Are stainless steel braided supply lines really better?

Maybe check the water pressure with a max pressure logging gauge?

What about air/water hammer? That can break plumbing. It seems odd that would happen the same time every year though. Are you getting air into the system because you are shutting the water off?

After 3 or 4 failures of "Braided stainless" water heater connection hose leaks, I gave up on them and switched to the somewhat bendable "corrugated" stainless tubing connectors. The cheap rubber hose inside the braided stainless ones has little strength and eventually springs a leak. I use braid re-enforced rubber or plastic connections for plumbing fixtures and washing machines.

Are your braided stainless hoses actually bursting, or just springing a leak that easily flows through the braid? Is the stainless braid actually split?

If chemicals are affecting the internal hose, the braid will make sure you cannot see a problem developing. A more conventional hose would show the damage before it ruptures.

Is there a water heater inside these washers that could be raising the temp too much, causing pressures to exceed the hoses rating? An expansion tank could help if that is the case. Or, could there be a freezing situation?

Does your setup require flexible hoses or could the connection be made with rigid piping? If the only time you need to move the washing machine is when the hoses break, consider using rigid pipes.

It isn't that hard to find hose rated for well above 125 psi.

Be careful with those inexpensive "max pressure" gauges. They will often give you a false max reading.

By design, the red max pressure indicator is loose on the shaft so that it will stay at whatever reading the pin on the black needle pushes it up too. The "false max" can occur if there is any water hammer present in the system.

In some cases, the rapid movement of the black needle will actually *throw* the red needle to a higher pressure reading than ever existed. I've seen (and vidioed) the red needle being thrown up to the 120 range when the black needle never exceeded 90.

All, There’s a lot of GREAT ideas, suggestions, and input here. I will consider it all and make a list of questions to ask the Hobart tech. Bob F, wish I knew how to post a picture in this thread, clearly a burst! The end that goes under the appliance looks new whereas the end that connects to the water pipe is discolored. The tech explained that the metal braid had to give first because the rubber bursting would not cause the metal to tear. To answer a few of your questions: We are in central CA, no freezing temps. This break happens in the fall. No water hammer that I can tell, the system is quiet as a mouse. I will check the pressure gage, good suggestion. The hose is not bent anywhere. The tech and others swear its not the chemicals but they have been removed from under the sink where the breaks happen. For now. There is a 5 gallon water heater under the sink, but again, rarely used, maybe once a week. Doesn’t get very warm under the sink. Thanks again for all of your help! I will keep you posted what we decide to do and if it works beyond a year. Best, Lori

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I wonder if there could be a problem with dis-similar metals where the stainless meets the supply pipe, or maybe an electrical leakage in the washer which passes current through the stainless hose through to the plumbing system. It could also be something else with leakage to the water pipe which goes into the washer which might have it's own connection to ground. These problems could cause corrosion at the joint.

Bob, it's not like you, or Peter, to write like this. What is going on?

I have no clue what that is. It is not visible when I look at my post.

Class action lawsuit on Stainless Steel connector hoses.

It's posted in "base 64", which for some stupid reason or another is:

a: an option in many posting programs and b: somehow got turned on.

If your viweing program doesn't automatically recovert it back to standard text, there are ways to cut-and-paste or otherwise feed it into decoders, but 99 percent of the time it's not worth the effore.

base64 - encode / decode binary file as RFC 1341 MIME base64

DESCRIPTION The MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) specification (RFC 1341 and successors) defines a mechanism for encoding arbitrary binary information for transmission by electronic mail. Triplets of 8-bit octets are encoded as groups of four characters, each representing 6 bits of the source 24 bits. Only characters present in all variants of ASCII and EBCDIC are used, avoiding incompatibilities in other forms of encoding such as uuencode/uudecode.

It is thunderbird detecting an unicode character in your post and base64 encoding it. Annoying, to be sure, particuarly when not all readers support base64 encoding.

Whatever it is, I'm not smart enough to do something like that! Note: I'm taking your comment as a compliment, even if you intended it as a dig.

So did Bob or Peter say anything I should know?

Oh, here's Bob's post. I posted my question about what Bob said before I saw this.

Good questions.

This is bothersome. AFter maybe 10 leaks in the basement, each from a different source, I thought I had found and solved all of them. Maybe not. ;-(

Anything Bob says is worth the effort!! ;-)

But I think he replied to himself and this time I could read it.

There is one guy here who posts this way almost all the time.

(Seems to me, if I can learn to read script and italics, I should be able to learn to read this without a decoder.)

I have no idea what I might have done to cause this. Let me know if you see it again.