Pro Handyman Blog

I’ve always heard the stories of people dropping jewelry down the drain trap and then having to call a plumber to fish it out for them. Yet, I can’t ever remember getting a call like that. Maybe everyone already knows how to fish their jewelry out of the drain. If not, I will fill you in on how it is done.

If you drop something into the sink and it goes down the drain, it will usually end up in the trap. The trap is the “U” shaped pipe under the sink. If you have two sinks in a vanity, they may have separate traps, or sometimes they share one trap. If they have separate traps, go to the trap on the sink where the jewelry was lost. Depending on the weight of the jewelry and the volume and speed of the water flowing down the drain, it may stay in the trap, or it may continue down on a trip to see the city, via the sewer.

You will need to remove the trap and dump it out. Loosen the slip fittings on either side of the trap and pour out the water (and hopefully the jewelry) into a bucket. If the jewelry is there, it’s time to celebrate. If not, you might consider going shopping. You can put the trap back in place and tighten the slip fittings.

The cold weather can turn your plumbing into a nightmare. It only takes a few dollars and under an hour to prevent a problem.

You need to wrap any exposed piping to insulate it. You can buy enough pipe insulation for you house for around $15.00. Some of it has two mating sides with peel-and-stick tape to hold it together, and the other type has a slit in it that wraps around the pipe, and you can tape that type up yourself.

Pay attention to the pressure vacuum breaker (anti-siphon valve). When the weather turns freezing, this is one of the first calls we get. Wrap the piping going in and out of it and also wrap the valve itself. You can do this with insulation tape or you can fashion something out of the pipe insulation. You will notice there is an air gap at the top of the valve. Don’t block this area with insulation.

If you have any hose bibs that stick out too far from the wall, wrap the exposed ½ inch pipe leading to it. If you have a crawl space under your house, use heat tape plugged into an outlet to keep the plumbing warm, just don’t overlap the tape upon itself.

A plumbing leak at a drain can be coming from several areas. Grab a flashlight and start looking for the source of the leak. Just because the water is dripping off the lowest pipe sure doesn’t mean that it is the cause of the leak. Run the water and look for the source. If the leak is occurring 24 hours a day, the leak will be coming from a pressurized water line or valve.

If the leak occurs only when the water is running, then the leak is probably somewhere on the drain line. Check along the drain line for where the leak is originating. It will likely be at a slip fitting which you may need to tighten or replace. If that doesn’t stop the leak, unscrew the fitting and check the slip washer. These have a tendency to crack which won’t allow it to stop the water. Replace it and tighten.

If the source of the leak is coming from where the drain connects to the sink, you will have to remove the drain assembly. In many cases, the installer will have used silicone under the drain flange. Silicone needs to set up and even then, I don’t have as much confidence in it as I do plumbers putty. My choice is to use plumbers putty under the flange. Roll out a chunk about as thin as a pencil and push it under the flange. As you tighten down the drain assembly, you should see it ooze our around the flange. That is a good thing and confirms you have good coverage.

Small plumbing leaks can be tough to diagnose. Leaks most often occur at points of connection. Sometimes a pipe is cracked, which is hard to notice, but more often the leak is occurring where a pipe meets a fitting. Depending on the type of piping being used, you may have a threaded connection or a soldered connection. For pipes and fittings that are threaded, a common mistake is not using pipe tape or pipe dope.

Tape fills in the tiny gaps that are left when the threads of two mating objects screw together. The spaces are tiny, but water will find a way through. So by filling these small spaces, you will stop any slow drips or leaks.

For water lines, use white Teflon tape. This tape is on a roll and you wrap the tape in the same direction as you would twist on the fitting. If you wrap the tape the opposite way, it will bunch up. Hold the end of the tape on the fitting and start wrapping it around the threads. Overlap the beginning piece tightly and you will notice it will start gripping onto the threads. I usually wrap the threads three times and then pinch the threads with my fingers in the same direction as the fitting will screw on to the threads.

The same goes for fittings using natural gas. Use yellow gas tape for gas lines. It is thicker than the white Teflon tape and seals out leaks at the threads.

For every plumbing job there is a hose clamp waiting to help. Hose clamps are wonderful tools. If you look under your kitchen sink you are sure to see several of them.

If you have a dishwasher, the drain line will go up to an air gap device. This hose is connected to the air gap with a hose clamp. The outflow of the air gap device is connected to a discharge hose with another hose clamp. This hose drains into the garbage disposal and is held in place with yet another hose clamp.

Hose clamps come in a variety of sizes and have a variety of uses. They look like a metal band with slots in it, all connected to a screw mechanism. The clamp is round and the screw mechanism allows you to tighten it around the hose to be clamped.

To install one, you need to loosely slip it over the hose, place the hose onto the nipple of whatever fixture it is being installed into, slide the hose clamp up to the point where the hose wraps around the nipple and tighten the clamp.

Hose clamps will help on many plumbing repairs, from under the kitchen sink, to making plumbing connections to a swamp cooler.

