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This is Andrew Twidwell, owner of abt plumbing, electric, electric heating and air once again with the show you got this to show DIY do’s and don’ts and I flubbed the intro.
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You did flub the company name because actually it’s abt plumbing, electric, heat and air.
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Yeah, we were just we just had this conversation with one of our marketing people like it’s heat and air, not HVAC. We’re trying to get this right. So my brains a little a little wonky right now. But anyway, hi, Rosalie.
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Hey, I heard you got some weather.
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We got some weather. Yeah, we’re recording this on Wednesday. So everybody has been experiencing the lovely Tuesday that we all had up here where the unexpected low snow occurred. And everybody got stuck, and including quite a few of our technicians took them two or three hours to get down the hill, if they could get down the hill, and some of them just left their trucks. And we’re dealing with those today. So yeah, it’s once again, the joys of living in this this year, foothills. It’s kind of fun, kind of exciting. But at this point, I think we’re all kind of done. It is what we’re recording this on March 29. And it was snowing on March 28. So we usually get a little snow but wow, that was that was That was impressive. Yesterday
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was unexpected, for sure. I mean, I saw the videos and I was like what you know. And then of course, we saw DTS video being stuck at McKnight. And so from my experience, when I lived in the snow country, there was always a bad sign if you were driving up 49 towards Grass Valley, and you had snow at midnight, because that’s just desert. That’s a bad that’s a bad sign. Because, you know, for me and like you too, I was on banner. So if I had problems that McKnight it was almost like, give it up, you’re not gonna get up, you’re not gonna get help. You’re not gonna give
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it if it wasn’t sticking, even if you’re just getting the snow rain mix there. You know, when you live on banner, you’re like, oh, no, it’s gonna be
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it’s never gonna get home. Never gonna get home. i It’s funny too, because I was talking to Didi about because you know, you, me and her all lived in that area. And so many, many years. Yes. So I was telling her how the first year that I had, I traded out my all wheel drive for a four door sedan. And I said, you have to get the right speed going up old Tunnel Road. And I more than once, like, I would be, you know, okay, it’s free, it’s clear, I got a haul but right now and get up and keep my momentum going. And more than once, I had to do a quick turnaround in the middle of the road and to prevent getting an accident because people would start to go up. And then for some reason, as they’re proceeding up a hill, they put on the brakes. And the second they would do that, I would be like, Okay, we’re all gonna lose control, right? So more than once I had to like flip around in the middle of my old tunnel and whatever that old lava banner cap more than once, I’d spend myself out and turn myself back down. Go back around town and try it again. Because once you’re moving uphill, don’t put on your brakes. Keep going
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to your friend to a certain degree. Yeah.
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You know, but the white knuckling I mean the white knuckling of that and an age and you know, even having a four wheel drive isn’t always the answer, because I’ve told the story million times, but I had that little CRV and I would just go perfect vehicle for snow. And I would pass time and time again. There’ll be Ford explorers in ditches on Pfanner because they thought therefore will drive could manage whatever. And they’re my little four cylinder all wheel drive is like, like no problem.
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It’s all about the tires. We had a neighbor when we lived up on Boehner Mountain Lookout that had a Toyota Prius, an old Toyota Prius, that she put snow tires on every year. Really good snow tires. And she did find and they like, meanwhile, jacked up. big ol four by fours would come up with some semi bald tires and they’re going off the side of the road. And the tires are key. They’re more important than four wheel drive. taller. time ago.
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totally scary.
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It happened one time. When we first started abt and we had a all wheel drive minivan, which was amazing. The Toyota minivan was amazing. But the tires were starting to go on it. And we thought we could get you know another season because was the end of the season. We didn’t expect any more snow and I’m like, it’ll be fine. And then of course it gets stuck with two little kids in the back and yeah, it’s all my fault. So yeah, and some nice person drove them home. And I got like, I got chewed out but yeah, yeah, don’t wait to get don’t wait to change tires. Get good tires when it’s snow and yeah, and then we may get some more snow I mean We actually were talking it’s Thursday, or it’s Wednesday today, and, and there may be more snow today. So, by the time we’re, yeah, by the time you hear this, we may have had another Snowmageddon. I don’t know.
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I hope not crazy. I hope not. I mean, I can’t, I can’t complain too much. We just have rain, of course, where I’m at. And it’s not, like right now, there’s actually a break. And I’m thinking to myself, this would be a good time to take the dog out. But I’m, I’m in, I’m otherwise engaged. But I have a friend coming out next week for about five days from Florida. And I said, Do you have jackets, they’re like, you might want to pack a jacket, because I don’t really live in
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Florida. You bring a jacket when you go inside, so it’s usually colder inside.
