Do Your Own Plumbing - Home Renovations Tips

Do Your Own Plumbing

The most expensive part of your new house is the plumbing. By the time you have run the hot water pipes and the cold water pipes and bought all the fixtures you have spent the most of any other part of the house. So it is wise in the planning stage to try and group your plumbing all relatively close together. It seems a bit silly to have a massive house and an en suite located way over on one corner all on it's own. You have to run cold water pipes to it and hot water pipes to it and waste water pipes away from it. Makes that one little room very expensive.

That being said, you will probably find that one must be a licensed plumber in most places to be able to install plumbing to a house. However, if you are just going to install an outside kitchen say, outside at your BBQ or something similar you may be able to do it yourself. Or if you have that cabin at the lake and you need some extra plumbing installed it is not difficult if you follow a few guidelines

The cold water is relatively easy to plumb with the easy to use 1/2" pipes and fittings available these days. It does pay to use the plastic piping if you are an amateur. These come with all the fittings you will need and just glue together. You can cut your plastic piping to length with a simple hack saw and glue it all together. Make sure you clean your cut inside and out side with some fine sandpaper to make sure all the burs are removed and to enable the glue to hold properly. Some products come with a solvent that you use to clean your joint before gluing. You can cut and lightly put together your pipe to make sure it is right before you glue it. T 's and straight joints and elbows in 90 degrees and 45 degrees mean you can make your plumbing fit anywhere. When you want to fit a tap say, there is the appropriate fitting that has attachments to fit to the wall and a threaded end for the tap to screw into. Use thread tape here as you normally would and you have a top job.

The hot water is best in 1/2" copper pipe and you don't need the gas and fittings that the plumbers use. There is screw up fittings you can use so with a couple of wrenches you can soon have your hot water in. You will need a tube cutter for giving your pipe a neat cut so that the fittings will be leak free. There is the same range of fittings as the cold piping so you can plumb anywhere. One advantage of copper is that it is flexible and you can bend it a little to get a better fit. Make sure all your pipes are held securely with brackets quite often so you don't get that knocking when the tap is turned on.

Your waste plumbing is done in 4" sewer pipe which feeds into the sewerage. Your other fixtures will feed into that in their relative sizes. Toilets are plumbed straight into the 4" sewer pipe while baths and sinks and showers etc. are in 2" pipe and have to be reduced to go into the sewer pipe. The exception is the bathroom vanity sink which is usually 1 1/2" pipe. All this piping is in the easy to use plastic so you can cut it with a fine hand saw and glue it together with same tools as the cold water pipe. Once you get into it it is really quite fun and very satisfying to see your plumbing all working. Make sure you do a water leak test before you put all your tools away as you may need to tighten a joint or two.

So there you go. Pretty easy really. Have a go and you will find that you will enjoy it.



By Nick Young 
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4141606