DIY - Pool Plumbing Pressure Test

hey guys today we are going to pressure test our new pool lines in order to do that first we're going to make a what i could just call a pressure testing manifold or a pressure testing device i will be using air to do my pressure testing you can also use water sometimes you can use a combination of air and water if you're trying to do a leak detection if you have a leak in your pool plumbing or i guess other plumbing in this instance we're talking about pool plumbing so i thought i'd just show you real quick what i'm going to put together here and then we'll actually take this out hook it up to the new plumbing system or the new plumbing lines apply our air pressure and i'll just kind of show you my experience with how this works this design is pretty basic i got inspiration for this from swimming pool steve and one of the articles i read on his website so steve appreciate all the good content you put out there helped me learn quite a bit so basically what we're trying to do is build a device a manifold that allows us to pressurize our new pool lines in my case i've run two inch schedule 40 pvc lines in order to go from really a quarter inch quick connect air fitting into my 2 inch pvc we've got to go through a couple of steps first we're going to build the actual air injection manifold and then we're going to use a couple different pvc fittings to reduce down and allow us to connect this manifold we're building into our two inch pvc lines real quick we've got some basic parts here you can find you know go to your home depot menards lowe's wherever go to the plumbing section you're going to be able to find pretty much all of the items i'm showing you right here you'll find these items in brass and galvanized you know maybe in other materials in my case what was in stock was actually galvanized steel i've got a brass ball valve here but either either material should be fine for this application so basically it all starts with kind of your t or your three-way t here and what we're going to do with this is on each right and left side we're going to use a half inch threaded nipple so this is a half inch t so we'll use a half inch threaded nipple on each side and i'm just showing you kind of a dry fit here when we actually do the assembly we'll be using teflon tape on the threads to help us create that actual airtight seal typically you'll see white teflon tape this is a tape called blue monster i've had really good luck with it so it's just what i have here in the garage that's what we're going to use this time so we've got the half inch t we've got two half inch nipples so the one half inch nipple will allow us to connect to our half inch ball valve so we'll thread that on there again using teflon tape when we make the actual connection from that ball valve this is what will allow us to kind of turn on or turn off the air in our case or if you're using water the water that you're injecting into the lines to actually create pressure so from this tee we're going to use reducer bushing or bushing so it's half inch threaded male thread on one side and then quarter inch female thread on the other so we'll be able to thread this into our half inch ball valve and then since it reduces down to a quarter inch thread i've then got a quick connect air compressor fitting and we'll be able to thread this then directly into that bushing so this is where we'll be able to hook up our air compressor hose right onto this fitting then use the ball valve to allow air to enter our plumbing lines when we're trying to bring them up to pressure to do the test so that's kind of the air injection side we put a nipple on this side what this is going to allow us to do as we connect to our pvc plumbing system what i'm going to use is again another bushing that actually has quarter inch female threads that will allow me to thread this manifold into my plumbing line like that so in order to connect this to my two inch pvc so this is an inch and a half down to a quarter inch so since my pvc pipes are two inch i've then got another bushing adapter that will allow this inch and a half bushing to step up to two inch so then i can insert that into my two inch plumbing line quickly the other bushing that we have is again another half inch to a quarter inch and this will go on top of our tee we'll thread that in and then we'll be able to attach our pressure gauge because this pressure gauge is a bottom mount with quarter threads and this actually goes from zero to 160 psi i won't be testing the lines near 160 psi in fact we'll probably be only testing up to around 30. you could go higher depending on what your application is and what exactly you're trying to achieve this was actually the lowest tolerance psi pressure gauge i could find at the store so if you happen to find one that only went to 30 or that only went to 60 that would work just fine generally when you're doing pressure test on your pool plumbing lines so this will again then just thread into the bushing that we put on top of our tee and that's the basic setup so this is all dry fit so i'm gonna disassemble it we'll apply our teflon tape to all the threads i'll use if you had a vice on your workbench you could clamp this tee into that vice that would really let you help you you know hold that secure as you tightened in the nipples and the bushing and worked your way around putting this thing together i'm just going to use a pair of wrenches and and hold this my vice actually broke so i'll just use a couple couple wrenches to hold this and and we'll get it tightened up and snug pretty good okay so the last thing i'll show you here at the workbench let me take this pvc part off okay i'll leave that nipple on there so you can imagine just the rest of that manifold connected here what i'm going to do to actually connect this then to my pool plumbing line is i'll bring into frame here this is a two inch schedule 80 union that i've got on my return lines as well as i've got another fitting on my two suction lines but the idea of what i'm going to do will be the same so imagine this part here on the line on my return line in my plumbing system okay and i've got you know the rest of my return manifold built out on a union just like this so if i take the same union and discard the the side that's connected already to my plumbing system then basically what i can do is take the top part of that union and connect this manifold into it so i'll glue that in so i won't be able to use this top part of the manifold or excuse me