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I hope. I hope that there’s jacket. So I was like, so you might want to bring some winter clothes, because I don’t know what it’s gonna be like next week. But fingers crossed, fingers crossed, we’ll see.
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Yeah, it’s it’s crazy. So yeah, so this is not a segue into our show. We’re not really talking about whether about DIY do’s and don’ts other than you know, be careful. Be careful, don’t don’t do winterize things just yet. But we did have this this list, I have this list of DIY do’s and don’ts from website. And it brought up some good stuff last week, and we didn’t finish the list. So I’m carry on with that theme again, because it is DIY do’s and don’ts. So and we had some good ones like don’t wrench too hard on
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things. That was the one that that was the one I think that stuck for me. And that was a little isolated clip, I was able to kind of put out there on social media, because I was like, How many times have I I’m not even that strong? And I’ve done that like, oh, another couple of cranks? I’ll do and it’s like, oh, or you could have just totally weakened the whole system system. So
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no, no, it’s know what the seal is. And yeah, you don’t necessarily have to do as things as tight as you think you’d have to. So anyway, so we get some more stuff. So this is a good one, too. I’ve seen people do this. And I have to admit, I’ve done it myself. And that’s not turning the water off. When you’re working on plumbing. It’s kind of like not turning the power off when you’re working on electricity. You can get a little I don’t want to say the word. But anyway, you can get a little like, Yep, I can do this. And really sure of yourself. And next thing, you know, like we’ve pointed out, if you’ve ever dropped a gallon of water or gallon of milk on the floor, what a big puddle that makes. Imagine that happening three to 10 times every minute when that water line is open. So you can get 10 gallons per minute out of a half inch line eight to 10 gallons a minute out of a half inch line. And I remember doing that, Oh, God was probably like 22. And I was working on a commercial building. And I didn’t want to burn the building down, I just had to replace hose bib on the outside of the building. And then I’m like, I’d done it with half inch lines. And this was a three quarter Mike won’t be that big of a difference. Oh my gosh, I took the biggest shower. And that that thing that took me It probably took me about a half an hour to put that valve back in. And I was drenched. And it was not a warm day for shows in San Francisco. So it was only like 50s. But yeah, I definitely learned my lesson on that one. So turn the water off. If you’re going to be working on plumbing, turn the water off. And if you don’t know where your water shut off is, you should definitely do that. Now. If you if you’re thinking about it, and you’re listening to this, go find out where your water shutoff is, and make sure that it actually works. One of the things that we find a lot of times is old gate valves. And that’s the one where it has the round handle. They’re typically like a red and white handle those things, they’ll last about 20 years. But more than likely, if you’ve got a gate valve, it’s been 20 years because we stopped pretty much stopped using them about 2530 years ago. So if you’ve got a gate valve, what happens in this gate valve is there’s literally a gate that raises and lowers kind of like a gate inside of a castle if you will, or a roll up garage, you know, it pulls this gate up by the threads. As you twist it literally pulls this gate up and then pushes the gate back down. Those threads will crack and typically happens on the off side. But you might want to exercise and see if it actually works. Just so you know that it works because you want to know if the thing works when you have when an emergency arises. So know where your shut off is and turn the water off if you’re going to work on on your plumbing. If it’s if you’re working on a fixture if you’re working on say a faucet or your toilet, there’s going to be a valve at the fixture itself. Turn that off. And that’s another good thing. Another good valve To exercise, you want to be able to make sure that things are working when you when you need them. And if you’ve got a house that’s 3040 50 years old, that the plumbing was done, you know, it’s original, those valves could start to be problematic. Make sure they’re functioning, make sure you can actually turn it off without a wrench, that sort of thing. So you want to make sure you can actually turn the water off, and if you are working in it for tomorrow. Oh, there we go right into using too much muscle on a stuck, stuck shutoff valve. sink and toilet shutoff valves tend to cease when operated for long periods of time. So we’ve kind of segwayed into that. If you can’t turn the knob by hand, don’t think you can solve the problem by applying more muscle. And this is true, you can not only break the valve, but you can break the knob and then you’re kind of stuck. So if you need a wrench to actually turn it, because the things turned on so tight, so tight. And I’m gonna give a little caveat to this one. If, if you if it’s just that first little bit, you could take a wrench and just kind of crack it a little bit, you should be fine. If you’ve got a really wrench on it with a wrench that you need a new valve, it’s time to replace it. And but be careful with valves because they can be problematic in the end, just remember why they’re there. They’re there for emergencies, you want to be able to shut things off, right. This other thing, so some of the old valves. When we’ve got like the gate valves or an old hose bib, you’ve got this kind of a hex net, where the stem goes through that the handles attached to and sometimes water will leak out of that inside of that little nut is called packing material. A lot of times, the way you can fix that is simply tightening it up a little bit, that net will slowly loosen up, especially on garden valves and hose bibs, because we use those quite often. As you open the valve, that knot can loosen up a little bit and as you tighten it down, it will just sit and you open it up again and loosen up a little bit more. And eventually you get water spring out of it. If you simply take a pair of crack a crescent wrench or a pair of a crescent wrench, and just give that a little tight, little tightening. It’ll tighten the packing. And you won’t have that leak. But again, you don’t want to over tighten it because I’ve seen people retched really hard on those and that nut can crack. So it’s literally just like hand tight, maybe a quarter half turn pass, passed hand tight. Make sense?
