Tankless Water Heater Installation

[Music] [Applause] [Music] well hello in this episode we're going to be talking about how to install a tankless water heater all right the first thing you're going to want to do is go ahead and get this water heater out of the box the box generally comes with something similar to this i like to use these to hold a water heater up off the ground while i'm working on it or you can do this on the tailgate of your truck so go ahead and locate your isolation valves most of the time these are sold separately they're in a separate little box it'll tell you what it is but go ahead and get your isolation valves out and get them ready and some of the water heaters it comes in the box with the water heater uh but most of the time you have to buy these now i went ahead got a little head start here uh because i know y'all didn't want to see me just threading fittings together but these are your isolation valves or your service valves and the reason for that is this is how you would flush your tankless water heater out or what they call descaling it is through these little service ports on the front of it now you're going to want to go ahead and get you some kind of adapters to switch it over to whatever plumbing pipe material you're using we use pex a lot so these are some pex adapter three-quarter threaded pex adapters on your fresh water coming in teflon tape don't pipe dope it we use pipe dope for other things or thread sealer we call it pipe dope don't use that stuff on your potable water or your fresh water coming in because there's all kinds of little filters there's aerators on faucets that pipe dope stuff can get caught in those and get caught in shower heads and cause you some big problems later on so only teflon on your supply for your water and of course you'll go ahead and put this together these have a union so you're gonna put your thread tape on there and screw the top parts of your unions on as i've done here already and remember these unions all of them are going to have like some type of little o-ring there's a bunch of different isolation valves out there the o-rings are different these are really neat because there's a ridge there that holds that on and then of course you would thread this on you don't need to teflon tape the union because it has that o-ring sealed but you can go ahead and put the bottom half on now this setup here is the way they show you in all the pictures and this setup here works great on an internal unit but when you're working with an external unit you have to have a pipe cover on it so a lot of times this hot side you're going to have to flip it the other way but try to remember you need to access these ports at some point to flush these water heaters out i don't think they did a really good design on how these things hook up but i didn't design it i just put them together but that's pretty much it you're going to do this work on the floor on your tailgate get yourself set up as much as you possibly can it's so much easier to do it down here than to have to work underneath this thing when it's hanging on a wall all right the next thing you're going to want to do is prep your work site where you're going to be hanging this water heater as you see here uh we've put this water heater up and down a couple times so we've already got some boards mounted here now when you're dealing with an external unit you're going to be mounting these to the brick so you're going to want to have your hammer drill uh an impact hammer to be able to drive these little screws in but if you're on an interior wall you've got sheet rocks now there's studs every 16 inches on center behind that sheetrock wall and that's kind of what we've done here you're going to have to nail some boards across that span and then you'll be hanging your water heater to these boards which is attached to those studs so you're going to want to cut some boards measure your water heater from top to bottom now i measured ours here and this one is actually a little different than the last one we had here so i am going to have to cut another 2x4 and mount it to the wall ah all right now this is the hard part uh you're gonna have to catch that little hole that little eyelet on this screw and be careful because it can be pretty tricky but there you go all right now the next stage of the process here is you're going to get out your little torpedo level or any kind of level really four foot any of those will work because it's not really anything in the way but these torpedoes are really neat because they'll stick to the side so put your little torpedo up there and get your unit level here you can also put it on the top that's kind of hard to see sometimes i i don't like putting them on the top because i've left so many of these on job sites because i put it up there and forgot about it if you leave it over here it's more in your line of sight and you're not as likely to leave it next thing you're going to do is you're going to get out your little impact or a drill with a screwdriver bit in it and there's more holes on this thing you're going to anchor these off with your impact now the next part of the process here is you're going to connect this pex uh you're going to know where your water heater goes and the location of it on the house because your rough end guys are going to loop uh your water line out there's going to be a red for hot and this white over here for cold if you're using pecs uh if you're using enough different material they might have wrote an h and a c on it or something like that to help you out or you can always remember hot's on the left coal's on the right it's one of the big rules in plumbing uh but you're gonna cut this now here in the training center i try not to cut things so much so i just kind of got it stuck together but you're gonna pull it apart and the first thing you're going to notice is water's going