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honest reviews and advice. - Hold tight and welcome
to today's plumber parts (mumbles) video. My name's James and today
we're having a look at pin holes in copper pipe and the various ways of fixing them. What I've done is made myself a nice little jig up just down here. I got a little packer box. I've used some absolutely
glorious new power flow flux. I used to use everflux, but you know, my lungs started to come out of my mouth. I used to use lacoflux,
but every time I got that trapped inside the smallest cut ever, I wanted to basically throw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge. But now I'm using powerflow flux and yeah it's pretty good, I
really, really like it. Basically, what we've
done, we've created this small, little header tank. That runs down to a little lever valve, so we can control this little
experiment we're gonna do. Then we've got a 15
mill to 22 mill medusa, going onto a straight coupling,
a loaded 22 mill pipe, with a bung at the end. I'm just gonna turn the
water on for you know, so you know that it's actually real. So it's real. There we go, so we're
pretty much ready to drill a couple of very, very small holes that are gonna replicate the pin holes that you can get on copper pipe. As you can see, we've got
a really small bit here that's gonna be drilled into our pipe and recreate our pin holes. (drill buzzing) Whoo look at that, (mumbles)
we've got one at the side. Oh I'm getting soaked here. Alright, so look at that. I've got water coming out everywhere. Number one, when you turn it up, so what am I gonna do? First things first, try to find out where you can turn the water off. Just like that. Now the water is off. We've got our little
tank up here (mumbles) We can easily turn the water
back on, just like that. Off. On. Off. Before we look into that, let's figure out why is it that there's pin holes in this pipe in the first place. Usually you find that
it's flux in the pipe work from when an apprentice, years
ago, put too much flux in. It was from the days
before water-soluble flux. It's basically got caught
in the pipes somewhere and over the last 30 years, or whatever, it's basically bored
it's way through the pipe and, basically, you start
getting these little pin holes. If that's the reason, you've
got to start worrying about the pipe work in the rest of the house. You've got to start thinking, you know, I'll fix this pin hole now,
but I might be back here in six months replacing
the whole bit of pipe. First up, we're going
to do the, oh my god, there's a pin hole, I
haven't got any time, it's five o'clock on a Friday night. I need to get this fixed
so I can pop back on my (mumbles) and fix this properly. This is the quick fix. What you're gonna do is you get yourself a little bit of rubber. It could be anything, anything rubber. Anything you can just press
over the hole, like so. Then, all you need to do is, basically, grab yourself a jubilee clip. There's plenty of plumbers
who've done this before, tried to buy themselves some time, or if they're on another job
and they've just popped out. Often, you'll be on the job, someone will run over the road to where you are and say "can you come to my house
quickly, I've got a pin hole. It's going everywhere." This is the way you'll
get over it until you can pop over there later on and actually effect a proper repair. You're going to basically pop this little bit of rubber over here and then you're gonna get your
jubilee clip, like so, you're gonna close your jubilee clip up, and then you're gonna do
that up nice and tight. You'll notice, straight
away, if you turn the water back on, we've still got
our two other pin holes but the one we've done so
far is now fixed temporarily. Now if we turn the water
back on, you should see, no leaks. That's pin hole pipe
repair number one done. Now let's have a quick look at pin hole pipe repair number two. Again, like I've just
said, the first thing we've got to do is turn the water off. I just want to reiterate,
that the fix we've just done, here, is going to work pretty well on the gravity-fed system. If your main's pressure, just
cross your fingers, okay. This isn't a proper fix,
this is just get you down to the suppliers fix. We've got our next pin hole, just here. I'm gonna show you how to fix that now. What we need to do is,
you need to find out exactly where the pin hole is. Now, this is only really gonna work, if you've got pipe work that
isn't so completely ruined and nacket on the inside
that it's gonna fall apart when you put a pipe
slice on it or a cutter. Now, most plumbers, they're
gonna have a pipe slice like this, so they're gonna be able to cut this really easily. The rest of you, are probably
gonna be using a hack saw. What you want to do is this, you want to get your pipe
slice blade, if you can see it, or the blade of your hack saw, directly over the pin hole that you've actually got and that's leaking. So you can see my blade, just here, so I'm just gonna pop
that right over this, like so, and I'm just
gonna cut this pipe now. This fix is only going to work, if you have a bit of
spring in the pipe and, unfortunately, you're
probably not gonna know that until you've actually cut through it. Sometimes you can move
it from side to side and if the pipe does move a bit, then you're probably
gonna have enough play to be able to slip a fitting on. There we go, we've made our cut, as you can see, you've
got quite a bit of water coming out, so obviously get
yourself a towel or a bucket. This is kind of the next level up. You need to use a straight,
