The Leak is Fixed

It took some time, but the leak is fixed and we can once again use the shower.  What an ordeal!  Last night after discovering the leak, I examined the connections, and there was indeed a crack in the plastic elbow.  It was right in the root of the thread.  Not having the time to take everything apart, and more importantly not wanting to, I was looking for a way to possibly patch the leak until I could get around to replumbing the line, especially because I don’t have a real good idea of how to fix it.  I ran to the store and looked thru the plumbing section for a solution, and bought some spray rubber, sort of like the flex seal commercials, and also some tape that was supposed to be for wrapping pipes to seal leaks.  My thought was to spray a few coats of the rubber over the crack, then wrap it.  Once wrapped, I would use a hole clamp to compress it all and keep it all tight against the surface of the elbow.

That plan sounds pretty good, but what actually happened was quitter different.  First, the spray said the rubber is dry to the touch in 15-30 minutes, and fully cured in 24 hours.  I put six coats on the elbow, one coat every 25 minutes.  Then I got it wrapped and clamped before bed so that Kris could take a shower in the morning before she went to work. 

At 5:15 AM I was up to turn the water back on.  It was only about 12 hours of curing time, but I thought with the extra coats, the tape, and the clamp I would be OK.  I was wrong.  After about 30 seconds or so of having the valves opened, I saw a drip coming down the pipe.  I was really hoping that it was leaking from someplace other than the elbow, but I was wrong.  So beginning at 5:30, I started developing a plan to get the pipe replaced.

After examining how the contractor plumbed it, I thought his method was really stupid.  First he put a couple of blocks behind the handle fixture (I still don’t know what that part of the faucet is called) to hold it in place.  Then, he had plastic elbows screwed into the brass fittings of the handle fixture, with a quick release on the opposite end.  This might have sounded good at the time, but since the elbow had about half an inch of clearance between it and the cement board used for the tile, there is no way to unscrew it from the fixture.  He did however solder a threaded end to the copper pipe to screw into the valve.  But, since I couldn’t remove the elbow, I was unable to unscrew the copper line as it would push up into the elbow as it was coming out of the valve, making the connection even tighter.

I ended up having to take a hand saw and cut the elbow in two pcs. to get it off.  Once I did that, the copper line came out really easily.  But the elbow, which was cracked about 50% of the way thru the thread, including the side facing the wall that the spray would not have covered, was now stuck in the brass fitting of the fixture.  And like the line for the spout, there was some sort of Loctite on the thread, so it wouldn’t just turn out of the fitting, and grabbing with a needle nose pliers just resulted in pulling off small chunks of PVC… another trip to the store to see what sort of a solution I could find to get the fitting out.  I was thinking that i need to get replacement copper pipe too so that whatever I decided to do with replumbing the line I would get a good fit. 

Luckily I found something like a screw tap (for removing screws that have had the head broken off) for broken pipe fittings.  There were actually several tools that did the same thing, so I bought them all figuring I would return whatever I didn’t need in order to prevent multiple trips back in case the first solution didn’t work.  Luckily the first thing I tried was able to work, though it took a little bit of doing since the ID of the plastic fitting was slightly undersize compared to the plug that was supposed to grab it.  I also decided to get some PVC line instead of using copper that is slightly flexible so that things didn’t need to line up 100%. 

Once I got the plastic fitting out, I was able to reassemble the line in about 30 minutes.  And the ease with which things went together was actually pretty amazing.  I have no idea why the contractor didn’t go that route in the first place given the confined space.  If anything goes wrong now (at least with the hot water line) I can get it fixed in 15 minutes.  So now I just need to figure out how to replace the cold water line, and redo the connection to the line going to the shower head without tearing a hole in the wall. 

Once I was done, I opened the valves and bingo!  No leaks.  I ran the tub faucet and the shower for about 5-10 minutes to make sure everything was good before noticing I still had water leaking into the kitchen.  I was stumped for a couple of minutes until I realized that the leak was coming from the drain.  After looking into it, I discovered that in assembling the drain cup to the pipe, I had cross threaded it, so my seal wasn’t tight.  Luckily that was an easy fix.  So by 2:00 PM, the leaks were all stopped and the tub was working once again.  I do however, still need to figure out how to replace the faucet handle without cutting a hole in the wall.  And I will need to now go back into the kitchen and fix the crack that has opened up from the water leaking.  It makes me mad after spending so much time working on fixing it in the first place, but at least I can sleep knowing that there is not water seeping into the walls and the tub won’t come crashing thru the ceiling.