Fixing a Leak Under a Concrete Floor The Easy Way | Emergency Plumbing Guide

leaks under the floor can be a real pain in the backside especially if you don't know how to fix them well today I'm going to be showing you how we can fix a copper pipe leak under the floor when you've got tension on the pipe and no room to work and the best bit is that by the end of the video any of you will be able to give this job a go yourself [Music] all right so first of all pipe leaks under floors like this one and never in a convenient place so you'll always be up against it with space and room to work and also there's likely to be a lot of tension on the pipe so the first thing we need to do is drain out the water in the pipe because we're going to be replacing this section of pipe and this fitting here and we're not going to be able to solder it if there's water in the Pines so if it's a heating pipe that you're working on you're going to need to drain out a lot of the water from the system so that you don't make a big mess when you cut into the pipe so you should have a drain valve like this one where you can drain off a lot of the water from the system use a hose pipe to drain that off outside so once you're confident that the piece of pipe that you're working on has no water pressure and that your water's turned off we can go ahead and cut into the copper pipe so we have a leak on this tee on this heating pipe but you can see that this pipe here as well has got some pretty rough soldering on there so we're going to cut out this whole section what we can't do in this situation is use a pipe slice because we don't have enough space to get our pipe slice in the Gap to cut the pipeout so you've got a couple of options first one you could resort to a hacksaw but often you'll find that it's still too tight to get the hacksaw in there to be really effective if you're struggling to get hacks or in there you can just use a hacks or blade and use that with your hand of course be careful not to cut yourself make sure the cut is nice and straight make sure that you don't jump the blade around and make lots of little Cuts along the pipe hold your finger against where you want to cut so that the blade can't slip around and then gradually cut through the pipe it can take a while because you don't have a lot of room to work foreign with the hacksaw if the pipe bounces around try and Brace it somehow by jamming something in there so you don't have loads of movement in the pipe so now we've got some water trickling from the pipe we're going to use a wet vac to catch a lot of that I've got my little Evolution 18 volt Wet Vac here we're going to suck a lot of that water up with the wet vac if you haven't got a wet vac you're going to need something to mop that water up foreign so that's our first pipe cut through we'll now move on to the second pipe once you've got some of the pipe work out the way you might even find that you can get your cutter in there to do the very last bit and there we go that is all the pipe work out the way and this pipe here is the one that caused the leak under the floor now we're going to move on to repairing the pipe work before we do that if you're not a subscriber and you like DIY videos make sure you hit the Subscribe button because you don't want to miss out on all the videos I've got to come and if the video helps you out today make sure to hit the thumbs up button for me and give it a like because that really helps the video to reach and help more people just like you on YouTube right let's move on to repairing the pipe now we're going to make a couple of new sections up and then use slip couplings to solder those sections back in place that's going to be the easiest way to do it because there's so much tension on the pipes and not enough room to work so we want to drop a completely made up t-piece in place and then use the slip couplings to solder those new sections of pipe work in place now because we're going to be doing some soldering we can't do that with water in the pipes so what we're going to do is use our Wet Vac to suck out any water that's still in the pipe there is an old bread trick you can use and if we don't get all the water out maybe we'll get a bit of white bread ahead and stuff that up the pipe and that might work as well so let's give this a go first but before we go soldering anything what we need to do is clean up the copper pipe because we've cut it with a hacksaw the end on that copper pipe is not going to be nice and smooth and clean and we want to really try and clean the end of that copper pipe up as best we can to do that we'll use a few little files we'll use some wire wool or a scouring pad and we'll use a deburring tool like this one some of these tools you'll need for the job today will be linked in the description below so that you'll be able to grab them yourself right let's clean up the ends of the copper pipe first thing to do is just square up any of the ends of the copper pipe that aren't perfectly Square because sometimes using a hacksaw it's hard to get them perfectly Square especially when you're struggling for space and then use the deburring tool to just take off any Burrs and sharp edges you can see there that that starts to remove any of them sharp bits of copper that the hacksaw has created turn the deburring tool around and do the inside of the pipe as well repeat that process for all the cuts that you made grab yourself some wire wool and just clean out the end of the pipe with the wire wool you want it to end up nice and shiny like these ones are next up cut a new piece of pipe and we are trying to make the joint that we cut out