Replacement of water supply: the choice of materials and

How is the replacement of plumbing in the garden, in a private house or apartment? What is it worth changing the old pipes? How to carefully dismantle the old eyeliner, and how to install a new one?

Let's figure it out.

Dismantling

Replacing water pipes begins with the dismantling of the old water supply. In conditions of a close bathroom of an apartment, this operation sometimes results in a serious problem.

We need:

• Disconnect the supply cable from the valves without damaging them and without affecting the tightness of the threaded connection to the valve.
• Disconnect and remove mixers.
• Pull all-welded liner from the holes in the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen.

To clarify: we are talking about a typical city apartment in a house of Soviet construction. In a cottage or new building, the layout of the bathroom and kitchen can force the builders to power them from different valves.

To disconnect from the valves, you need:

1. Shut them off and make sure that the water has ceased to flow into the apartment.
2. Cut both sgona (so-called pipes with long and short threads, screwed into the valve) grinder or hacksaw.
3. Pulling the eyeliner towards you, unscrew the halves of the eaves from the valves.

By the way: if you have screw valves, do not be lazy to replace them with ball valves. They always hold water perfectly, are exceptionally fault tolerant and durable.

How to remove faucets? The easiest instruction is for plumbing fixtures with flexible connections: it is enough to unscrew their nuts with an open-end wrench or wrench. Similarly, the drain tank is turned off.

Slightly more complicated is the procedure for dismantling the wall-mounted mixer in the bathroom:

1. Turning the cap nuts.

1. Holding the corners or couplings, in which the scythes (eccentrics) are screwed, we twist both the scythes. The choice of tool for this job depends on the type of mixer: domestic eccentrics are turned away with pliers inserted inside; Imports usually have to be taken beyond the edge of the carob key.

The kitchen faucet on the hard liner is easiest to dismantle by cutting the pipes under it and unscrewing them from the tee under the faucet.

Leads are disconnected from the valves and all plumbing fixtures, but they are held on brackets connecting them, fixed or bolted to the wall. Screws get out quite traditionally - a screwdriver; It is most convenient to cut the plug of the dowel with a grinder, after which the bracket can be easily removed from it.

To remove the liner from the holes in the wall without unnecessary damage, it is better to cut them from the side of the kitchen as close as possible to the partition.

Choice problems

Pipes

What kind of pipe is better to replace the plumbing? The answer depends on where it is located.

In the garden or at the cottage, only cold water is usually bred. Here, the optimal choice would be polyethylene pressure pipes connected by compression fittings.

Why exactly they?

• The price of polyethylene pipes is minimal among all other offers of the modern market.
• The elasticity of plastic makes it possible to lay pipes with bends. What is especially valuable, polyethylene retains its elasticity even in frost: if water freezes in the water supply, the pipe will not burst, but only slightly stretch.
• Compression fittings allow you to assemble a water supply system with your own hands, without using any tool at all.

Important: cut the pipe into pieces of the desired size still have. For this purpose, a special miter knife or an ordinary hacksaw is used. In the latter case, the cut will have to be cleaned of burrs.

For a house connected only to the cold water main, the best material will be polypropylene: without reinforcement - on cold water, reinforced with aluminum foil - on hot. Reinforcement not only increases the tensile strength, but also reduces the thermal expansion of plastic.

But in a city apartment is better to stay at the corrugated stainless steel. Why? Let's look at the characteristics of inexpensive Korean Kofulso pipes and fittings for general development.

Against the background of 20 - 25 atmospheres and 95 degrees, maximum for polypropylene - inspires. Note: at temperatures close to critical, the strength of polypropylene pipes is markedly reduced. At 90 degrees, the working pressure is already limited to seven to eight atmospheres.

Why do you need a margin of safety in a city apartment? In some cases (for example, when supplying hot water from a direct pipeline to the peak of cold weather), the temperature of hot water can seriously exceed the maximum allowed according to the current SNiP 75C.

Worse, the water supply system in an apartment building is not controlled by you, but by unknown locksmiths, whose skill level at times, frankly, leaves much to be desired. It is worth a locksmith to sharply open the valve on your riser - and the pressure at the front of the flow of water filling it can reach twenty or more atmospheres.

Valves

Replacing the water supply network is often accompanied by the installation of new valves and mixers. Concerning valves, recommendations have already been made: our choice is ball valves.

Slightly specify the rules of their purchase.

• Under the handle of the crane should be hiding the nut, pressing the stem seal. If the seal is pressed by a washer that rests directly on the handle, it will be impossible to tighten it when worn.
• The stroke of the handle should be smooth, without jamming, not requiring much effort.
• It is better to take the taps with yellow bodies, and not with silver ones. Under chrome plating instead of honest brass, silumin may be hiding; crafts from it often fall apart already at the installation stage.

What to look for when buying a mixer?

The water pressure control should be carried out by one lever or by turning the tap half a turn, typical of ceramic cranes. Screw cranes are simply obsolete: they serve less and often need repair.

The switch on the shower should turn on a full turn. This suggests that it also uses reliable and durable ceramics.

The more massive the mixer housing, the less likely it is that silmin is hidden under chrome plating. At the same time, pay attention to the thickness of the gander (spout) walls: if they resemble cigarette paper, this product will hardly work happily ever after.

Important: ceramics require mandatory installation after coarse filters. Sand and scale, trapped in the groove of the ceramic plates, when trying to close the faucet, can chop them off.

Installation

How is the actual replacement of water pipes in each of the cases described? With polyethylene, it seems, there will be no particular difficulties: the assembly of compression joints is extremely simple. The only subtlety - it is impossible to prevent jams of the sealing ring, which will inevitably lead to leakage.

Polypropylene pipes are connected by welding using a low-temperature soldering iron.

1. The chamfered pipe and fitting are combined with a nozzle of the appropriate size and melted.
2. The pipe is inserted into the fitting socket with a forward movement and held there for a few seconds until the molten plastic solidifies.

Foil-reinforced polypropylene requires stripping: the foil is removed from the welding field with a few turns of the shaver (with external reinforcement) or flat-cutter (if the foil layer is located in the middle of the pipe wall).

Corrugated stainless steel can bend with a radius equal to the diameter of the pipe, which allows you to perform turns of the pipeline without the use of unnecessary parts. Connections are made with compression fittings with silicone seals. To assemble the joint, it is sufficient to tighten the union nut with an adjustable wrench, holding the fitting body with the second key.

Water supply liners need to fix fixing clamps in increments of about half a meter.

Conclusion

We hope that the material offered to the reader will help him in choosing solutions for the new water supply system and its installation. Additional useful information can be found in the video in this article.

Successes!