to come out of it so be ready for that if you're on the outside of the house just watch out for yourself you know it's going to shoot water all over the place but if it's on the inside you're going to have to get a bucket or something and try to catch as much as that as you can most time you're in a garage and spill a little bit of water on concrete floor it's not going to matter a whole lot but go ahead and cut that and uh i'm going to bring us in a little closer here and start connecting some pecs all right so here's our next step you're gonna have to hook your water lines into your water heater uh to do that you're going to need uh some tubing cutters you're gonna need your good old crimpers the three-quarter version um you need a little bag of fittings and some crimp rings now to do this the way i normally do it when you line this water heater up you should have been paying attention to where these water lines were and basically center that top screw on these with where these valves go all the water heaters are different so what i normally do people think it's funny i like to use my body parts to measure stuff sometimes because you're just kind of getting a rough estimate so go ahead and get you a measurement somebody got a really really bad end on that pipe so cut give me a good clean edge to go put your crimp ring on the top and go ahead and put that right there um i kind of like to crimp as i go uh and now you can see you've got your pipe here like this you can kind of use your pipes to give you an estimate of where you're going to need to cut for that fitting and yeah all this stuff still is gonna have water in it from your test at your rough end so crimp ring on either side here when you put these crimp rings on you don't want that little pipe uh to be exposed about a dimes width is the rule and then you'll put your 90 in pop it into place sometimes those fittings you got to kind of force them get your crimp rings right where you want them about a dimes width of that pipe exposed and then make sure your fittings are all the way up on there and give it a good old crimp now when it's crimped it's not going to spin but it'll spin when it's not crimped so just remember that when you're going back behind checking stuff if you don't crimp it it's going to blow apart well there's your hot side pretty pretty easy to do um and i do like to use uh white and red just to keep it going get my little finger measurement there [Music] that pipe cut put your crimp ring on there get it all the way up on that fitting and crimp away and here again you can kind of use the pipe there to [Music] gauge where you need to cut now you don't have to use pecs you can also use cpvc you could do it out of copper um those are pretty much the popular uh types of potable water tubing that are out there right now there are some other ones but you don't really see them a whole lot get those uh crimp rings on there dimes width to that pipe exposed push you fitting on all the way to the little bumps on the fitting there adjust your crimp rings and crimp now this setup like i got it here this will work just fine for an interior unit but on an exterior unit we have to put a pipe cover on this so uh you're actually gonna have to spin this around so it'll fit in that pipe cover but for now i'm gonna do it like that the next piece the next thing here uh is your relief you're going to have to hook that up too what i know i'm going to do is kind of take my pipe uh you're going to want to use white for this because people are going to see it you don't want red and blue pipes poking out and i know you can't see the floor here but when you do your relief the code says 12 to 6 inches off of the ground when you're cutting this uh but we go for six because our inspectors are looking for that six so go ahead clutch pipe [Music] and of course you would well i forgot my front ring you put your relief on like that i normally kind of try to twist it around so if it's got a little bow in it that bow is pushed back toward the wall the brick wall or whatever now if you're on an interior here the rough end guys hopefully they left you a little piece stubbed out down here at the bottom to where you can 90 out of the house because this relief has to go out of the house and it has to be gravity fed from the point that it leaves here you can't come out with a relief line and go up because it'll hold water that water gets nasty you could be potentially creating a what they call a cross connection or something that can contaminate your fresh water supply if that nasty water and that supply were actually to go backwards so that's pretty much it for hooking up your water lines the next part of the process here is you're gonna have to install your pipe cover now your pipe cover you have to buy it separately and you're only going to use it on an external unit uh it pretty much comes in pieces you got a front cover that will essentially go right here and and hide those pipes um you're going to have two side walls they're the ones with the little wing at the top you're going to have a mounting bracket this is for the back side this is so you'll be able to screw it off to the wall we're not going to be able to screw this off because i don't have a full wall here but we'll get enough done here so you know what's going on the next part you got a bottom notice how the bottom is solid there's no holes in it some of these covers are open on the bottom and you don't have to drill but this one we're going to have to drill and it comes with a little bag of screws so i didn't crimp my relief line here because i have to build this cover and then i'm gonna have to drill a hole for it and i'm gonna have to slide it up through now the other thing here and i think this is kind of a little design flaw uh all these isolation valves are different this setup would be just fine for an interior unit if you're not having