if you're lucky you won't have such a complex joint to make that I've got to make here you can see it's a bit of a pain I finished building up our little crossover here and you can see that we're pretty much there we just need to clean the pipe work up now and then we're going to solder this in place and you can see that we are using the solder ring or Yorkshire fittings if you're interested in learning how to solder with soldering fittings then check out the little pop-up that will appear at the top of the screen now and that will take you over to my Yorkshire fitting soldering guide where you can learn a lot more about pipe preparation and soldering Yorkshire fittings right let's finish getting this fitting made up and then I'll show you how we're going to use the slip repair couplings to solder that in place all in one go and that's the little tip and trick of the video is using these things to solder the new joint in place nice and easily even when there's no space and plenty of tension on the pipe like this if you want to grab some of these the link is going to be below in the description use a bit of wire wool to get that pipe work prepared for soldering now because we're using solder ring fittings when we Heat this it's going to melt the solder that's already inside the fitting therefore we're not going to be able to just do this bit by bit we're going to have to solder this whole joint in one go because the heat transfer is going to end up melting the solder on the rest of the joints so that's where this is going to be a bit tricky is getting the torch in there and doing all these joints at once so what we now need to do is get some flux put some flux on the pipes and get everything in position so that we can solder them just put a bit of flux on the end of the pipe and then place the pipe into the fitting and we'll do that for all of our joints first of all what you now need to do is grab hold of the slip coupling the idea of these is that they will slide over the pipe and then you'll bring them back to solder them in place now when we put the slip coupling on we need to make sure that the pipe ends up in the center of the slip coupling the best way to ensure that we get that right is to draw a little line on our pipe so that we know that the finished position of the coupling has to be in line with that Mark that we've made with our pen apply plenty of flux onto the pipe and then use your slip coupling and slide that over the pipe now it might be hard to slide it over if it is you're going to have to give it a tap and there you go you saw with a couple of slid all the way to the end of the pipe do the same for all of the pipes you're connecting onto so now you can insert that section of pipe that you've made sometimes you might need to give it a tap with an adjustable spanner to get the coupling to come back to where you need it and you can see there the mark that we made earlier so we know that the coupling is in the correct Place sometimes it can be a little bit tricky to get the uh slip coupler to move back over the pipe but you see there eventually it does give it does go so you can see there the new piece of pipe work is in all the marks on the slip joints now meet up with the pen marks that we made on the pipes so now we can go ahead and solder those fittings in place you're going to need a good torch for this because for a start you need something accurate and you want something that uses matte gas I use the vortex love the torch links Below in the description if you fancy grabbing one I'm going to use a heat mat underneath the pipe work for this first join because I don't want to set fire to the damp course underneath so let's put the heat mat in there and sometimes when you're soldering under the floor it can be really difficult to get a good angle to um to do the job so and in this case we're just going to have to heat from the side ideally I'd be heating from the bottom of the joint to let the heat rise up through the pipe and let capillary action take the solder around the joint this joint first see foreign so that joint has done its job and now we'll solder the rest of the joints [Laughter] once the pipe's cooled down we want to get all that old flux off so let's get in there with a bit of wire wool and give it all a clean up so all the flux is clean from the pipe now and that's them joints soldered in place and obviously because I'm doing two pipes I'll now move on to doing the same thing with our second pipe however this time I'm going to have to use the heat mat and possibly some wet rags to make sure that the heat I apply with the torch doesn't unsolder the joints that we just put in place so I'm pretty happy with that that's a nice neat job done what we're going to do now is refill the heating system with a filler loop on the boiler and bleed out all the air and give this a test if you've enjoyed the video you're probably going to like one of these ones as well it's going to pop up on the screen now so go check one of them out and I will see you guys in the next one

Channel: The DIY Guy

Views: 213,284

Keywords: plumbing repair, do it yourself, how to fix plumbing, plumbing tools, plumbing diy, diy plumbing, copper pipe repair, leaking copper pipe repair, emergency plumbing repair, emergency plumbing, leaking pipe under concrete floor, leaking pipe under floor, leaking pipe under a concrete floor, how to fix a leaking copper pipe, how to fix a copper pipe leak at the joint, how to fix a pipe leak under the floor, how to repair underfloor heating pipe, how to fix a water leak, leak

Id: mwkfOmLgqHc

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023