Have been investigating a small leak and found a suspect Cuprofit elbow
> in a really unaccessible place. Supplies a new towel rail feed and the
> leak can be seen from the kitchen below when view thro a downlight
> opening. The elbow turns up the wall right on the line of a joist and
> the floor in the bathroom is fully finished (no-more-ply/UFH/tiles) >
> Will Fernox cure this? Pipe is not p**sing water but is dripping at a
> constant rate. How does the Fernox work and is there a limit to what it > can do?
I doubt very much the (electric) UFH actually run right up against the pipework.
1 - You might be able to remove the floor tile Take a stanley knife with HD blade. Run it along the grout repeatedly until all gone. Take the widest paint scraper you can find. Insert it part way into the grout line. Perhaps some tape on the back side to prevent tile damage. Gently lever the tile up. Expose the area around the pipe with care. Replace fittings as necessary, perhaps a solder connection and use push-fit somewhere more accessible.
2 - It may be possible to replace it from below. Remove part of the ceiling, erode the floorboard around the pipe away using a long side-cutting drill bit or a small end-mill bit in a drill. Then replace as before.
3 - Abandon existing piping & route new. Route from the room behind - sink pipe into the wall, through the wall into the towel rail.
4 - Abandon wet heating and use electric heating. If the radiator is large and particularly if white you can probably get a 150-250-350W element in there. Doesn't cost that much to run even if it is used to stop the room cooling off much.
It's times like this that a digital photo of electrical installs is worth its weight in gold :-)
Try and refit the existing joint entirely from below: You can buy 600x600mm or similar pieces of plasterboard from DIY stores (full sheet doesn't cost much), might be very simple to do it "from below" and just put a new piece of plasterboard. Feather the old plasterboard by sanding it, scrim tape, plaster over and sand smooth, repeat with a very fine filler, repaint ceiling for =A312 tin and done.
I'd examine the joint from below first. You may find you just need to break any seal around the pipes & find someone has cut the pipe too short so it isn't fully seating in the elbow.
Forget "leak stoppers", fix the problem properly or you could end up with dry rot, smells, downstairs water damage when you are away and so on.
IMO this is a fine example of how sh** any pushfit system is when used on central heating pipework. Yes it may be fine for a year or two but then start to get odd drips here and there where pipes expand and contract in the fittings. Add to that the dirt in the system then you are onto a sure fire leaking system.
Im sure a lot of keen diyers like me go by the motto 'if a jobs worth doing, its worth doing right' but then there are a lot who just get a job done quick and store up problem for a few years time. Surely in this case the only solution is to rip out all the pushfit and replace with soldered copper!?
I just had a chat on Friday with the heating engineer who will be putting in our boiler - we're running all of the pipework for the CH heating system and installing radiators and whatnot and he's doing the gas installation and the commissioning.
He's recommended running most of the CH pipework in plastic (apart from near the boiler) with accessible manifolds, which sounded fairly sensible, but what surprised me was that he said "you shouldn't put compression fittings under the floor, they should all be soldered" and then later went on to say "for the joint between the plastic pipe under the floor and the copper tail coming up to the radiator, use a polypipe pushfit elbow".
To my mind a compression elbow would be a better choice for that joint.
I presume if a pushfit plastic system is pressure tested then it will be fine in years to come?
I fitted Hep2O piping and fittings, more than 20 years ago, into a new exte nsion and which bridged between copper CH and DH/C piping in the undercroft and copper piping in the first-floor services. In that time there hasn't b een a suggestion of leak from any of the Wavin polybutylene product.
I used it again recently in fitting out a walk-in shower facility, again co nnecting an 'improved' similar product. This did leak, and I traced ( and c orrected ) this to an inadequate full 'push'. It hasn't leaked again, in ov er a year.
It was far easier and cheaper for me to install than copper.
I consider I'm at greater risk from frost/freezing damage to copper piping than I am from modern plastic systems failure - and note that Wavin/HEP2O o ffer a 50-year product guarantee - and I've put my money where my mouf is.. ...
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