ASK This Old House | Preventing Plumbing Disasters (S19 E2) FULL EPISODE

[Music] a house is like a big machine a lot of moving parts and if you don't take care of it things can get out of control today we'll examine a critical aspect of that machine the plumbing system and that sits right outside the building right here we don't want to see it hear it or smell it but understanding how your plumbing system works can save you a lot of money you want to make sure that water has somewhere to go otherwise the pan is just going to fill up and you're going to have water problems then we'll let you know what to look out for and what you can do to keep your system running properly and prevent costly damage to your home and all of a sudden water is coming out of every place it should no matter where it happens it's always a huge mess that's coming up next on ask This Old House [Music] the modern plumbing system plays an incredibly important role in our lives every day put that in your memory draw when you need clean water just turn on a faucet and it's there when you need to get rid of dirty water press a lever and it just seems to magically disappear but if it's not properly maintained the same plumbing system can really wreak havoc 30 years of kitchen sink waste there are many places around the house where water damage can occur toilets faucets pipes inside the walls even the piping for the heating system the average Insurance claim for water damage in the United States is around ten thousand dollars and frozen pipes can double that amount so what do you need to be on the lookout for to protect yourself from this kind of damage we took a tour with damage prevention specialist Michael Milligan to find out why don't we start here underneath the sink now what we've got here is we've got you know a couple drain pipes we also have some supply lines we have a supply line to the dishwasher as well so there are several places here that you could look for possible water damage issues first with the drain pipe you know there's a possibility as it's draining that there could be a seal that's not not completely finished here you might have some some water leaking out there so what you want to do is maybe run your finger underneath it see if there's any moisture it's nice and dry here now with the supply lines they're a little bit different because there's always pressure there's always water pressure in those lines so what you want to look for is to see is there any moisture especially around the connections is there any bubbling maybe of any water you're also looking to see if there's any cracks depending on what kind of supply line you have okay another thing that you're going to want to look for is there could be some discoloration underneath some of these areas that's obvious signs that there has been some water leaking in the past in addition to under the sink it's important to check any Appliance in the kitchen that might have a water connection such as a refrigerator in the bathroom it's most often the toilet that causes problems now one issue that we have is overflows typically what you see there is that you'll get a clog that'll cause the water to come back up overflow out of the toilet now the other thing that you have is we do have supply lines to the toilet as well just like we did all those other appliances in this case we've got a little braided one down there with a shut off exactly this here is a metal braided supply line now there are other options that you have I have a couple here I've got a PVC I also have one that's made out of chrome but what it all comes down to it there's nothing that you can install as a supply line that you can just put in walk away and not have to be concerned with at all so don't have a false sense of security here exactly great okay now one thing that can really cause an issue is the washing machine especially if it happens to be in a finished area or even worse above a finished area which is exactly what we have right here a finished laundry room on the second floor yep that's exactly right so something that we would recommend in a situation like this is that you actually put a pan underneath the washing machine and we have one here as an example so basically what you're going to do is you're going to put that underneath the machine so that any water that comes out can collect here now the key to it though is that you want to make sure that the the pan is plumbed you want to make sure that water has somewhere to go otherwise the pan is just going to fill up and you're going to have water problems anyway okay so Plum the pan and also I guess you need to be aware that this pan is only going to grab water coming out of the washing machine and won't necessarily capture water from a burst hose yep that's exactly right matter of fact we have some examples of some burst hose here this one is a rubber hose obviously and what you can see is that it actually bursted right near the coupling and you can just imagine how much water pours out of that unattended you know a little crack of about an eighth of an inch can give you hundreds of gallons of water a day so something like this is going to give you a lot of water that's a disaster right yeah you got a braided one here that bursts as well we do that's right you know no hose is leak proof here we have a hose and it burst right in the middle so what are you recommend you to do to prevent these hoses from leaking the first thing that you want to do is make sure that you're proactive and checking your hoses we recommend that you change your hoses out about every three to five years now this homeowner here actually has a manual shut off right at the hose so what you can do when you're not actually doing laundry or if you're going to be gone for any extended period of time you can actually shut that valve and what's going to happen is if something does occur where there's a leak then that water is actually shut off so it's not going to continue to run while you're outside of the house of course you've got to shut it off and you can't be