PEX plumbing lines will have to be extended when you install a comfort height or handicapped toilet. Since these toilets are higher than normal, the distance from the water supply line to the bottom of the toilet tank where the line connects to the fill valve is greater.

PEX is cross-linked polyethylene pipe and it’s very popular with builders. PEX requires special fittings and crimping tools. PEX piping is secured to a fitting with a collar or sleeve. The fitting slides into the end of the pipe and the collar is compressed around it with a special tool. Different manufacturers use different methods of crimping; some use a copper ring, while others use a stainless steel sleeve. Generally speaking, one manufacturer’s method is not compatible with that of another.

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about expensive tools. You can use some plastic parts and screw them all together. Not all home centers carry a variety of PEX parts so you may have to look around. You can also use sharkbite fittings.

Your toilet’s water supply line looks like a pipe with a female adapter on the end. You can screw the adapter onto the fill valve sticking out of the bottom of the toilet tank. A crimp ring will hold the adapter onto the pipe.

You will need to cut the plastic pipe in the middle somewhere and splice in a length of pipe. Give yourself about four inches from the end of the fitting and cut the pipe squarely. You can use a tubing cutter or a utility knife, but the cut must be square and free of burrs.

Cut a piece of piping longer that you need for the splice. Now you can join these pipes together with screw-on fittings. First slide on the large nut, small end first, onto the pipe.

Next, push the grip ring onto the tube, flat side first, so that it is about one-eighth of an inch from the end (the grip ring looks like a skinny washer with little fingers sticking out of it). Now, slide the cone washer onto the tube, large end first. The cone will push the grip ring back into the correct position. The cone is in the correct position when it is one-half inch past the end of the tube. Slide the mating piece of the fitting onto the pipe and tighten the nut. Tighten it by hand until it starts to squeal and then give it one additional turn with a wrench.

You can hold the pipe up to the toilet and measure where you need to cut it for length. Make the cut at the desired location and repeat the process to attach the end of the pipe with the adapter on it.

PVC pipe repair isn't that difficult. Once you find a broken PVC sprinkler pipe, you need to clear out the area around the break or crack so you can work on repairing it. Make sure the water to the area is turned off so the hole doesn’t continue to fill.

If the pipe has a small crack in it, you may be able to glue a repair sleeve on it. To do this, you need to thoroughly clean the damaged area of the pipe and make sure it is dry. A repair sleeve comes in two halves and basically is like a suit of armor for the crack. Once the pipe is clean and dry, prime the area with primer and apply PVC glue to both the exterior of the pipe and to the inside of both sleeve halves. Fit the pieces of the sleeve around the pipe and push them together. The two halves have a little notch in them to line up the pieces and hold them together. Glue will ooze out as you squeeze the pieces together. Wait until the glue has dried to pressurize the pipe.

If the pipe is damaged at a fitting, you will have to cut out the fitting and re-pipe that area. You may need to cut the straight pipe back, add a straight coupling and a length of pipe, and finally a new fitting in place of the damaged one.

If the water drains very slowly down your bathroom sink, you probably have a clog between the sink stopper and the P-trap below the sink. Fortunately, this is one of the easier plumbing problems to fix.

Bathroom sinks take a lot of abuse. Most of the clogs are simply hair mixed in with a little soap and they make a nice ball to slow the water. You can try a tool called a “zip-it” which is nothing more than a long skinny piece of plastic with small barbs on it. You slide this down in between the stopper and the drain and it snags the hair ball and pulls it out. This can get very nasty though as it sprays drain stew all over you and the sink as you pull it out. So pull it slowly and be aware.

You can also take apart the drain assembly, which sounds a lot worse that it is. The sink stopper handle is attached to a horizontal pivot rod. This pivot rod connects to the vertical drain by a nut. Unscrew the nut and pull out the pivot rod. This will allow you to pull the sink stopper out of the sink. You will probably pull out a ball of hair along with it. You can clean this up and reinstall everything back together. The drain should flow much better.

If the drain is still slow, disassemble the P-trap and dump out the water and debris. You will probably see a lot of hair hanging out of the drain (there the P-trap was connected). Remove this hair and reassemble everything back together.

Many times I get a call to re-connect a copper soft water plumbing loop. What happens is that the previous occupants of the house take the water conditioner with them when they move out (or are forced to move out) and don’t reconnect the piping. This leaves two pipe stubs sticking out of the wall. Before you turn the water on, you must connect these two pipes or you will have water rushing out of one of the pipes.

You can reconnect these pipes with either a long copper flex line or a length of copper pipe and some fittings. If you choose to use the pipe and fittings, you can solder these together. Here is an article on how to solder copper pipe.

If you choose the use the copper flex line, you can either buy a flex line that requires soldering, or one that has compression fittings at either end. The compression fittings will only need some wrenches to make the connections water tight.

After you have secured the loop back together, turn on the water to check for leaks. If you have a leak at a soldered fitting, you will have to re-solder the joint. If the leak is at a compression fitting, you can give the fittings a quarter-turn to see if the leak subsides.