Sweating Pipes

This is the story behind adding the water line for the new fridge.

There is all manner of water lines down in the basement.  It's an impressive historical record of water supply lines throughout history, both galvanized and copper pipe.

And there's some interesting stuff, too.

• Shutoff valves in random places (the one the hot line shuts off the kitchen and the master bath, while the cold one only shuts off the kitchen sink!).
• Shutoff valves that are labelled for gas rather than water...
• Random pipe diameters.  A 1-inch line that randomly chokes down to 3/4-inch for no apparent reason.
• Short bits of pipe soldered together to make a longer run.  It's only a 3-foot run, why not one 3-foot piece rather than 6 6-inch pieces with 5 couplings?
• Lines that are capped-off in odd places.  Not near the last branch, but 10 feet after the last branch.

Someday, when we remodel the kitchen and master bath, I'm going to replace all this junk with PEX.

At any rate, I had to tap into an existing copper water line.  Though I'm getting better at sweating the joints, I'm still not good enough.

Well, good enough to get a joint that doesn't leak, but not good enough to get a pretty one.

Or, apparently, to prevent a little excess molten solder from dropping onto my finger.

Lovely isn't it?

Only a few bad words were spoken...

New Fridge

 One of the last appliances from when we bought the house was the fridge.  It's been a little under the weather since day 1.

The ice maker had something caught in it (looked like an old ziplock bag), so it was all jammed up and wouldn't work.  Naturally, the water line for the ice maker was connected to the back of the fridge, but the other end was just dangling down in the basement.  The was no indication that it had been connected to anything.  No shutoff valve with a missing connection.  No capped-off branch line.  Nothing.

The face plate surrounding the crisper drawers would fall off at the slightest touch.

Things at the back of the fridge would freeze solid while things at the front or in the door would be slightly below room temperature.  Regardless of the temperature setting.  It would be especially bad during hot weather.

And the thing would make more noise than a 727 at takeoff.

The hope was that we could live with it until we gutted the kitchen...  We'd been trying to nurse it for as long as possible so we could avoid getting a temporary one, but...  The hot weather over the past month forcing us to throw out a bunch of 3 day old food that had become a science experiment was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Friday night I pulled out the old fridge (see top photo).  Much amusement and muttering resulted from the science experiment that was exposed.  Note - the only thing we're responsible for in that picture is the stray nerf bullet.

SWMBO spent two hours scraping up the crud that had been beneath the old one.  Good thing she was wearing a hazmat suit.  The results are shown in the bottom photo.  Note the shiny new water line that's properly connected down in the basement.  There's a story behind that, too...

At any rate, the new fridge came Saturday morning.  And we don't have to go to the store to buy bags of ice any more...