HOW TO USE PRESSFIT ON COPPER PIPE – HOW TO SOLDER COPPER PIPE. Solder vs Crimp. Mapress Copper. HOW TO DO PLUMBING. Why you would solder copper pipe. So, I have soldered copper pipe now for almost 30 years, and there’s lots of pluses and there’s lots of minuses with soldering. But I’ve now moved on to press, press fitting. So, I’m going to have a look at that, I’m going to try to answer some questions that people put in the groups as well. So, one of the questions is, will it seal with no oaring on press fit? So I’m gonna look at that as well, and I’m going to try and, I’ll find out, we’ll find out. I’ll pipe a fitting up, and we’ll take the o rings out and we’ll crimp it with the o rings in, and then we’ll see if it fails so yeah, let’s have a look now.
Novopress Geberit
The first thing I’m gonna do is, I’ve put some clips on here, and I’m gonna solder an elbow on there. So we’ve got us elbow, we’ve gotta clean it up to start with, make sure that’s nice and clean. Get us pipe, clean this pipe up, get another piece of pipe, clean that up, on there. So I just put some flocks on the pipe, I always put a little dab in the fitting just the tiniest bit, get that fitting on there, and then if we get us other but of pipe, there, you notice I try not to put too much, too much on. And then we need a mat now, to go behind there, so we’ll just get a soldering mat. And then we’ll just get us blow lamp and solder.
Try and get your blow lamp to a small flame really, you don’t want a big, you don’t want it big like that. Just a small flame. And then, try and point that away from the mat if you can. You can see there some of the flux is running down, we probably put a bit too much on there really. And then that’s soldering, so we’ll leave that now for a little while just to cool down. If we don’t let it cool down then the fitting can actually crack, so I’m just gonna leave that for a few minutes. So quite a lot of fumes came off on that then, and this room now does, it does smell of soldering. Also we’d have to be careful with fire alarms and things like that if we’re gonna be soldering.
We’d then get a cloth and we’d clean this off best we can, then if we have a look on the back of there, I’ve put the soldering from the back and it’s run down the pipe. So you can try and clean that off best you can, some people use like a drill end et cetera to do it, but normally that’d be on the back of the pipe and you wouldn’t see that.
Now well look at press fitting. So again, we’ll put us piece of pipe on. This time we don’t really need to clean it up, if its newish pipe and if it’s got a decent edge on there. We get us press fitting, so if you have a look at them, they’ve got an oaring inside. A lot of people mention about o rings, now bearing in mind that almost every boiler we install has got hundreds of o rings in nowadays. And o rings in most commercial places, hospital et cetera, we’re not allowed to use blow lamps so we would have to press anyway, and so one of the questions people ask is ‘are they as reliable as soldering?’ I think they are. They’ve proven for around 50 years I believe. If I’m wrong, please add it in the comments below but I believe they’ve been out now for about 50 years. So we’ve just put this fitting on, slide it on as easy as that. Now you can get a gauge, so some manufacturers have a gauge, and you can mark this fitting with your gauge, and then you just know that the fitting is fully on so ill just show you that now.
So we can see that I’ve put a line on, so we know when we put this fitting in, we know that it’s in, we know that it’s not dropped out. When it’s in place, I would actually try as much as possible to press these off but you can just as easily press them in place. So just get a longer piece of pipe for that. So again we would mark that piece of pipe and then when we look at this press gun, this one is 15 mil, its a little bit awkward to see cause it’s worn off. We also have jaws, we have different jaws. This one, that’s a 22 mm jaw. If we have to change the jaw, all we need to on this Hilti machine, we just turn this, push this pin in, turn it, and very easily, very very easy indeed. And that’s it. So now we want to press this fitting again. Just double check its all in and it’s not dropped out, and we just put us machine on. If you have a look in there it’s got some little imprints there, don’t know if you can see that on camera, but that goes round that part of the fitting there. We just put that on and then very easily.
And we just press that until it stops. And then that fitting now is all pressed on. And then same again with this one. And that’s it, that’s how easy it is to use press fit, there’s no mess, there’s no muck going into your pipe, there’s no risk of fire, there are no fumes. It’s just so much easier. What I’ll do now is I’ll pipe this up, I’ll take the oaring out, we’ll use a new fitting but we’ll take the o ring out and we’ll pipe it up now.
