Pipe Freezing Kits

[andybanner]

Good advice regarding the above...........

Pipe freezing kits are great, if you know the job in hand is going to be quick one and with no problems. (Yep right).

I needed to replace the main stop cock in my kitchen.
Froze the pipe, and continued to remove the old one, and fit the new one.
Pipes of slightly different size and lack of access later, the frozen water melted.
Mains pressure water up to about an inch all over the kitchen floor . until i managed to screw the tap into place.

My advice:

Buy a stop key and turn off the water outside the house.
Leave the freezing kit on the shelf in B&Q

 

[Just_back_from_the_pub]

Fair point, but in some cases there might be little alternative.

A few of weeks back I helped a friend instal a new bathroom into a flat that he has purchased from the council in East London. In the bathroom there are a series of boxed-in steel service pipes that run vertically from top to bottom. One of these pipes is teed off (and out of the box) to run horizontally (clipped to the wall) and provide a cold water feed to an old-style high-level WC cistern. Because we replaced this WC with a modern close coupled device we thought that being able to remove the rather unsightly feed pipe to the old cistern would be easy enough. Easy my *rse!

Because the supply is from a large water cistern, which sits on the roof of the building, you might think that it would be straightforward enough to arrange with the other tenants for us to turn off the supplying service- valve for the time it takes to cut off the feed pipe in the bathroom and blank off the tee. However one of the neighbours informed us that where this had been done previously - to a different cistern supplying a different set of flats - the service-valve had jammed when turned off and had shut down the water for a few hours making the individual extremely unpopular. The guy was also informed by the council that he had been trespassing in an area that was out-of-bounds to non-council staff!

Anyway, the point is what do you do in this sort of situation? The council seem totally unprepared to come round and turn off the valve just because some guy wants to refurbish his flat. So you are left with no alternative but to either retain the unsightly pipe or use a freezing-kit around the supply pipe. Also I don't think standard kits will deal with steel pipes? Anyway the problem is yet to be resolved!

 

[SparkyTris]

Why not do this:
Wait for the summer, when the water in the pipes won't be quite so cold
Get a load of rags, spread them over the floor. Have minions standing by to wring out rags & replace, and buckets standing by, and get goggles and oilskins.
Then do the work on a "live" pipe. All you need to do is get a tee in the pipe, so you could have a check-valve-and Tee all fabricated ready to go! Obviously you'd have to use compression fittings, but then it's a steel pipe so you'd be using them anyway.

I've had to do similar on a trawler on more than one occasion (and that was with a 3" pipe and seawater!, and you see them doing it in submarine flicks the whole time!

 

[planenut]

In view of that advice; How high up, i.e. what storey, is this flat?

 

[PTH]

SparkyT : compression fittings on steel?
Pipe freezing is ok, but must be really well planned - have watched 6" high temperature (150 deg.C) district heting mains frozen - it did take a tanker full of liquid nitrogen and several hours but it can be done. I haven't tried the kits but I wouldn't think they could hold for more than a few minutes, ie. not long enough to cut a thread on a steel pipe, but enough to get a compression valve on a copper service.

 

[SparkyTris]

SparkyT : compression fittings on steel?

Well you know what I mean. If it ain't alloyed, it's compression.

I agree the aerosol kits are a bit crummy. I think they are designed for work on microbore CH circuits. They do work quite well on 10mm "brake-pipe".

 

[kevplumb]

they work on 3/4"" steel
if you know how

 

[Just_back_from_the_pub]

Sorry guys for being a bit late back to the screen.

SparkyTris: Don’t quite see what you are getting at when you say," All you need to do is get a tee in the pipe, so you could have a check-valve-and Tee all fabricated ready to go!". What would the check-valve be used for? There is already a tee in place with with the feed pipe coming out horizontally. As you say this could be disconnected “live” and then a blanking cap quickly screwed in so effectively the tee becomes a coupler. Perhaps I should point out that this cistern fed pipe no longer supplies any item in the said flat as everything is now taken directly from the mains. Maybe we could say that the remaining length of horizontal pipe that forerly fed the old WC cistern is now a deadleg and that the council should be responsble for its removal? Anyway, your solution does sound like great fun! Even more so on a trawler!

Planenut: It is a maisonette flat and the bathroom is on the first floor of a six storey building.

PTH: I must agree that the propect of using a basic pipe-freezing kit is a bit hairy!

Kevplumb: They work on 3/4"" steel if you know how? Well spill the beans Kev…I’m all ears, or should that be eyes?

 

[kevplumb]

tape the ends of the jacket to seal them to the pipe and use the big cans

have done it and lived to tell the tale

 

[Just_back_from_the_pub]

tape the ends of the jacket to seal them to the pipe and use the big cans

have done it and lived to tell the tale

Kev, without wishing to appear a complete halfwit, what is the jacket and what are big cans ?

 

[kevplumb]

jacket is the bit you put round the pipe

cans are what you freeze it with

 

[Just_back_from_the_pub]

jacket is the bit you put round the pipe

cans are what you freeze it with

Ah, right, I see, thanks. Okay, can you recommend a kit that would be up to doing this kind of application, Kev? Or will any old generic freezer do the job?

 

[kevplumb]

personally for peace of mind i'd hire an electric freezer

you can leave it on ad infinitum if things go wrong

cans are ok if the job is straightforward

 

[Just_back_from_the_pub]

Right, I will pass this on to the mate. Good advice once again, Kev...thanks a lot!

 

[dabaldie]

personally for peace of mind i'd hire an electric freezer

comet sell them for £60 these days.. difficult to wrap around the pipe tho....