Repairing burst flexible copper

[toller]

I must not have drained my cottage pipes too well, because three of them burst. Two are rigid copper and easily accessable, but one is flexible copper where there is only 16" between the ground and the floor joists. I am not looking forward to it.

I have never worked on flexible copper before, but am not at all confident that it is still round. Will I have any problem sweating fitting on the it? Any great advice on this?

Is there anyway to mend the break? It is in a place where a leak will not do any damage, so I don't need 100% certainty; I can alway just cut out the mend if it doesn't work. I have fiberglass and epoxy; is that worth a try? Fiberglass won't be fun in that little space, but will be better than trying to replace the damaged section. Any other ideas?

thanks

I did everything the same as years before, except that after I drained, I closed the valves; figuring I could save myself a trip into the crawl space in Spring. I can't imagine where the water came from, but it did. Live and learn.

[Doug Miller]

Cut out the damaged section, and splice in a replacement using compression fittings.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Even better, splice in a piece of PEX and it will not burst as easily.

[ds549]

ive soldered in repair sections on soft copper .easy as hard copper

[maradcliff]

This sounds easy, but if the pipe froze, the copper expanded and the pipe is larger than it should be. It's often not possible to get a compression fitting on it, once it expanded. You may have to replace the whole section of flexible pipe. As for the rigid pipe, that too expands, but usually not as much. If you are able to get back where there was no water, you can often sweat there. I bought a house years ago that was all plumbed with flex pipe, and it had frozen I spent hours trying to patch the stuff, and finally just replaced everything with rigid copper. If you try to hammer a coupler on an expanded pipe, you are unlikely to get a good sweat joint. I also tried to flare the ends and use flare fittings. The problem there, the pieces wont slip on the pipe because the pipe is too large from being expanded.

[toller]

Thanks. I was debating whether to replace the whole section or just the broken spots; probably faster to do the whole section than fuss with expanded pipe.

[Doug Miller]

Like I said - cut out the damaged section.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?