be much more work to do it upstream of the bath sink, get both that way.

I'm guessing that the tub valve might have a slug of scale right at the point where it joins the valve. But if we're going to open the wall in the closet, may as well give it the full treatment. Maybe a new valve as well.

 

[Geofd]

it would make sense to me to get rid of the galvi.....when money and time allows get a couple of rolls of pex and just start clipping it up

 

[cmac2012]

I mentioned replacing it all, wouldn't be a huge job - two bedroom, one bath, crawl space is fairly comfy. His former father in law had spoken with him on the topic and is down on pex, he's still close with the guy and wants to give him a nod and go with copper. We might do it in stages.

 

[Geofd]

it would make sense to me to get rid of the galvi.....when money and time allows get a couple of rolls of pex and just start clipping it up

i felt the same about the pex until i had a pioe burst i ended up tearing the ceiling and part of the wall out ...to repipe in copper would have cost a fortune....so a lot of the guys i workwith use pex because its a cost savings for the customer along with the labor....
anyway this was the fist time i used it i used a few hundered feet of domestic pex and about a hundred feet of the pex with the oxyegen barrier for a heat loop its a time saver and not that difficult to do there are a few methods and everyone has their opinion...
i used brass fittings with copper crimp rings they work great.....

 

[cmac2012]

It's worked out well for me a number of times. I've moved fixtures around and capped lines on a few jobs.

I lived in a Zen center in Berkeley in the mid 90s, sounds woo-woo I know but it was small, our teacher was Korean martial arts guy, no nonsense. Me and two other guys rebuilt a large house, 5 bedroom, three bath and built a Zen hall out back. One of the guys put in radiant heat flooring, pex in gypcrete on the second floor and in the crawl space under the oak floor on the main. Long story short, in subsequent years I've repaired a number of leaks for the new owners. The guy who built it now installs it full time but he cut his teeth on that one. Bound to be some amateur errors.

One of the most recent repairs that was a tad unsettling, a one inch line feeding the heaters kept developing leaks. The new owners, after 12 years, got strongarmed out in some re-fi shenanigans, they didn't want to replace it in the last 3 or 4 months they would be there so I used some slit hose pieces with hose clamps to jury rig a patch. Then it would start to leak somewhere else. IOW it was sort of disintegrating.