to put a pipe cover on but since we got to put a pipe cover on we're going to have to make this work so it's going to essentially sit in here somewhere right about there i don't think it'll go all the way but somewhat like that now the first thing you're going to need to do is locate your bag of screws um what i normally do is this front cover part is going to go on last so i normally set this on the ground and dump out my little bag of screws into this pan and it'll hold them in that pan that way you're not losing them in the pine straw or something like that so there are four little holes up here underneath uh this um front cover there you're gonna take your little wing walls one is gonna be uh the right side and one's gonna be your left side so let's do the one closest to me first get you get you a little screw get your little screwdriver and we are going to locate one of those little holes and all right i normally just start with one um one will hold it but there is a space for two and this is slotted so you can adjust it um and i hate to tell y'all guys this but you have to do this by hand with a handheld screwdriver don't do it with your impact because these are just little flat pieces of sheet metal is what you're using for your threads it's not it's not like a real threaded uh socket it's pretty much just a hole punched in the sheet metal [Music] and if you strip that out you've messed up luckily they do give you two holes so uh the next part is the bottom if you see the little holes that's that's all that's this thin piece of sheet metal that's it now the bottom does have a front and back you can figure this out by using your little bracket here the closer holes are going to be your back side the holes in the front are going to be your front side so this is going to go right up here on the cover it goes on the inside you can tell because the holes are different sizes the smaller hole is going to be on the inside screw it down be careful with this because like i said you can strip it out so but essentially that's the basics of it the next one you're going to do is you're going to mount this part it goes like this with that flat edge down and this goes up underneath the bottom same as these it's just a little hole punched in sheet metal uh so to save us some time here on footage i'm gonna go ahead and screw this off the rest of the way and then i'll show you how to put the front cover on got the rest of the bottom screwed off here for us now if i was on you know a real home um this wall would come on down and i could mount this cover onto the wall but because i have this braced off and i'm pretty much in a crawl space here uh i really can't mount this uh but you will screw it off at the bottom here and then your cover will go on the cover does have two little holes at the bottom to match up with the two little holes down um underneath now sometimes these covers want to be a little weird but that's because that's um that's why it's adjustable up here with that slide piece uh and then the last thing you would do would be to put screws in the bottom here and that's pretty much how to install the cover now like i said earlier this bottom is solid and i wouldn't be flapping around like this if i had it anchored to the wall you are going to have to drill a hole with a hole saw one that's good for metal for this sheet metal you're going to have to drill a hole in the bottom of this for your gas lines because uh most of the time these things are hooked up by a gas provider like a municipal gas provider they're not going to cut your cover you have to cut it for them they will hook the gas up for you but you're going to have to provide them with a hole in this cover and the other thing is you're going to have to drill a hole for your relief line now when i would do this i would normally get a plumb bob or a string with a bolt or something tied to it to give me a rough estimate of where that's going to be you're going to want to drill your whole larger say like two inches or so for your gas people giving them enough room to play with on your three-quarter a one-inch hole will be just fine you don't want the holes to be too big though because uh bugs and stuff can get up in here and build a little nest and you don't want a whole lot of that going on and you don't want the hole so big that uh wind and stuff is blowing up in here because these pipes and stuff down here can freeze in the winter time which is going to bring us to our next part insulating your water lines now i went ahead and took that cover back off because it was kind of flopping around and i didn't really have a good way to anchor it in the field you can insulate now and then put the cover on it doesn't really matter how you do it but your electricians they love to tie their little wires and stuff and wrap it around your loop here you're going to want to go ahead and get those out of the way um so you don't want to wrap them up in the insulation get this guy out of the way yeah he's fine um this black foam pipe insulation with the self-adhesive sticker stuff is what we like to use now the hardest part here is going to be cutting these 45s so you're going to want to get you a decent little razor knife um mount this up there and measure it and then you're going to kind of cut a little 45 out of it and then that'll go on there see my little 45 angle and then if you cut your 45 right you know 98 42 45 is making 90 so you'll have your next angle go ahead and just you know kind of eyeball it use your fingers to measure be careful with the razor knife and that's pretty much it now uh to secure this even more into oil yeah to secure it even more you can wrap duct tape around it but it does have this little uh uh green stuff here you pull that off and you stick it down now um i don't want to do that here in the training center because i'm just going to be throwing this stuff away and i'm going