lazy and leave it in the open position all the time that's right now another thing that you have as an option is something like this where it will actually shut off the water for you if it senses an issue so you don't have to manually flip that switch so in this case whenever the washing machine isn't drawing electricity it's not in use this will shut the water off at the hose that's exactly right it's also got a moisture sensor too correct yeah it does basically what you have here is it's a sensor like you said you put it down at the base to the washing machine and if it senses any moisture at all then this device will actually shut off the water flow to the washing machine in General Plumbing failure material itself weakens over time and can no longer withstand the water pressure in the house which is usually somewhere between 40 to 60 pounds per square inch or PSI this demonstration shows what can happen to water pressure if the water in the pipe freezes when water freezes it expands by about nine percent when it changes its state from water to ice that's not enough to make most pipes burst right the ice isn't no it's the pressure that that expansion of water has caused Downstream so if this Grows by nine percent it's now going to compress this little bit of water that's in here and can build up that pressure inside here as high as 25 000 PSI what absolutely it's the pressure that's going to make the thing go crazy not the just the nine percent growth so we got here I'm going to insulate right here here's a pressure gauge this represents the cold water supply to the house or to the bathroom group to a kitchen and we're at uh it looks like 60 PSI or so which is normal right right yeah 40 to 40 to 60 pounds pressure is typical okay so now we're going to use compressed air oh yep it's going up wow it's going up fast look at that that's just in a couple of seconds right there bam so look it's it's three three ten seconds it goes right beyond the range of the gauge and this is potentially before we even have a full s block right I need people to really visually understand what happens though when this thing freezes and this little pipe and we have full City water pressure so we've got a split here caused either by the block of ice or more likely the pressure cause that's right there that's right the blockage goes away because yeah the ice melts or something so I thought I would do a little demonstration imagine you are there when it finally bursts you can open this absolutely so ready yeah here we go this is 60 pounds of pressure okay that would fill your house I'm gonna let me shut this up and that's the first rule right you got to actually find a place to be able to have the shutoff so this is one right here but in a panic when you've got water coming you need to find a control point so somewhere in the building there's the main water shutoff and it might look like this or it looks like this this when you turn clockwise and this one you turn to this position what we always love to do for any house is to put a main Watershed to take us in a panic you got to be able to find the right control valve sure once you get it shut off then you call a plumber you get it repaired but the other question is is how do you prevent it so you know they make all kinds of pipe insulations like this generally it's split so you can open it up and put it on after the fact and insulate those pipes but many times those pipes are out in places you can't get at them you know think about a kitchen cabinet often the sink is right at the window the hot and cold are right behind it so one little tip is to open up the kitchen cabinets and attempt to get a little bit of heat in there to keep it from freezing right now the other thing you can do is to actually relieve the pressure so that that that extraordinary pressure won't build up 25 000 pieces so using our demo again right here so here's our freeze again and let's simulate that this is actually a faucet just crack that faucet all right so just that little release would be enough wow if you're in cold cold night and you think it might freeze find the farthest faucet away hot and cold just let them drip a little bit into the sink for the minute [Music] to experience a plumbing failure you'll need to repair or replace any of the damaged pipes and fittings depending on when your house was built and where you are in the country your plumbing system could be made up of a variety of different materials some good and some not so great some of the earliest Plumbing Systems used lead pipes and a lot of our plumbing infrastructure is still made of lead today but as the unfortunate events in Flint Michigan made clear if lead pipes are not properly maintained the results can be disastrous a decision to change water sources resulted in lead from the pipes contaminating the city's drinking water but most lead pipes actually have a thick inner coating of minerals that prevent the lead from leaching in the water [Music] during World War II houses switched to galvanized steel pipes to save lead for ammunitions and around the same time copper started being used for piping and is still used as a plumbing material today it is susceptible to corrosion which gives it a greenish patina look but its rigidity and durability make it a good choice for piping in the 70s and 80s there was a shift towards plastic piping using PVC polyvinyl chloride which has become quite popular in the last few years plastic piping solved a lot of problems that metal pipes couldn't they didn't leach into the water they don't allow for mineral buildup on the inside of the pipes and are easier to install and make the connections so plastic I think PVC right that's PVC but that's only for drainage not for potable water supply okay for portable water supply you need to look at this this is called CPVC the C stands for chlorinated polyvinyl chloride and that's good for use with water it's a little different color so we can distinguish it right it comes in the standard sizes of half and three-quarter the connections would look very