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My bedroom is about 14 x 16 or so and has only one wall that is connected to the rest of the house. There is a window in each of the three freestanding walls. Each window is pretty old and although we did have storm windows added to the outside about 15 years ago, I feel that they are leaky. I...

I have oil in my house. I have noticed that the price of oil fluctuates alot and is quite a bit more expensive to heat with than natural gas, right now. Is it possible to get an gas burner installed but to be able to switch between the gas furnace or the oil furnace back and forth? I have hot...

I have a well room in my house. It is really just a concrete room under one section of the house. In the middle of the concrete floor is a approx 1 foot square hole which does to the dirt. Coming out of the hole is a well head, about two feet high. Coming out of this well head is an electrical...

I got a shark-bite-like 1/2 ball valve. I need to cut into a copper line to place this in. The ball valve take 1 1/2 inch of pipe in each side and the ball valve in 3 3/4 inches long, so math tells me that if I remove 3/4" of copper pipe, the ball valve should fit perfectly. BUT, the way these...

Every winter the pipe outside my home that goes to the hose, leaks. I drain the pipe before winter, but the ball valve that is inside the house lets a dribble of water through, even though it is closed and after a winter of expanding and contracting with water in it, it leaks. So I am unable to...

We recently had our bathroom redone and the plumber put in a new baseboard which looks great. I now want to replace the two baseboards in my kitchen. What is the process? Do I need to "drain" the system and then refill it? How do I do this? How will I remove the old ones? Do I cut the copper...

I have a plumber redoing my bathroom. I noticed that instead of using copper tubing, he is using plastic. There is red and blue plastic tubes for both the sink and the shower. I see that he has used that orange stuff that I have used in the past for hydronic heating tubes to connect up the...

I am putting in a wood floor in my dining room. The baseboard radiator is too low to the floor for me to slide the new flooring under it. Someone recommended that I detach the radiator from the wall, push it up an inch or two, and reattach it. I started doing this, but the inlet copper pipe into...

I am a neophyte at soldering. I am building a manifold which consists of 3/4 copper tubing and cutoff valves. I am having trouble with one solder joint. All the rest seem to test out under pressure. It is where one of the cutoff valves connects to the 3/4 tubing. I have been heating the valve...

I have a old stone house which is about 90 years old and is made from the stones that were in a old stone wall which runs on our property. The living room has cheap wood paneling which has been painted white, perhaps covering the original plaster and lathe walls. Needless to say, the house is...

I am installing underfloor heating in a few rooms. Coming from the oil burner I have a two 3/4" copper pipes running, one supply and one return. Coming off of these pipes I will have three separate runs to PEX tubing, one for each room. I want to be able to control how much water (and thus heat)...

I am putting in a radiant floor in NJ and have laid all the PEX tubing and am putting down the hardwood now. My oil burner system is slightly complex and has 6 zones in it. After much discussion with my floor supplier, we decided that I should hire a plumber to hook the thing into my heating...

I just put in 300 feet of PEX tubing for underfloor heating. Just to be sure I did n't screw it up, I ordered a pressure test kit from the PEX supplier which I then assembled. I pumped the PEX tubing system up to 20 lbs of pressure. I found that over an hour it lost 10 lbs. Then it lost a...

This is a simple minded question, but I am a simple guy. I am putting in hydroponic underfloor heating. I finished running the PEX and now I need to run 3/4" copper tubing back to the boilder room, before I call in the plumber to hook the baby up to the furnace. It is about a 25 foot run. The...

Two questions: 1) should the horizontal pipe coming from a trap be angled down? 2) what height must the "fake gas valve" be at? Should it be higher that the bottom of the sink? Can it be lower than this? One more thing. I am going to set the toilet today. What should I use on the...

While trying to trace some electrical wires in my basement bathroom, I removed a ceiling access panel. It was covered with rust dust. Looking up, and this is below my main bathroom, I noticed a large cast iron pipe (mybe 6 or 8 " across) with a cast iron stopper or end. This end is where the...

I have been trying to get my plumber here to move some pipes, and I left a message for him on Sunday, but here it is Tuesday afternoon, and still no call back. So I guess I need to do it on my own. I have a 1/2" copper water pipe running along a wall, and ending in a 90 degree turn out and then...

I have a PVC drain that I need to change because of the new lavatory sink base that is going in. Is seems that many of the 90 degree joints are "glued in" place. Thus, I cannot simply turn the joint into the config that I need. Is there some type of solvent to get those joints to release? Or do...