Today’s DIY picture album is my attempts to build a shower and the continuous struggle that ensued.
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- It didn’t take long to mount the in-line, on demand water heater to the rafters, solder in a couple elbows, and install a compression fitting valve, completely wrong by the way. More on that later on.
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- I had to bump the piping out to the other rafter because of how the hot and cold water inlets are situated. It wasn’t much of an issue, just had to buy a couple more elbows and practice soldering.
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- So yeah, the floor above this area still hasn’t been put in, and it’s honestly not high on my list since the shower is where the drain for the kitchen sink needs to go. But I wanted to capture the positioning of the pipes from the downstream.
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- This is the other side of the support beam. If everything would go according to plan, I’d get the piping out of the water heater and into the previous piping which only was fed by by the furnace, the worst way to heat water in history.
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- Okay. H20 5 is the worst flux I’ve ever used. Of course, I’ve only ever used the bottom flux, so I wouldn’t know what the differences between normal flux are. Either way, don’t buy the top one, it’s horrible.
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- So I managed to solder a few joints together well enough that they got to the termination point! Yay!
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- I wanted to make sure when I was soldering the last of the joints, the alignment would prevent stress from being put on my bad joints from the crappy solder. Ugh I hate that solder even right now.
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- Well, before I managed to turn the water back on correctly, I decided to take a picture! Sure glad I did because of what happened next…
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- Turns out that compression fittings were not installed correctly. After energizing the lines, I saw some water leaking from the fittings. Now, sure had I not ever touched them they would have been fine, but I was like, “Oh yeah, let’s fix this.” Now, I also had the hankering suspicion that I didn’t seat my pipes fully into the valves prior to being compressed against the pipes. SO yeah, once I got the water off after the valve let the pipe out, I saw my issue, The compression ring was on the very end of the pipe, not actually on the pipe 🙁
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- So yeah, one of the problems with my compression fit valve was the alignment. You can’t really tell from this picture, but they’re about half an inch off, which only added to the problem of the valve not being fully seated 🙁
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- I had to add a coupling further up the line to fix the spacing, then go to home depot, buy new compression rings, and seat my pipes fully, ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh that sucked.
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- I opened up the unit once I got back from homedepot because after I soaked the outside of the unit, I wanted to check the inside. It was completely dry, hurray!
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- When I opened up the hot water heater, this was the most amazing thing to see. So, what you’re looking at is a terminal block. You take your wires that are run from the breaker box and you terminate them here, rather than outside of the water heater. Terminating, or landing/ending/putting the wires where the go, the wires inside of the unit means that the wires are run from the breaker to the heater without being broken, which would introduce a failure point. This is super awesome.
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- This fucking compression fitting, I hate compression fittings by this point in the evening, was leaking. Now I didn’t want to torque the shit out of the heating device, so I put my vice grips inside of the unit and cranked my bodyweight on this stupid fitting for like 3 threads. 3 threads in NPT, fuck your compression fitting, you suck so much.
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- I’m done, the pipes are in, they don’t leak, I’m finally happy. Only 3 of my 8 compression fittings were leaking and the only one that gave me problems was the one on the inlet.
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- One last picture in case tomorrow when I get there and the pipes are all on the ground. I did shut the water off because I don’t trust my own work… yet.