similar to The Copper connections with T's and elbows but we wouldn't solder this we would actually use a cleaner and a special cement that would allow us to fuse those pipes together but more and more people are looking at one more choice in plastic piping it was about 20 years ago that I first saw PEX cross-linked polyethylene comes to us from Europe and it's becoming more and more popular here in the United States you've been using it for a long time you're a big fan of it right absolutely it's a very very durable plastic and it installs quickly comes in coils in a variety of sizes and colors this would be blue for cold water red for hot water but it also comes in straight sticks again in the blue and the red now the labor savings is where the story really gets good you can run this like an electrician runs wire a home run system you can come from the basement and fish it up into a building now that means this is Time Savings and also there's very few fittings inside the wall so it's a straight shot and with less fittings I guess we have less chance of leaks okay but there are at least a couple fittings yep and there's a lot of choices for those connection methods okay so one of the common ones would be this a crimp style this is a copper ring with a black coating and this is a stainless ring and the way that would be connected is you put the ring on now that fitting sits right down inside there okay and then there's a special tool which would compress that ring to the right Dimension can you make that for me yeah we got it yep okay now that's that's made okay that's not going anywhere right now that's a simple one here's another connection that I actually prefer it works in the same principle here is a brass outer ring and that fits onto the pipe and but now you'll notice that this doesn't fit inside this is too wide of a diameter that's right so now what I need to do is to expand that pipe it's a special tool yeah if you crank it up you can actually see the pipe expanding right here press that in there for you all right how's that now you bring the band up the ring other side of the tool you just reverse it here okay now when I draw that up that is a forever connection not all plastic piping is created equal an unfortunate precursor to PEX tubing was polybutylene and although it's been outlawed in the United States since 1995. some homeowners are still dealing with the damage caused by the piping this was the pipe that was The Craze in the mid 70s it was polybutylene it was flexible you could fish it anywhere the connections were easy to make but they found that over time the connections could fail and the pipe could actually fail and they used to do it in a couple different places in the country one was the Pacific Northwest and the other was right here the mid-atlantics so I'm sure a lot of your neighbors have this stuff too yes they do and once I learned what I have I talked to several neighbors and they've had their pipes replaced as well because they had some failures of the pipe inside the walls that they didn't know about and then some of them they had leaks that they actually saw I mean that's the thing these fittings can be up inside the wall and just drip drip dripping seriously you wouldn't even notice it so really the only way now is to get rid of it so what we've done is we've actually found a local plumbing car that's going to help us get that old pipe PB excellent we have an unfinished crawl space here which allows us to access everything from underneath without doing minimal damage in here which is not the typical case I've seen these jobs where we've got a bathroom over here and a washing machine up here and you end up opening up walls and ceilings and it's really painful so take us through how you're going to attack this thing okay well we're going to start over here at our kitchen we're going to access it through the bottom of the cabinet here hot and cold good we have our ice maker over here which we'll access up through here okay two down two down like I said most of our fixtures are on this floor great we have our laundry room here which we can access from our crawl space nice nice and a first floor bathroom here okay full bath here full mattress comes up through the floors great but there's a bathroom above us yes sir there is so you can see oh here's the PB right here Deb so it doesn't actually look too bad it's some the better connections of the two that they had but so you'll be able to actually re-pipe this entire house with only open up just what we see right here yes sir that's pretty amazing all right so here is the polybutylene were taken out of the building flexible seems terrific and here's what we're putting back in this is a Pex tube and cross-linked polyethylene PEX you know although they look similar they are not the same this is a tougher pipe and it's been proven in the World Market since the 70s has been used for radiant floor heating first and for all those years it's put into concrete slabs and it gets heated and it gets cooled and it really isn't a tough environment and it lasts and it's been safely used for 25 years in the United States for potable water so the best way to test them is to take them back to really the way where they were when they were first manufactured this amorphous state so I've got a heat gun right here and this is made up of oil-based resins hydrogen and carbon it has very little sidewall resistance and it just pulls apart like taffy okay so that's a simple plastic this is the PEX and what's happened is those molecules that used to be just long strings are now Crosslink my much like a chain link fence if I give extraordinary pull watch how much harder it is to pull this apart it's as if I've cut it with a knife PEX has become one of the more common building materials being installed in new houses and retrofitted into old houses its flexibility strength and ease of installation make it a popular choice that should last for a long time but no matter the material give it enough time and usage any plumbing system can develop leaks detecting