Does direction matter in plumbing?

[DavidA1982]

I'm having the kitchen renovated. In one corner is a hugely ugly pipe (maybe 2 pipes) that has been boxed in with some equally ugly tiles. Ideally, I want a wall unit fitted right in that corner but the pipe and boxing in is in the way.

The stop cock is right under the plumbing for the kitchen sink (albeit below the floor). It seems that the mains supply goes through the stop cock, and then immediately up the ugly pipe to the bathroom. The picture tries to show this: the dark blue line is my understanding of where the mains supply runs; the light blue line shows the water supply for the downstairs tap and the outside tap. To be clear: the pipe represented by the light blue line passes in front of the ugly pipe represented by the dark blue line. The light-blue-line pipe is not teed of the dark-blue-line pipe.

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• DavidA1982
• 5 Mar 2015
• 1

My question is: can I shortcut the ugly pipe by simply connecting the downstairs tap plumbing directly to the mains pipe just after it leaves the stop cock? My proposal is shown in a gold dash line. If so, I could ask someone to cap off the ugly pipe in the ceiling void and remove it from the wall, making the kitchen fit a lot easier. However, I suspect that the answer is "no" because it would mean water going the other way through some of the plumbing.

The reason it is fairly urgent is shown in the second picture. If I can remove the pipe then I can tear out the ugly boxing in so the plasterer can finish off tomorrow. If, however, my proposal is nonsense then I need to box that ugly pipe back in again first thing in the morning before the plasterer starts. I have absolutely no idea what is happening with the pipes that run horizontally through the wall here (and I don't know what the rusty pipe in the wall on the right hand side in the first picture is, either)

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• DavidA1982
• 5 Mar 2015
• 1

 

[Nige F]

Don't panic leave the boxing and the ugly pipe - that's lead and it's the rising main . By the time you have a wall cupboard fitted above the base units you will only have a small area above the wall unit that has the marks where the boxing was that can be diy repaired later . Let the plasterer crack on . The plumbing can run the other way as you asked - in fact if you have a lead service pipe coming in to that underfloor stopcock, the whole lot want's removing and new plastic installed . BUT it could be brought in @ the front of the house and connected anew . You need to 1 ask your water supplier about lead replacement scheme . 2 find a good plumber , Does not need to be a Gas Safe engineer - they charge more for basic plumbing

 

[sooey]

Does not need to be a Gas Safe engineer - they charge more for basic plumbing icon_lol.gif

Naughty Nigel, fibbing about gas safe boys charging more. Yellow card for you.

 

[DavidA1982]

Don't panic leave the boxing and the ugly pipe - that's lead and it's the rising main . By the time you have a wall cupboard fitted above the base units you will only have a small area above the wall unit that has the marks where the boxing was that can be diy repaired later . Let the plasterer crack on . The plumbing can run the other way as you asked - in fact if you have a lead service pipe coming in to that underfloor stopcock, the whole lot want's removing and new plastic installed . BUT it could be brought in @ the front of the house and connected anew . You need to 1 ask your water supplier about lead replacement scheme . 2 find a good plumber , Does not need to be a Gas Safe engineer - they charge more for basic plumbing

Thanks. I've got a plumber but he's not a good one. I paid him to come in earlier this week and disconnect the sink and put it in the garden. He just shut off the isolation valves and unscrewed the waste - he left it all physically connected. Took me about an hour last night to unscrew the nuts on the valves to actually remove the sink. I also asked him to i) locate the stop cock; and ii) tell me how much work it would be to bypass that ugly lead pipe so we could remove it from the kitchen. He failed to find the stop cock (because he didn't take out the sink) and said that it would be a major job to bypass the lead pipe. The ceiling void was open at that time, and had he moved the sink he would have seen that it would actually have been a pretty straightforward job to bypass it. Getting access to that lead pipe from the room above is a nightmare as the bath is above it, and the plasterer has since put a ceiling up. Oh well.

Oh well.

 

[TeaTime]

So long as you know what each pipe is connected to (for certain) you can remove whatever you like.

What you don't want to do is to accidentally disconnect a supply to something, so just make sure you reconnect to the DCW main, ensuring that all supply pipe from it has not been left disconnected.