to be taking this apart a couple times so get your other side mark it cut it put it up on there if you get a good 45 there you can cut and mark it and there you go and wrap some tape wrap some tape make sure that's secure now this is pretty much all we're required to do with code but every so often we have a hard freeze where temperatures drop way down and we've had these pipes freeze on us doesn't cause any damage to the water heater pex is really resilient to freezing it doesn't quite bust like cpvc or or copper wood if it freezes but we decided that we would go one step farther so we take this wall insulation just a square piece uh we cut it and then what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to shove some of this behind here of course the cover is going to be around here you're going to want to shove some behind and then you're also going to want to take another piece and put it across the front now when your cover's here you'll be able to put that cover on and all this will be nice and insulated at this point with cover on now insulated water lines hooked up you're pretty much done uh as a new construction installer because your gas service provider they're going to come hook this up for you your gas line here and then your electricians they're going to they're going to do this wiring part for you but if you have a controller that's what this blue wire is for and uh we are responsible for wiring that controller so that's going to be our next step i'm going to show you how to do this cat5 wire this blue wire there's actually several pairs of wire in here cat5 wire is what you're generally going to see when installing a controller on a water heater it's really for telecommunications uh as long as you're only going say five or six feet uh cat5 wire is going to be just fine but if you're running all the way to the other end of the house you're gonna want something a little bit bigger in uh size to keep that continuity up but what we're going to do is we're going to strip this wire on down what i generally do first is i'm going to take my razor knife and i'm going to kind of just gradually cut around this housing be very careful and then you can kind of just pull that off and there you go there's your pairs of wires they've got a brown one a green one a orange and a blue what i normally do is go for the blue pair and then i'll take the other ones and kind of just twist them around like that there is a piece of white string in here which is for um you can grab that white string with a pair of pliers and just rip it and rip this whole cover off as much as you want um now i used to just strip this wire with my fingernails um but if you do that too much it hurts so get you some type of wire strippers strip that wire back to where you've got two bare wires i go ahead and put a little bend in here like a little hook because we're going to go hook it around some screws wiring your remote wire to your water heater you got this little white box right here and it actually says remote connection that's what you're looking for there's a little screw up here on the front you're gonna go ahead and unscrew that be careful with that screw don't lose it don't lose it down in the pine straw it's going to be very difficult to find all right get your wires here and you're going to want to take this cover and slip it over the wires and just kind of let it hang there that's for later because we got to put the cover back on now when hooking these wires up to the screws here it doesn't matter it doesn't matter positive negative and it doesn't matter on the controller you can hook it up either way it'll know what to do just as long as one wire's on one screw and the other wire is on the other screw all of your tankless heaters are different according to their brand so this is just one example of a connection there are other ones out there some of them are easier some of them are harder you got to watch that wire when you're doing this if you don't have it hooked just right that screw will push your wire out from underneath it and you will not have a connection screw that in and then hook your wires up around that piece there and now we're back to our little cover it's got a little hook in the back hooks on like that find that screw and she is giving me a hard time find that screw put it up in there if you can get it started with hand by hand that helps but like i said be careful if you drop these screws in that pine straw and they love to use pine straw outside around the houses it will disappear really quick on you but that's pretty much it you're done there your extra wire you can tuck it up behind here keep it out of the other people's way because your electrician is going to come back behind you and your gas guy is going to come back and do his part too but that's pretty much it if you're a new construction installer you've done what you needed to do the next step here is actually wiring up the remote wiring your remote now most time these things are in the garage sometimes they put them in a laundry room sometimes they put them in the master bath uh they can put them wherever they want to as long as they ran a wire rough in but you're pretty much going to have a wire the blue cap 5 wires what you're looking for in the garage it's if the electrician ran it the box is going to be up about shoulder high or head high uh it'll be in a blue box for you to mount it uh if it's something that we're doing you might just mount it straight to the sheetrock uh but we do have this nice board here now all of your water heaters have different controllers this is what uh the ranai controller looks like and it has two little wires poking out of the back of it you're going to have to strip these off off and you're going to have to wire nut these you would just wire nut them to the wires but that's your renai controller it's a little smaller a little different all of