water leaks before damage can occur is critical to protect your home some early models of Leak Detectors were simple sensors placed near high risk areas like the washing machine and the hot water tank if the sensors came in contact with water they would sound an audible alarm to alert the homeowner of the plumbing failure [Music] today's Leak Detectors can communicate directly with the main shutoff valve and close it if necessary these detectors fall under two main categories Point sensor activated and valve body activated Point sensor activated Leak Detectors rely on physical sensors placed around the home and if any of them come into contact with water the shutoff valve can be automatically closed valve body activated Leak Detectors monitor the flow rate of water in the home and if the rate changes drastically the shutoff valve will be engaged the newest generation of these devices strive to provide even more protection what we've done is that we have a flow sensor that's actually installed on the main water supply line so in the event that water is running for too long of a period of time at too high of a flow rate it can let you know shut off the water so we basically negated the need for all of those Point sensors that you previously had right so the turbine inside there spins the faster it spins it basically tells you there's more water being used but it's only going to tell you if there's catastrophic leaks and there's a lot of people that are doing the same thing you're right and it's important for that reason but what we've done is we've also put in two other kinds of sensors we also have a pressure sensor in here and we also have a temperature sensor temperature sensor is important because water reaches freezing temperatures and home all around the country so we help notify homeowners in advance of that happening to help you know better maintain their homes pressure is really crucial so pressure is important because it pressures it too high of a rate for too long of a period of time it actually causes aging to the system and could cause connectors fixtures appliances to fail and burst what you're doing is you're closing the valve and you're measuring the pressure Downstream of that valve and if it's a perfect leak-proof system that pressure should stay constant but if you've got a leak somewhere you're going to see that pressure drop over time that's exactly right so when the water stays constant and we run this test every single day and can identify even a drop of water a minute happening if we see the pressure stay constant we know definitively you don't have a leak in your system you get great peace of mind but in the event that we see even a slight drop in the pressure we know you have a leak somewhere and now we're helping you troubleshoot where it's coming from and be because we have Wi-Fi built into the device we can communicate that alert right to your phone and help you troubleshoot where it's coming from that's great yeah so now that we got the valve installed it'll start giving you data almost immediately but it'll take about a week to start alerting you as to what your abnormal water usage looks like gotcha Leak Detectors can be a useful tool to help protect a home from water damage this simulation to find out just how quickly they can detect and react to a leak so you really want me to cut it yes you're sure I don't want to hear you you know complaining after I cut it ready first up was the point sensor activated shutoff valve so now you can see it goes down to that sensor now it's going to send a signal it's still flowing right okay is that expected it takes about 30 seconds to process it but that 30 seconds is still better now here we go see it whoa okay look at that so now that is pretty good news if you were away from the building and this hose let go so you know this is discouraging right so some people here think well that's no good but the reality is that's 30 seconds oh yeah if this was three hours or three days oh yes this is nothing in the house I grew up in I've talked about it before on camera we had a washing machine hose go on the second floor and that house was never ever the same next we tested a valve body activated system to see how quickly it would react whoa look at that okay so with this it doesn't have the sensor so it's going to take a little bit longer to sense it could be up to a minute the brain is measuring that's right starting to figure out something's wrong still unsettling to see this amount of water go into your house and even though that feels like a long time and a lot of water if this wasn't on here the sensor this could just keep going for hours or days here it is okay so now phew there's something unnerving about water leaking in so two different categories right a lot in each category so many of the choose from thoughts on picking one whatever one you pick good just get one just get one because it's really it's a great saver and the insurance companies love it because water damage is one of the biggest issues in a house very cool Richard thank you plumbing system is one of the most vital parts of a home it's important to keep track of the system you have and the overall health of the pipes fittings and connections even a properly installed system using quality materials is susceptible to leaks and failures over time properly maintained your plumbing system will continue to reliably deliver and drain water for years to come foreign a driveway a big patch of dirt in between so you're probably looking for a walkway we are these are New England Stepping Stones I love it so what we're going to do is we're going to lay them out and then we'll adjust them at the end okay the first thing we have to do is find out just how big that route is and get it out of this thank you foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: This Old House

Views: 141,204

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, plumbing, Richard Trethewey, Kevin O'Connor, Ross Trethewey

Id: 2a4OpOyC6C4

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022