Here's a question how do you safely solder in a wall or down in your floor joist bay without
catching the entire house on fire I've got a ton of really great tips that will help you out and i
think today's video is going to be helpful if you need to fix a water leak or if you want to swap
out all the plumbing in a bathroom for example and use something like pex a in this bathroom i
wanted to swap out all of the copper because it was getting ready to pin hole leak everywhere
that's a completely different story and i'm going to show you what that copper look like in a moment
but down here in this joist bay we have our pex a adapter fittings and look how close they are
to the drywall they're like literally an inch inch and a half off of the drywall now i know
i'm going to get a lot of questions about why i converted from pex a to copper but check this out
all these little green spots are potential leak points pinhole leak points for this
copper you can see it's labeled in red it's type m copper typically you should be using
type l it's much well not much but it's thicker than type m and there's a big problem in our area
with excessive amounts of chlorine in the water system which scary in and of itself but all the
copper is starting to corrode because it's over 40 years old and so i decided to swap
out all the copper in this bathroom with pex a everything that i could see i just pulled out and
this is evidence as to why that is a great idea these are pretty much all the tools that i use
for the copper part of this project this is the auto cut tool my favorite cutter and the reason
why is it's tiny look how small that is fits in tight spots definitely comes in handy when
your copper is like an inch off of the drywall so the reason why i like this and i'll show you it
just it just goes right on the pipe and then you collapse it and then there's also an arrow on here
this might be a little bit hard to see but the arrow is just the direction that you spin the
cutter so for example the arrow is pointing in this direction all i'm going to do is twist it
and then after about 10 twists you have a cut pipe now at this point some people make the mistake of
saying like okay i'm ready you know now i can go ahead and solder well you can't you got to do two
additional things you got to debur the inside and the outside of the copper pipe and for that you're
going to have to use a deburring tool now there are a lot of different ones out there but this
this one right here is my favorite again you can see how small it is it fits in tight spots and you
can deburr both the inside and the outside of the pipe with this so i always start with the inside
and i like to do this probably like you know 10 times everybody has their personal preference
but what happens is you debur the inside of the copper pipe and then you got to debur the outside
so there there's a cone on this side and then you can see the cone is the op is just really a
depression on this side so those little ridges then the bur the outside of the copper pipe
and the reason why this is done is because of a few different reasons you don't want any burrs on
this that could disrupt the flow inside the pipe disrupting flow can lead to more pinhole leaks
which everybody's getting in this area and also if if you have to put this together with another
fitting that has a rubber gasket you could potentially cut that so for example shark bites
are popular with di wires and if you slice through the o-ring and the shark bite because of the burr
now you're going to get a leak so always deburr the inside and the outside of the copper pipe
so this tool is great now the next thing you need to do is clean the outside of the pipe and you can
use something like emery cloth for that so this is just emery cloth you can get it any home store you
can go to a plumbing supply house personally i like supplyhouse.com too which is awesome
but let me go ahead and clean this now i'm just using one of these scrap pieces of type m
and i really want to make this shine so i just pinch the emery cloth between the pipe and my
thumb and my finger when you're down in a joist bay it's going to be a little bit harder to do
it this way obviously so you can take the cloth and move it back and forth but you really want
the copper to shine like so so this is nice and clean and normally i take this a step further
by using like a nylon grip pad but that can be a little bit overkill but you just want it to look
nice and shiny at this point now what you want to do is take your fitting so
you want to prep your fitting this is a pex a adapter for half inch pipe so for example
this just slides onto the copper pipe and now i can convert from my copper to my pex a
so pex a is different than pex b because it uses cold expansion i'm just going to use a wire brush
spin that like you know 10 15 times inside the fitting so we're just roughing this up
then i like to just make sure there's nothing in there so you want these to be clean you
don't want to touch these with your hand because you'll get oil off your hand onto the onto the
copper and in the fitting that's a no-go that's no bueno from there we're going to be using our
flux and this is od h2o water soluble flux and the reason why i recommend this
is because you don't have to flush out the system because it's water soluble so that's a huge deal