them have like a cover plate that comes off and some screw holes these screw holes are lined up to go in that light socket box i also have a new ritz controller here uh same deal here this one has a cover this one's a little harder to get off but it has a cover now in order for this one to work they would have had to turn their box sideways because the screws are on the side most of the time we're just mounting these straight to the sheetrock this one has a wire with a little blue connector most of the time we just cut this off and um wire nut it to the to our wires here but it does come with a cable if you were going to mount this controller say just stuff underneath there you can use these wiring harnesses and stuff but most time it's in the garage and we cut those off and just wire nut it straight to there you've got to use your little wire nuts you got to use them if you don't use them this thing will short out on itself and you'll get a call i ain't got no hot water my water heater's broken i need a brand new one uh and we're not in the business of giving people brand new water heaters uh the next one i've got here is um the ao smith controller they've some of them have different buttons different functions they're all going to work different but the mounting process is pretty much the same this one just has two screws on the back of it which is primarily what you're going to see out in the field only a few of them have those the wire hanging out the back you don't have to wire nut this those screws will lock it down and you won't have a short now the one that goes with that here this is the rinnai one a ream i'm sorry it's got this funny looking little bracket and then the controllers right there this one doesn't have uh the face that comes off it uses this bracket so what we're going to do is we're going to mount this bracket to the wall this bracket will also work with those blue boxes and i about messed up this bracket will do the boxes sideways too but those little prongs go at the top not side lanes like i was about to do it and then you're going to screw this on off the bottom one here is slotted so that you can get it good and level remember people don't know plumbing people don't know electricity but they know straight so you won't want it to be straight the next thing you're going to do is hook this thing up now i put these little tabs on here some of them come with these little guys uh some of them you just put the bare wires on there you don't have to use the little um clip things there but things out here in the little training center we kind of do them over and over and over again so this makes it nice and easy and you don't have to worry about your wires getting just burn up wore out from people tighten them in and out all the time but here again it doesn't matter if it's blue with the white stripe or the solid blue or whatever but then always leave yourself some extra always leave some extra so if you have to make a repair you can because sometimes uh somebody could drive a nail through here and it mess up one of these pairs of wires or something like that but then this one's just gonna come go on here it's got little slots you line it up and you lock it down underneath here there is a little bitty screw uh that's in your little pack of stuff that you get with this guy we are going to take our little tiny screw i'm and stick it up in there and thread it in there this guy can be kind of difficult sometimes as well because you gotta find that little hole there she is all right now if we had our power turned on we could turn the power on and start using our water heater but most of the time in new construction you're going to beat the electrician you're not going to have power to the unit you're pretty much just going to wire it up like this and you're going to walk away from it and as a new construction installer you're pretty much done at this point now i am going to cover how to wire this thing up and i am going to cover gas line because you might have to go replace a unit uh and if you're replacing the unit there's not going to be an electrician coming behind you there's not going to be a gas municipal or a heat and air guy or something like that to come do it you're going to have to take that stuff down luckily it's already built for you so you're just going to disconnect it and you're going to put it back together so let's jump into that making the electrical connection to your tankless water heater now typically in a new construction setting this is not something you're going to do the electrician will generally do this unless you're having to swap this unit out for some reason or another the builders probably aren't going to call the electrician and the gas people and all that so you're going to be in charge of the water the gas and the power so it is nice to know how to do these things now you're generally going to have a piece of romex wire which is a solid copper wire there's three of them in here there's your positive your negative and what they call a neutral ground or an earth ground now the tankless water heater does have its black and white wires hanging out down here on the bottom you could essentially just wire nut it together like that but that looks like garbage and somebody could come up and yank that apart you're going to want to feed this into the heater and actually make your connection inside this unit so in order to do that we're gonna have to take the cover off so i'm gonna do that real quick all right here is the inside of your tankless water heater now most people once they open this thing up for the first time they're like what but really once you get to playing around with these guys they're pretty simple all these wire connections they only go back to one together one way these are in a wire harness type assembly so uh it's really not that bad but for the most part right now you're not going