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When checking the website statistics for the last few days, we discovered that yesterday someone found our site by searching: "bread in pipe before solder?"
No kidding. Other people have heard of this?
Apparently they have. If you follow some of the links from that Google search you will learn that this stuff-bread-in-the-pipes trick is known by HVAC technicians, hardware store folk, and general handy people (scroll down to step 4) among others.
All around we are feeling a little better about the suggestion, since this seems to be a time-tested solution (Michael wants you to know that he never had any doubts). At the very least, now we know that this trick has been outed by other people before us and therefore the plumber mafia will not be coming after us.
Solder on!
In our last post, we mentioned a strange, bread-product solution to the leak problem we were having in our newly extended heat register. We want to tell you about that, but first let’s back up a minute.
Why is it leaking in the first place? What did we do wrong?
It’s a basic science lesson, actually. Michael soldered the pipe together with a flamethrower (okay, a small propane torch, but isn’t that less exciting?). Although he had drained the pipes before beginning, ’tis the nature of water to not go away completely just because you ask politely. So some water remained in the pipes, which were getting heated well beyond water’s boiling point by the flamethrower.
Okay, class:
Q: Boiling water turns to what?
A: Steam.
Q: And when steam is contained, it does what?
A: It pressurizes and looks for a way to escape.
The building steam pressure within the copper pipe blew out a small pinhole in the solder, causing the minor leak. While our current solution of little plastic container under the drip is consistent with our way of handling house problems right now, we knew that we would need to find a more permanent fix eventually. So Michael consulted the plumbers that he frequently works with.
And thus we were introduced to the plumbing world’s secret fix: Wonder Bread .
(By the way, we really hope that we aren’t breaking some kind of plumber’s code by sharing this. Hopefully plumbers aren’t like magicians and sworn to punish anyone who reveals their trade secrets.)
(Although if we disappear within the next few weeks, you’ll know what happened.)
Apparently, what we need to do is re-drain the pipes and re-solder the joint after stuffing both ends of pipe with little chunks of Wonder Bread. The bread will absorb the steam as it develops, keeping it from invading the joint. After the pipes are sealed, the Wonder Bread, being essentially made of fluff, will gradually dissolve in the hot water and disappear in the system.
It’s a mad kind of brilliance, isn’t it? Who knew that the plumbing profession had it in them?
We haven’t tried it yet. Mostly because we are a little unsure. Wonder Bread? Really? We trust these plumbers and all, but… Wonder Bread? That stuff will survive the Apocalypse and give the cockroaches something to snack on a thousand years later. Do we really want it floating around in our heating system? But we are also hesitating partly because we can’t quite bring ourselves to purchase said Wonder Bread. We’re kind of a multi-grain family, ourselves. What will we do with the rest of the loaf?
Anyway, that’s the answer. We’ll publish the step-by-step photo evidence when we actually get around to doing it, including the inevitable shot of Cherie testing out whether Wonder Bread is really as icky as she remembers.
Spring is an odd thing in Maine. It doesn’t creep up on you. Rather it just sort of appears all at once. At least that’s how it happened this year. We were trudging along, shoveling snow and slogging through mud, pulling on our winter coats every morning and then, suddenly, one day, we didn’t need the coats. And then we stopped, blinked, and noticed it was 70 degrees and sunny. Just like that.
Once all the snowdrifts melted, we could see that we were “that house.” You know, that house that the neighbors are always complaining about. The yard was covered in drywall and lumber scraps, there were old coffee cups and water bottles strewn about, and various debris was piled on and under the porch. So we’ve been taking advantage of this change in weather by spending the last two weekends outside cleaning up the yard and trying to reduce our redneck quotient by at least two degrees.
We have made progress, but unfortunately it doesn’t make for very exciting entries. So instead we bring you a little something that Michael did several weeks ago back when we were still in the middle of heating season.
You may remember that we hired our plumbers to install all of the heat registers in the upstairs. We are not plumbers; we believe that sometimes the wisest part of homebuilding is knowing when to turn the job over to professionals (see: Drywall, Taping and Sanding Of ). But when we were in the middle of flooring bedroom three, the smallest bedroom, Michael started being concerned that there wouldn’t be enough heat in the room. We had only a four foot section of register in that room and the only window faces north: it’s a dark and potentially chilly room.
The plan was simple: extend the heat register around the corner of the room and turn the four foot straight register into a seven foot L-shaped one.
The scene of the crime, before.
First, Michael drained the heating pipes that headed upstairs, because he is smart like that and Cherie didn’t marry no dummy. Then he cut out the subfloor to expose the heating tubes.
The orange tubing is the flexible heating tube that connects to the copper pipe in the register. He had to cut the connection to the copper pipe, move the hose to the new position, and then add new copper tubing at the end of the extension.
Then he installed the new register and tested everything for fit. So far, so good, so out came the flamethrower (you know it’s a fun job when the flamethrower is involved).
He soldered everything together, replaced the subfloor and ta-da! The extra heat was installed and we were ready to finish flooring.
There were a few mishaps, of course. This was one of our projects, after all. First, the cat decided to take advantage of the brief opening of the floor to re-explore her long-lost Eden in-between the floors. It took about half an hour to get her out of there again. Then, one of the register covers got a little burnt because Michael had to use it as a shield to keep from burning the wall. And, okay, the extension is leaking a little bit at the corner joint. A very little bit. Just a smidge, really. A small piece of Tupperware under the register to catch the water and it’s as good as new.
We did get an ingenious idea for how to fix the leak. It came from a real-life plumber. Any guesses? Hint: it involved the use of a bread product.
Cherie really hates having this conversation (or one of its many variants):
C: Hey, did you get a chance to look at the camera?
M: What’s wrong with it?
C: When I turn it on it makes a loud buzzing noise and won’t focus.
M: Huh. It seems to be working fine now.
C: It is not! Let me see that! What did you do?
M: I turned it on.
C: Why does stuff always work when you touch it? That is so unfair.
Anyway, the camera appears to be over whatever little fit it was having. Ungrateful little wretch. Pretends to be a great camera and then all you do is toss a little drywall dust on it and it folds like…like…someone that folds under pressure.
(C: Hey, I need a football analogy!
M: Ryan Leaf.
C: Who the hell is Ryan Leaf?
M: Trust me.)
Fine. Our camera folded like Ryan Leaf.
So, here’s some quick shots of the new floors. Note that they are blurry, which is all the Ryan Leaf camera can manage, but they are proof that the floors are done.
But first, so that the internet doesn’t continue to think that we continue to torture our dog, here is a shot of our current living room arrangement:
Note the dog-approved area rug that used to be in our bedroom. She’s much happier. Also, there is normally a coffee table in front of the couch, but, instead of taking the time to clean all of the crap of the table, Cherie instead opted to just move it out of the way. (What? It was morning and she had to get to work.)
Here’s the other side.
True, the stairs aren’t done yet and won’t be for a while. And we realize that we are missing some wall there on the far side. That is where the woodstove is going, so we are waiting to put in fireproof materials.
Anyway, here’s the smallest bedroom–the back-up, emergency guest room–right at the top of the stairs:
And bedroom 2, the real, official guest room:
There. Proof. No we are going to go talk some more sense into Ryan Leaf.
