As I intimated in last night's post, I developed a leak in the plumbing again. It didn't show up until I filled the system, and then heated it up. That leads me to believe that some of the flux had somehow hardened at a point in the fitting that wasn't clean enough. The flux is water soluble, but when I was just charging with air to test, it held up... Add water, and you have a leak...
So I drained the system, and then blew it out with compressed air to get as much out as possible... I pulled a valve body apart at a point just below the bad fitting and let the remaining water run out there... I kept pumping air at the open fitting from both directions until I got nothing but air... Why?.. Well it is impossible to get fittings hot enough to solder when there is any water nearby... It simply does not work... While it was an annoying point to work, it was actually a good point to be able to drain thankfully...
I heated it up with the torch, and then tried to get some of the flux in there... It seemed to be ok, so I proceeded to heat the fittings and try to re-solder them... This is a heavy bronze valve body connected to a copper pipe, so it takes a lot of heat to get the valve to solder temperature... I worked the solder around the fitting and again it appeared that it would be ok... I then walked away for a while to let it cool on its own, rather than hitting it with water, which I imagine just isn't the best way to go...
This morning, I came downstairs, and looked at everything with fresh eyes... (well as fresh as they are first thing in the morning...) Break out the inspection mirror and flashlight, and look... Sadly, I am not convinced that it will hold, so rather than filling it with water again, it was off to the plumbing supply... I bought a replacement valve as there is no way in hell to easily reuse sweat fittings... The rest of the fittings I needed to deal with this, I already had here... So I cut everything out, made a short career of cleaning everything, and then went to work with the flux, torch, and solder... This time, the joints look like they are supposed to look... The solder fills the gap between the fittings all the way around and appears to have flown smoothly...
Right now the system is getting up to operating temperature again after re-filling it with water, and bleeding the air again... Once I'm up to temp in the whole system, then I'll start cycling the zones one and off in 20 minute intervals to see if I can break anything else...
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate plumbing?...
Posted by Backstage at October 6, 2005 12:35 PM | TrackBack