to worry about any of this stuff because this is brand new we're not trying to service it or repair it or anything like that so when making your electrical connection inside the water heater there is a little box right here now behind there is where you're going to make that electrical connection so i'm going to bring it in a little closer and see how we do at showing you how to do this here's our little box for making our electrical connections you might have to move some of these wires out of the way to do this and this is going to be really difficult for me to show you and stay out of the way to where you can see what's going on but you undo that little screw at the top now be careful with these little screws some of them are pretty unique find you a little place normally when i'm working on these things there's a gas meter right there and i will put those screws on top of the gas meter but that comes off there is a like a little wiring harness here um but what i typically do is pull this out up here like this move that out of the way and then you're going to take your romex wire and go back up into that little hole where the other one was now let's strip some wire here um the way these romex's is set up uh there's the white the black and then that ground in the middle if you take your razor knife and run it straight down the center of that yellow you can cut along that solid bare copper what they call the earth or neutral ground and you won't cut into the housing of your other wires now we can strip these wires you can get a fancy wire stripper but uh most the time you're just gonna have um something like these needle nose with a wire cutter on there and you're going to want to bend you a little piece in that earth ground there's a green screw right here that's where your uh earth ground is going to hook into that bare copper wire is going to go on that green phillips head screw most of your earth grounds or green grounds are going to be painted uh green and they're all going to have that little groundy symbol there next to it uh so we take our wires here we get our little wire nuts and you take your black wire and this is actually a lot of wire here so i am going to cut this back just a little bit and then we'll have to strip those wires on out as well and you're doing this be careful you don't snip all the way through the wire because it's not what you're trying to just cut that housing off of there and if you see that move where i spin the pliers around that will help you a little bit too of course these little cutters are so they've been around for a while so they're not exactly the best thing in the world there we go now let's pull this on back down a little bit here we're going to take our black wire black ghost black like so twist it around uh it's a little difficult because you got a a solid copper and then you've got kind of a braided copper wire here but you're going to want to wrap that around and then go the wrong way put your wire nut on there make sure you push and screw and push and screw and then i always like to pull on these wires to make sure they're not going to hop out so make sure we've got a good connection and i not exactly happy with how much wire i've got there so we're going to go ahead and pop some more off of there come on damn them there we go and twist your wires together and the way these little wire nuts work there's like a little threaded piece up in there kind of like a i guess you call it a backwards oopsie look at that see i did went to go do my pull test and it uh it hopped right on out of there uh but like i was saying it works kind of like a backwards screw it's like a little spring and it will bite on those wires and give you a good good solid solid connection and then give your pull on your wires give it a test you can undo some of this stuff get it out of your way just remember to put it back and don't cut any of these things and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna fold this black wire and tuck it back into that hole and then you fold and tuck your white wire back into that hole get your screwdriver undo that ground and you need to get that ground over to that screw and then we are going to secure it nice and tight and that is not going anywhere and now if you've got everything tucked in nice and pretty good and tight uh you're gonna go ahead and put this box back on and it's not won't listen to me there we [Applause] go and nice and tight and you see how that is down at the bottom all nice and pretty uh instead it's just two wire nuts i mean it looks like it's supposed to be like that so that's the way you should do it and then take your little sensors and stuff here and put these back where they were you're kind of done within there for right now so um you can just lay them in front of it that's it alright that's how you hook it up making your gas connection now as a new construction uh residential plumber you're not really going to be doing this your gas provider is gonna do this part uh or at the very least your heat and air guys are gonna do this uh now if you're a service plumber you might find yourself doing a lot of gas stuff because plumbers do do gas but in new construction the only time you're going to have to mess with this is if you're swapping this unit out and they're not going to call the gas people they're not going to call the electrician twice to disconnect and reconnect uh all this stuff they're gonna leave it up to you they're gonna figure that you could probably handle it and it's one call one person so if you were swapping this unit out you would have to disconnect the gas the electricity and then take the water down as well now i went ahead and kind of set something up here for me now this is training center stuff this this is kind of something that's not uh on a residential house this this is here these heaters are residential heaters that we use but