push fit, fitting, but they need so much spring, I don't tend to recommend these. What we're gonna do is get
ourselves a compression fitting. We're working on 22 millimeter pipe here, so you're gonna get a 22
mill, compression fitting. What we're gonna do is we're
gonna spring this pipe apart. It's gonna be really difficult sometimes. Spring it apart and you're
gonna slip the nut and the olive over one piece and you're gonna slip the nut and the olive over another. Then you should have enough room, sometimes you have to
wiggle this out this way, and then you can push
everything back together and tighten this up, with a set of grips. Once we've got all that made up, we just give that a little nip up. Alright we should be able to
turn the water back on again and find out that now
we've only got one leak, this little one left down here. Now we've fixed two of the leaks, and now we're gonna move onto the last and the most advanced way of
trying to fix a pin hole leak. Now we're gonna use the same method we did for cutting earlier on. We're gonna find out exactly
where the pin hole is and either get our pipe sliced
blade or our hack saw blade directly over it, and do our cut again. It's a very similar way of
fixing the same problem, but not using a compression fitting or obviously, a jubilee clip
and bits and parts like that. This time we're going to
create a really permanent fix and use a solder fitting. It's very important,
when you're soldering, that the pipe is
completely empty of water, otherwise, it will not solder. Also, the pipe itself is very, very clean, otherwise, it won't solder. We're gonna let all our water out, here. This is gonna be the
difficult bit for any job. We've got it nice and easy here. We can see, straight away, that we've got only this little bit of pipe. For demonstration purposes,
it's gonna be fine. The next thing we wanna do, we've cut exactly where we wanted to. Look at that, that's how bad
my aiming is at the moment. I've pretty much just
missed the pin hole nearly, but it should still be fine. First up, we're gonna do our
very best to clean the pipe. I haven't got much movement here, but let's get that pipe
as clean as possible. We only want to be doing this once. Sometimes, obviously,
you're not gonna have the luxury of being able to get one of these tools around there, so you're gonna need to use
a little bit emery cloth. Use your brain. Sometimes you might even have to come down to the poor man's way of
cleaning a bit of pipe and just popping some flux over it and then getting your burner on there and just burning off the flux and giving it a rub down with the flannel. Next thing, most important
that no one ever does, is clean out your fitting. Clean out the inside of your fitting. I'm kind of cheating today, I'm actually gonna use
the capitery fitting, or yorkshire fitting. You're gonna see me do
something with it, okay, that every plumber does. Every plumber who buys
a yorkshire fitting, runs a little bit of solder in as well. It's just how it is. You're just never happy, but give me a plumber that's happy though. I've looked high and low
for my last flux brush and I can't seem to find it, so I'm just gonna rub a little bit of flux on the pipe, right here. Put that on there like that. Then this one here, it's
not gonna be as easy to do, so just a little bit of sludge
there like that, lovely. Even though my flux now is soluble, you don't want to leave
any flux in the pipe. Put this on here, give that a twist. Now I recommend it as well,
that you don't actually use flux on the inside of a
fitting, for the same reason. Slide that in, now, we're
gonna just get on it, give this a solder up. I mean, you guys, you guys out there who are trying to fix
a pin hole, you DIYers. You're only ever gonna attempt this if you know how to
solder, so I'm not gonna give you a close up on how to do it. We have done a video on how
to solder copper fittings, so go to our channel, search for it there, and you'll find a full guide and full close-ups on how to do it. Boom, we've got fire. There we go. Why not have a close-up. As you can see, I always like
to heat up from the bottom, and run my solder in from the top. The reason I do that is because I know then that if it's hot enough for it to run all the way around, then it's actually gonna
run around the whole thing. Give that a little rub,
there we go, look at that. This flux is so good, for this (mumbles). It's really, really good. Oh let's get rid of that, ow. Give the pipe a clean down. As you see, I've burnt the table a bit. Lovely job. Now we should be able to see
that we fixed all the leaks. Now that we've got our
solder fitting done up, we've got our compression fitting done, and we've got our
rudamental quick fix done and everything's okay. The water is, as you can see, already on. If you want me to prove it, I'll pull the end off here again. Here we go, the water's coming out. There ya go, full proof that
these are the three main methods that people use to
fix pin hole pipe leaks. I'll always recommend though, that if you've got that problem, especially if you've got a
few pin holes on the way, it's a good idea that you
replace whole pipe length. There you go. I hope you found today's
video helpful and informative. If you've got any questions or you think there's something we
could have done better or if we've missed something out, please let us know in the
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shouldn't be very long. Remember everyone, to hold tight. - [Narrator] Plumberparts.co.uk. Honest reviews and advice.