the top part of the union for anything else other than pressure testing but i'm okay with that because i'll be able to use it on multiple lines within my pool plumbing system so the idea here is i've now got a way to conveniently connect into my pool plumbing lines because i have these unions installed already in my pool plumbing so when i'm doing my my checks now that's great but maybe i open the pool up next summer and i feel like i have a leak and i want to have a way to check it i won't have to actually cut into my my system i'll have a very convenient way to go ahead and replicate this pressure test on the system using this using this union so this is the approach i'm going to take there's countless ways that you go about connecting you know a pressure test manifold to your plumbing system so depending on how your equipment pad is and exactly what you're trying to do obviously you may have a different approach this is just what i'm doing and i think it's going to work really well for us so i'll go ahead and actually assemble this manifold and then we'll go out by my equipment pad and i'll show you how i'm able to hook this up to the system and i'll show you exactly what we're doing okay guys we're at the equipment pad here these three lines are my new returns and here's that other end of the union we were looking at up in the garage so you can see each one of these pipes i've got a union connected to it one thing this will allow me to do is obviously use the pressure test manifold that we put together another reason i like having these on here is whenever i shut the pool down for the winter i've gotten in the habit of i take the pump completely out i store it in a in a shed i take kind of as much of the equipment completely disassemble it and store it over the winter so this will allow me to completely disconnect my lines um valves you know the jandy valves that are expensive i can get those disconnected and actually store them over the winter but let's let's talk about the pressure manifold that we put together so you can see how it's come together after we you know kind of discuss the assembly in the garage we're able to connect it then to any of these unions because we've built and attached the manifold actually to another union right so we've kind of trashed half that union and we're just going to use this one half just for the purposes of being able to connect our manifold to the pipes you'll see this wire coming off the i'll just call it the manifold here whenever you're pressurizing a line for the purposes of testing or anything else it's actually a really dangerous situation at that point because if you have a failure if a line ruptures if this were to separate here even you know 10 20 30 pounds of pressure and for sure anything above that you're really going to have a surprise in your hands where this can go flying off your your plugs that you're using on the other end of your lines in the pool if you're using standard winterizing plugs a good chance those could blow out you know they make more specialty heavy heavy duty plugs for the purposes of pressure testing you could use threaded plugs well you know i won't go into the full details on that within this video but do just want to make sure you're you're taking the right precautions whenever you're conducting a pressure test you can see right now we've got this system charged to 30 psi and actually i've had this charged all day long so i've had a little issue with this line where i couldn't get it to hold pressure and i was pretty sure it was only it was just leaking off at the return in the pool i wasn't able to get a good seal at that return i was finally able to do that it's been holding at 30 psi all day long so my confidence is growing quite a bit that this line is actually in good shape for us so what i'm gonna do i'll move this manifold around to all three of my lines before i cover them up in the trench then before i you know for sure before i would turn on the equipment and put them under actual operating pressure my opinion on what pressure you should use when testing definitely not an expert i've done some reading i've done you know watched other youtube videos here's let me say it this way here's what i have done when i first attached this manifold i went to 10 psi and let it sit there was no change so then i went to 20 psi then i let it sit for about 10 minutes then i moved it up to 30 psi and basically i would let it sit overnight you know call it 24 hours and if there's no movement in the psi from that 30 i'm considering it a pass and i'll move on with with the rest of my work here on renovation others may test at higher psis which is fine others may test at lower psis which i think still leaves you open to a bit of risk that you could miss something so i'm not an expert so i'm not going to tell you what psi is best to test at so do your own research you know you do want to know what what type of pipe you're using what types of operating pressure it has as a maximum you definitely don't want to exceed that so do your homework the purpose of this video is really just to show you the manifold that i've constructed here and how it's actually i've been able to attach it to my pool plumbing i don't have the compressor over here right now it's kind of loud so i don't want to run it while we're on the video here but here's where i would just attach my air compressor hose you know the coupling would just attach here and then i'm able to let air go into the system by opening this valve when i've got the valve closed that's how i'm able to just kind of cap it off and maintain the pressure so guys i hope you found this video useful lots of other resources out there please look in my description i'll link to a few other articles or videos that i use to help me kind of figure out my approach here if you're doing a pool renovation or have any you know kind of curiosity around what the rest of my project has been like you know feel free to check out my channel my other videos we've done a pretty big diy renovation project where we've removed skimmers we're changing skimmers out we're removing concrete putting new travertine decking in obviously doing uh overhaul on the plumbing system we've got new equipment for the equipment equipment pad so feel free to check out the channel appreciate your interest thank you you

Channel: Seldom Rest

Views: 9,773

Rating: 4.9238095 out of 5

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Id: y94fNeUDThs

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021