How much flex in piping?

ChrisJ

I elongated a hole in the first floor as I need to get the pipe away from a semi-recently added wall. The issue is when I moved the runout it ended up slightly out of alignment with the hole and more towards another wall as this is in a corner.



I've included a picture of how much I need to get this to move as well as a drawing of the piping layout.



What would the pros do under these conditions?



I can pry it back to where I can thread the new pipe in and call it a day but I'm not sure if this is acceptable or not and if it will cause problems down the road.

Jamie Hall

Several thoughts...

If you can move the pipe enough -- and hold it there while you are threading the interfering pipe in -- and get it tight, then from the plumbing and heating standpoint you shouldn't have a problem; that is, it shouldn't leak.  However, it is almost sure to be a source of expansion noise, which can be somewhere between not a problem and a real headache.



Can you make that hold a tad bigger towards the wall?  I'd rather see you do that, and figure out a way to cover the hole...



Don't you hate it when things like that happen?!

icesailor

Holes:

Hag out the side of the new floor. What difference does it make.



Of more concern to me is that the old hole is shown on the top, and the fitting below the floor is no where near in alignment. Are you connecting to a radiator?

Unless you don't mind strange noises in the night, I would never let it rub on ANY wood.

Hap_Hazzard

You need a twisted nipple.

I had a situation where I had rebuilt the wall behind a radiator to add insulation and make it pretty so I didn't have to cover the radiator, and I thought I left enough room for the radiator to go back, but when I screwed the valve back onto the nipple and tried to make up the union, it was off by about 3/8". Oooooops!



So I took out the nipple, made a new one, slightly longer, then hacksawed through it at about a 15° angle, so if you put the pieces together and rotated them, you could get anything from 0 to 30 degrees of bend in the nipple.



Then I took the pieces, screwed one end into the valve, the other into the elbow beneath the floor, just loosely so I could rotate them to get the right angle, then mark them where they needed to line up.



Then I ground a 15-20° chamfer around the outer edges of both cut ends--just a chamfer, not a bevel--then clamped the pieces together and ran a bead all the way around with my little flux-core wirefeed welder. (It's like a little gasless MIG welder.) After it cooled down I cleaned off the slag and inspected the joint and tested for leaks.



The toughest part was screwing the twisted nipple into the elbow until it got tight, then bringing it the rest of the way around to get the angle right, but I got it in and lined it up without breaking it. Because it angles away from the wall, it makes the handwheel on the valve stick out a little, but that actually makes it easier to grip and turn without skinning a knuckle on the radiator.



Before you say, "but I'm not a welder," neither am I. I sucked at it when I was a mechanic. But we didn't have welders like this. They make welding easy, and I picked mine up for about $85.



If you want to give it a try, I can give you more details and show you some pictures.

BTOW2MMR

offset?

2 45`s with close or shoulder nipple?

ChrisJ

Cutting

I ended up cutting the floor more behind the pipe. Will just patch in with some plywood before putting the new floor down.



The pipe is still rubbing a little on the floor, but it shouldn't be enough to matter. If it does cause any noise I'll use the plastic milk carton trick.



This was actually related to my closet thread but I wanted to start a separate thread as it was a separate problem.



http://www.heatinghelp.com/forum-thread/144576/Oh-look-what-I-found-in-my-closet