This is a tool I dreamed up for measuring water pressure around the house.
Find out where I had good or bad pressure. I put a little twist in it, let me show you
that. To make a pressure gauge is not very difficult.
All you need is the gauge and some way to attach it.
Pressure is interesting to know, especially if you have a multi-story house.
Let me show you something else more interesting. This little valve back here.
I can measure the dynamic pressure at different locations.
It does not have any absolute meaning, but you can compare it to other things and give
you a lot of information. Let me show you that.
Let's see what it looks like with the dynamic valve open.
Looks like about 21 PSI. It's hard to see, it's awfully bright out
here. When I turn on the valve in the back to get
the dynamic pressure it drops down to about 18-19 PSI.
It give me an idea of the friction in the pipe.
Let's go look at some others. Here's another faucet in the back of the house.
It is also around 21 PSI. Open it up and see what happens.
It only drops down to 20 PSI. It does not have as much loss as the one in
the front of the house. This is up 1 story higher.
Call it 17.5 or something like that. What happens when we open the dynamic pressure
valve? And it drops down to 15 or 15.5 PSI.
Let's see what this one does. This one is from a 2 inch line that comes
from the city. Let's see how much it varies.
It went from 10 to stabilizing about 9. Not unexpected.
Let's go over how I made this. I got a gauge. It goes from 0 to 40 PSI or
0 to 3 Kgs/cm^2 You need to get what is applicable to your
area. I've lived in houses with pressures closer
to 80 PSI. For here this one is adequate.
Then, I needed an adapter to go from the gauge to a 1/2 standard pipe.
My hardware store did not have one so I had to make one.
My guess is your store would have one. Just an adapter from gauge to 1/2 in standard.
This is a 1/2 inch adapter from a water filter. This is where the water filter was tapped
out. This is usually used between the wall (supply)
and the sink or where ever you are tapping from.
Just a water filter tap. This tubing, you probably recognize it, it
is used to connect the wall tap to a sink or toilet.
So I can use this part to connect to a sink or toilet supply to check pressures there.
This is a plumbing spear. This is steel. Normally I'd use brass or stainless,
but this won't get wet very often or very long, so steel is adequate.
Then there's the tube. I can use it with the clamp to connect to faucets that don't have
a screw fitting. Just clamp them over the end of the faucet.
The last thing is the adapter for a garden house tap.
Whatever style you have. I can pretty much cover my whole house with
this setup. Can measure the pressure anywhere in the house.
You will need the equivalent. That's it.
That's how it's made. And we've seen how it's operated.
Just connect, measure the static pressure. Then measure the dynamic pressure.
The hole here is roughly 1/2 the area of the flex tube inside diameter.
I'm getting about half the flow when I check dynamic pressure.
So what does the difference between static and dynamic pressures tell us?
In 1 case I had 15 of these in a short distance. And it was killing the water pressure (flow).
I understand that these decrease flow by 1.5% to 1.7% each. So 10 would decrease flow by
17% or so and that's pretty significant. In another case, this is not as bad as another
I found. The other I threw away already. You can see these start to block up, and you can
find things like this: 1 bathroom is OK another is not.
The static pressure is the same in both, but the dynamic pressure shows you which are blocked.
Here we are at the washing machine. Getting adequate pressure but the pressure
under flow is very poor. I suspect it is the valve.
It probably has a tiny passage. I'm hoping that's what it is. That's the easiest
thing to fix. In this tangle of pipes, it leads down stairs
to 2 bathrooms. 1 to my left, 1 to my right.
We were having terrible problems in the 1 to my right.
The 1 on the left was OK. They are both from the same supply.
Turns out, we missed this first time around, back in this tangle.
I don't know if you can see it, but back here where my finger is there was an iron pipe
nipple that was rusted almost completely closed. The gauge helped us locate where this issue
was. This is an inexpensive tool that can give
you valuable information on plumbing things around your house. What is blocked, whether
you've got poor work in the past. It will help you track down bad valves.
Bottom line it provides valuable comparisons of different pressures / flows around your
house. Hope you found this interesting and useful
in your future plumbing projects.