What the Flagnard? Install a Shut-Off Valve on a Pressurized Copper Water Line.

[TheBlackAdder]

.

.

[usonian]

1. Oh, to find a copper water line.

I learned to solder at a very early age. Just tinned some wires tonight.
I really hate plastic.

[Hotler]

2. That's cool, pricey, but cool.

Thanks for sharing.

[Emile]

3. Pretty cool, but over two hundred bucks.

[Chainfire]

4. As a retired plumber, I admit that is pretty cool. In some instances the $200.00 cost would

be well justified. I have had to freeze sections of water pipe in order to install a valve in a system that could not be shut down without massive disruptions; it is very time consuming. For the homeowner, the easier and cheaper process would generally be to shut off the water at the utility connection (meter box) and use compression fittings to accomplish the same thing. With a well pump supply, if nothing else, you could always turn off the power to the pump and bleed the pressure off.

Several times in my career, I had to do what we called the "kamikaze" technique, in order to install a valve under full pressure. It can be done, but you and the surrounding area get a real bath in the process; not something done inside your customer's home.

[ProfessorGAC]

5. Interesting!

How did you freeze the line?
And, we're you worried about expansion pulling other fittings loose?
Our manufacturing sites would sometimes freeze a line to stop a leak, but these were lines that had innocuous materials that were either nonaqueous or had little enough water that they shrank upon freezing, not expanded.
One exception was a very dangerous chemical where stopping a leak right now was more important than worrying about pipe integrity. But, it didn't expand on freezing either.
It's a cool approach so I'm curious how you did it.

[Chainfire]

6. There are commercial pipe freezing units available but I built a wooden box that would cover about

3 feet of the pipe that needed a valve installed so I could shut down a section to fix a leak. I filled the box with dry ice and waited until it frosted over. I knew it was frozen when the small leak stopped. The last time I did it was on a commercial hydronic heating system, to shut it down to fix a leak would have put the building out of heat for half a day. If I had shut down the system, it would have broken loose 50 years of crud in the lines and then purging the system would have been labor intensive. When freezing the pipe, the ice was free to expand in both directions, so bursting was not an issue. Fixing that leak would not have justified the cost of a commercial freezing kit.

https://www.zoro.com/wheeler-rex-pipe-freeze-kit-38-to-2-38-cap-15-pc-1755/i/G4820374/?msclkid=5ec36018f3d91132daeb04c00f752a41&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=text_rlsa_dsa_na_na_shopping%20feed%20priority%20skus&utm_term=Pipes%20Valves%20%26%20Fittings&utm_content=Top%20100k%20Impression%20Products&gclid=5ec36018f3d91132daeb04c00f752a41&gclsrc=3p.ds

[ProfessorGAC]

7. Thanks

I was going to guess dry ice.
In the environments in which I worked, we always had access to liquid nitrogen. When it's purchased by the tank truck, it's cheaper than dry ice, too.
Yeah, the freezing a small section makes sense that there was room to push water behind & ahead out of the way. Probably only added a few tenths of a psig to the system that way.
Thanks, again.