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make sense to me.
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You’re awfully quiet today. Especially I’m
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just listening to you talk about what not to do. And I’m thinking about all the times I probably have, you know, dove into do not territory. So I’m just kind of going through all the things I had all the oops, moments that I
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Yeah. Yeah, not turning the water off can be a big one.
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Oh, I can imagine. Well, I mean, you know this already. But so speaking of Florida, Frank coming from Florida, so friend was in the path of the hurricane that happened last fall last September, I think it was. And I mean, I have, you know, so it was very stressful for me, kind of trying to check in and be we stay connected. But anyway, so the damage from the hurricane. Most of the folks that were affected, it wasn’t that the winds blew down their house, like, you know, you might expect it was that water levels rose and had nowhere to go. And so my friend’s house was basically destroyed because water got in, and it doesn’t take hardly any water. So when you’re talking about these things about making sure you turn off the water and things like that. I mean, we you, you’ve said it so many times, I don’t want to keep repeating it, but the damage that water can do so quickly, is so permanent. And I have another friend in Florida, that is just refinishing their rebuilds, you know, they were able to take the house down to the studs, but they had to basically rebuild from the, you know, from the framing, because the water sat in their house for I don’t know how long it was, but any amount of water sitting is never going to be good for you. So I think he thinks
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12 to 24 hours is pretty much the limit that you want, after 12 to 24 hours. And don’t quote me on this, but it’s somewhere in that neighborhood. It happens really fast. Multiple sports start to start to propagate right? And so yeah, you definitely want to be careful about leaving water and turning the water off when you’re when you’re running water. And I was actually talking to a friend who owns a Water Restoration company and we’re talking about a They’re testing for spores. And he was like, yeah, there’s always spores, there’s always, there’s always mold spores everywhere. So if you test for them, they’re going to be they’re all they need as little moisture. So, and that’s the thing, they’re always they’re omnipresent, they’re always there, all they need is immediate to, to, for them to grow. And that media is water, right, you get a little moisture, and they start to take off. So 12 to 24 hours, if you don’t catch it by then it’s pretty much too late, you’re ripping it out, you’re throwing it out, you know, the drywall, but any soft material inside the house is gone. Yeah, it happens fast. So be careful with water, water is and water does. More, if I was talking to an insurance broker, they water does more damage and fire. In homes, across the board, as as a line item, water does more damage then fire at people’s homes. So water can be you know, you think about like, you get a fire and they put fire off fire out with water. And then now they got to deal with the damage of water. Right now it’s water damage, and you have to have contained fire. And Allison, you got water damage in the firehouse. So you can kind of it’s pretty obvious. Okay, here’s a good one, this is a good little trick. And I will tell you some of the don’ts on this with. So when you’re sweating or soldering copper pipes together, the lines have to be really dry. You can have a little bit of trace water in there. But what happens is when you start soldering, if it gets cool by water, dripping in back into that joint, it won’t allow the the solder to flux to the pipe. And it won’t allow it to flow because it can’t get hot enough. And also, if putting in a valve that also tends to expand and push air out. Because when you you know what happens when you heat water, it turns into a vapor. And it expands to you know, 10 times its size or wherever ridiculous. So how do you deal with that. So a trick of the trade has been to use white bread, and just regular old white bread. So and that works great. So if you’ve got a solder if you’re trying to solder fitting, and you just got this really small drip that’s coming, and it’s one that’s maybe coming every second or every two or three seconds, but it’s enough to make it so you can’t sweat the pipe by taking up a bunch of wonderbread. And it doesn’t take much and big for half inch line about a quarter slice, take the crust off, punch it up into a ball and shove it up in there with a stick. And that will soak up enough of the water that you can get the fittings soldered. The dope that you want to do is speaking from experience. Again, back in the day when I was probably like 20 years old, I learned this great idea that you could put bread into your into line and you can you can actually solder. Well, I had whole wheat bread for lunch. So I threw some whole wheat bread in there. That’s what I had available to me at the time. And I fixed the pipe. But then I had to deal with all the brand and everything in every single fixture in that entire house. So took me a good couple hours to go through the entire house and flush the system out of all the little bits and pieces of that bread. So it got stuck in the showerhead got stuck in the aerators got stuck in the toilet valve the fill valve, I mean, it was everywhere, right? And I learned from that that you got to make sure that you use white bread. Yeah, highly refined. White flour works great. They also if you do have to, if you have the option to be able to go buy something, they do make tools. There’s jet sweats, there’s also different types of tools that you can use. And in that I was this was many, many years ago, we didn’t have jet sweats at the time. So we’re just using bread all the time.