you don't want to have to flush out the system if at all possible especially residential
right and at home so some tips on this with flux when you open up this small container
there are salts in here and you want to use a clean acid brush the big deal is you want to
mix this up and you also want to look for any kind of contaminants inside the flux
so for example i have something like right there so i'm just going to wipe that off
so you want to mix up the flux and you want to look and have a creamy consistency like this
right and you don't need that much flux on the pipe so the first thing i'm going to do is
take my acid brush obviously if i'm down in the floor i can't spin the pipe so you have to get
around the pipe using the brush but you only need
like a half inch of flux on this and you don't need some crazy amount on there
the flux is going to pull the solder into the fitting alright so it just looks like this
and you want to make sure you don't have any hairs on the pipe from
your brush that's also very very important so when i go to set this down i'm actually
like if you if i was doing this and i wasn't down in the floor the pipe is going to be obviously
held in place for me but if i was holding the pipe like this i'm going to set it down on something
that supports it so that the flux isn't getting contaminated by whatever is on this plywood
so that's another tip but whenever we take our fitting here again i'm just going to spread some
flux in there i'm basically looking to coat the entire inside of that fitting all right
now what you do is you take this and because this for me was coming out of the joist i had to put my
fitting on so i put the fitting onto the pipe and then i just twist it and that helps make sure that
the flux is on the full surface of the fitting and the pipe now at this point you may think
you're done you're good to go if you want to make this look as clean as possible
there is an extra step super easy super straight forward so you just take a clean cloth like this
and you wipe off all the excess flux that's on the pipe and the fitting itself
because after all the flux you that's really just attracting basically through the solder
so you don't need any of the solder to be on the fitting on the outside of the fitting you want it
to be between the fitting and the pipe so i'm just wiping off all the excess flux here so at this
point i am ready to solder this together but then the question becomes how do you do that without
burning up the floor or the drywall and i didn't mention one thing that really helps out with this
process i'm going to show you that now this is what you need it's the od flame protector pad
it's been used a lot and you've probably seen it in many of my videos on instagram or
on youtube shorts but basically what this does is protect your drywall or wood from the flame
and prevent those materials from catching on fire so basically what i'm going to do
is to mimic what i did down in the floor joist i'm going to put a piece of half inch drywall
on the floor and then we'll put our flame protector pad over top of that so one thing i
forgot to mention whatever pipe you're using it's well it's helpful to bend the solder to that pipe
diameter so this is a little bit more than a half inch but
i was trying to bend this into a half inch bend and once this gets used up to right about there
i know that i've pretty much fed enough solder into the joint and i'm done and you can see how
close we are to the drywall i'm going to focus on the pipe first and then the fitting hopefully
you can see this but once i'm done with the soldering process look closely to see how the
solder changes from a dull gray to i'm sorry a shiny gray silver to a dull gray that's when it
starts to really set up so we'll focus on the pipe then the fitting and i'm going to go from below
okay
get that out of there so watch closely here
it's starting to change
so it's going from like silver to dull gray and that's how i know it's really starting to set up
so again i'm going to just hold this here
i'm not going to touch this for a few seconds and now what we'll do is we'll just wipe this off
and i'm okay having a little bit of a drip on the bottom there because that clearly indicates that
you know i have enough solder in that joint so let's go ahead and remove this
and again you can see that this isn't affected at all we'll get we'll actually
raise the camera up and we'll show you from above all in one shot that this is fine and
the lumber is okay too so we'll raise this up and you can see look everything is good
so no burning of any of the materials in this area which is terrific i probably should have
mentioned this tip at the beginning of the video but anytime you're working with a torch
and flame make sure that you have a bucket of water and a sponge to extinguish any fire
better yet use a fire extinguisher if you do have questions about the tools and materials
i use let me know in the comments i'm happy to help you out in any way and also if you're doing
a bathroom remodel and you want step-by-step help and you want to cut down on your cursing
during your project check out my courses over at homerepairtutor.com they're awesome and i
definitely guarantee you they'll help you out thanks for watching and we'll see in the comments