some of this gas stuff i've kind of had to make some things happen to get this thing to work but i went ahead and built the basic thing here now you're going to have to take this stuff apart i just put it all together to make it easier for me to carry um i know this gas sizing isn't right isn't going to be the right size but i'm running this heater off of a 20-pound uh little gas grill propane cylinder uh so it's this is not what you're going to encounter in the real world but what you're going to do is you're going to take this stuff here it's called thread sealant plumbers love to call it pipe dope um and you're gonna coat your threads with it you're not gonna use teflon tape on this you're gonna use this thread sealer uh i've been told that the gas will eat through the teflon tape um but i don't know that for sure because i've always pipe doped my gas fittings and then you're gonna kind of screw that guy on uh the next thing is you would have a pipe cover here uh you're gonna need to eat drop down out of that so i got a long length here and we're going to go ahead and dope that real good get get in those threads really good because this is what's actually making uh the solid seal but yeah we're just kind of painting this stuff on comes with a little brush in the can it's not bad be careful with this stuff because uh if you get it on your pants your clothes or something like that it's gonna be with you all day and even if you get it on your hands some of the old stuff would wash off really well with water uh but i've noticed the newer stuff doesn't quite want to do that and we've got a little t here's our next one now this is a propane water heater so it should run just fine off a half inch connection but in my little world it's not really about uh your pipe sizing and your connection as much as it is uh your inch is a water column [Music] now you're going to need a pipe wrench on this uh black iron and actually i've got some galvanized here just because it's what we kind of had floating around um i always kind of put it together and then grab your bottom fitting and watch it as it tightens itself up enough go around tightening it all up together but yeah what you're going to want to watch out for is that this top piece because it's made out of a different metal i i'm not really sure what that is cast aluminum maybe uh i don't know the old plumbers they'd call it pot metal i i'm not exactly sure um but what i'm building here is kind of called they call it a drip leg uh you got to put a drip leg on your gas appliances it's there to catch moisture and dirt and stuff like that now typically when you're running a propane system uh you don't have a drip leg on it because propane's actually well it's hard to say it's cleaner but it is because it's in a liquid a filtered liquid form that's in a tank at your house it's not traveling very far where uh with your natural gas that stuff is piped hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles across country uh is networks of natural gas just all over the country that run for miles and miles and miles and it can build up cons condensation uh pipes can rust any kind of all kinds of stuff but it's because the system is so big so you're going to want to tighten your drip leg that's what this is and you can um build build your whole piping system out of solid iron pipe um but we uh we like to use uh these little flexi hoses uh these are really great uh it's uh keeps it simple so you're not having to figure out a whole bunch of stuff uh and i am gonna put a little valve on this uh a lot of times you might get sent out to hook up the gas and it's just this flexi hose is all you gotta put in there this now on this flexible part it does have a flared end piece um people will tell you that on the flared end you don't need to dope it but uh me personally i do it anyway i mean what's it gonna hurt so this flared end is what makes the union to that uh flexible pipe now in the plumbing world today we do have a flexible piping system they all have names track pipe there's a couple other ones out there ward flex you can do the whole system out of a flexible pipe tubing oh and i didn't want to do that yet i gotta tighten it up now you don't really have to go nuts when tightening this up but you want it snug and you want everything lined up nice and pretty you want that gas valve pointing straight up you want these things angled right so that it looks pretty cause uh you know a lot of people out there don't they don't know how gas works they don't know how plumbing works but they know straight and they know crooked and uh people will look at something and just talks so much because something's not straight i mean it could work better than anything else in the world but if it's not straight um they're gonna want a brand new one well that's pretty much it and then of course you would connect that to your other end somebody's gonna provide you with a gas meter uh if you are in the field using a propane unit you're not gonna hook this up the propane guys are gonna do all of that and i've never really run across uh where i was swapping out a propane heater because we only we only run into like one or two of them a year most of our houses are spec houses and they have gas in those neighborhoods so well that's pretty much it that kind of covers all of our install on the tankless water heater you

Channel: Plumbing Solutions, LLC

Views: 90,569

Keywords: Plumbing, Plumbing Installation, Tankless, Tankless Heater, Tankless Water Heater, Water Heater, Water Heater Install, Water Heater Installation, Tankless Water Heater Installation, Tankless Heater Installation, Tankless Water Heater Install, Tankless Heater Install, Plumbing Install, Hot Water, No Hot Water, Residential Plumbing, Tank Less Water Heater, Tank Less Heater

Id: Yn6_NANMN9Q

Length: 59min 9sec (3549 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020