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Can I just sit for a moment with the fact that you just said that? As a plumber? You had to flush out all the plumbing in the house because of your wheat bread. I mean, this is ridiculous. Like I don’t know how you. I don’t know how you’re in business like what in the world like, so I’m going to tell you really quickly so I don’t eat into your time but I tried
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to help him eat wheat, wheat bread and it seemed like a really good idea at the time. And yeah, I learned the hard way. Well, you don’t want to use whole wheat bread.
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So there’s another if you ever find yourself surrounded by bison, which could happen to you because you go to these nature it’s hard. It’s been happened so keep Wonder Bread with you. And you can throw out loads of wonderbread and I found from working at a zoo many years ago that that’s what we used to feed our bison we will go up on the hillside and feed the bison loaves of Wonder Bread they loved it. So if you’re ever surrounded By bison and you need to get them to get away from you. You just throw out wonderbread. So plumbing, bison, I mean, Wonder Bread is amazing. It’s wonderful.
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It is. And you know, and going back to the old school that we still always have Wonder Bread or that around the house and you take the eat the crust, and I’m making it to a little ball. Oh, I love that stuff. Don’t eat this stuff anymore. Anyway, so bread works great for soldering pipes. Having the right tool now this is this is one of those things where, yeah, people are like, how do you do this? Well, you know, you buy the tool for that one specific job. And that’s how you fix things. A lot of times it’s one tool that we use for one specific thing. Like we have a tool to remove pipe we call nipple extractors. For pipe nipples, when they’re in the lawn, you can’t get a wrench on it, they literally make a tool that this is literally for pulling out pipe and you’ve got one for half inch line, you got one for three quarter inch line, you got one for one inch line, and so on and so and so on. That half inch one gets used a lot. And they break. And it’s literally that’s the only thing we carry this tool for is pulling that one time and use it maybe like I would carry I carry two of them with me because everyone’s why one would break and I want to make sure I’d have backup. And then maybe you know, when I was a service plumber in the field, I probably use it two or three times a year. But it was always there. I always had it. When a homeowner, you may use it one time in your life. So having the right tool is hard when you’re a homeowner or DIY because you need that one tool for that one specific job. So if you have a buddy or a friend that hat happens that really like tools, ask them or go in with somebody to buy that particular tool and other one of the tools that we have is one for literally pulling off half inch compression nuts. And it’s literally that’s all the tool that is pull compression that’s off and how often you’re going to be doing that, that one time you got to remove that emergency shutoff valve. And
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you need that
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tool me that thing to pull it on to tool to pull it off, sorry, I thought it might my screen went blank for a second there. And you need that tool just for that one particular job. So in any event, that was one, another one is a basin wrench. Again, you’re not gonna use it very often. But man, if you don’t have the base are much trying to remove or install a faucet without a basin wrench, you’ve literally got about three or four inches between the wall and the sink to pull a half inch nut off of that, that bib it’s impossible with hair channel OS you can’t get a pair channel that you have to have a base and rich. The other one a couple other ones
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are nipple extractors. burnishing tools,
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you know for for when you’re soldering pipe, you need need a deburring tool. So I’m kind of spinning here. Yeah, so avoid imaging fittings, so you have to have a strap wrench. Anyway, there’s all these little tools that you need. So there are tools that we use for specific items, specific jobs. In any event. That’s all I got. So hopefully this has been helpful for you guys. Hopefully you can have the tools or borrow the tools and look into these problems. And don’t remember, don’t forget white bread. Don’t use whole wheat bread. And if you need to reach somebody to come and help help you fix these things. You can reach us at 53023090925302309092 for any your plumbing, electrical heating air needs, or you can find us on the web at easy as abt plumbing.com or abt plumbing.com and find us on Facebook. And with that, we’ll catch you guys next week. Thanks for listening and talk to you later. Bye