Plumbing question about possible pipe crack
BG57Builder
| Posted in General Questions on
I have noticed this for years and didn’t pay any attention to it but am going to be finishing basement now and wondering if I should replace this before doing so. This is the kitchen sink/dishwasher drain line and like I said hasn’t been an issue for the 4 years I’ve lived in the house. Don’t know if this looks fine or should be replaced, thanks!
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That crack looks like it leaked but plugged up with gunk and sealed itself after a while. I would NOT TRUST THAT PIPE. I'd replace that pipe while you have access -- it's relatively easy, and it's cheap to do. You don't want it to fail (technically it already has failed) and wreck your finished basement in the future.
Bill
If you're doing a drywall ceiling I'm with Bill on this one. Better to replace a piece of pipe now than to tear out a bunch of drywall and replace a piece of pipe later.
On the other hand, you might consider installing a drop ceiling with grids and tiles that could be removed later and then you wouldn't have to worry so much about issues like this as well as maintenance, etc. I would only install a removable drop ceiling in a basement if it were my own home so that I could work on maintenance issues like this in the future.
BG5Builder,
This is fairly straightforward. Whether you are finishing the ceiling or not, fix the pipe. The suggestion you instead use a ceiling which will give access in the future makes no sense.
An accessible ceiling is still a plus in case of any future maintenance, but the broken pipe should still be repaired prior to doing the rest of the renovation work. An accessible ceiling is NOT an alternative to actually repairing the bad pipe.
Bill
Bill,
An accessible ceiling is a plus - but why then only in the basement? In a two storey house there is likely to be as much plumbing in the first floor ceiling as the one below. Unlike crawlspaces, as soon as you decide to finish the basement it becomes just another storey, and any advantage of having services there disappears.
(Yet another in my ongoing rants against including basements. The closer you look at the arguments in favour of them, the more they fall away.)
Not to answer for Bill, but on the upper floors I think it's mainly a matter of esthetics. There are also issues if you're relying on the drywall as an air barrier or a fire barrier.
I don't find opening up and patching drywall to be much of any issues. I think most plumbers basically consider drywall a removable panel.
DC,
Basements are to me what Thermal Mass is to you.
That dropped ceilings are acceptable in finished basements and not elsewhere is just another sign the living spaces we create down there are inferior to the ones we build above grade - and if drywall is necessary for either air-sealing or fire protection, shouldn't that also be true on the basement ceiling?
Thread Hijack alert. It would be interesting to imagine what a house build to maximize renovation and ease of maintenance would look like. An attic above, crawlspace below and nicely done dropped ceilings through out?
"Basements are to me what Thermal Mass is to you."
But basements are an observable, measurable phenomenon!
Where I am, Washington, DC, there is a very practical reason for basements. For economic reasons single-family homes are always built to the maximum size the zoning will allow. One of the zoning requirements is FAR -- floor area ratio, which is a ratio of the floor area of the house to the area of the lot. Basements don't count toward FAR, only above ground space counts. There is also a lot coverage maximum, which basements also don't count toward, you can make the basement bigger than the footprint of the house and in fact you can excavate all the way to the property line so long as you can make sure your neighbor's lot doesn't collapse. Porches and decks don't count toward FAR, so it's not uncommon now to see a house where the front porch and back deck are over a basement that is bigger than the footprint of the house.
We also have a height limit but there is no limit on how deep a basement can be, I have a neighbor who recently built a house with a basement over 20 feet deep.
For similar reasons cathedral ceilings and even flat roofs are popular here.
DC,
It makes perfect sense to exploit zoning and tax regulations if they provide those sorts of incentives, but in areas where those don't exist would anyone do the same thing for some practical reason?
Malcolm --
Responding to #13, I grew up in New England. The frost depth is 40" where I grew up. Houses are typically built at least 48" above grade because otherwise you can't get out your door when it snows. So the foundation is an 8' wall. Before the advent of poured concrete the foundation would be stacked stone or brick, in order to build it you had to excavate a place for the mason to work, you're building an 8' wall anyway so you may as well level the floor and call it a basement*. By the time concrete came along excavators were used for the digging and if you're having the equipment on site for a day anyway you may as well excavate the whole basement.
The most common heating fuel is oil, which is loud, a basement is a great spot to stick the boiler and the fuel tank.
My personal prejudice is I find slab on grade just unpleasant. And how do you keep the walls from rotting on the bottom, and what do you do when it snows? Plus you end up using space on the inhabited floors of the house for utilities. If you raise the house and put it over a crawl space you solve most of those issues, but why not make it a basement instead where you can stand up?
*(The traditional construction technique in New England was to put the footings only a couple of feet below existing grade, then take the dirt from the basement excavation and pile it up around the outside of the foundation to get the footings to the required depth. So you needed a source of dirt anyway.)
I think it's an issue of aesthetics. In commercially-residential spaces (think things like college dorm buildings that were originally a large house or similar structure), I see access hatches sprinkled around the ceilings. Those look pretty crummy, but they provide a way to get up to access things and fish wires.
Regarding drop ceilings, I was recently working in a clean room (customer is taking over a semiconductor fabrication place and converting it into a datacenter), and the ceiling grid was heavy aluminum extrusions, the ceiling tiles were a sort of painted drywall. It didn't look all that bad, and was MUCH MUCH sturdier than regular ceiling tiles! The use the entire ceiling plenum as an air return, and have a pressurised access floor (and also walls with egg crate material down load over filters). I've never seen so many filters -- ALL The surface area of the lower half of the walls were pleated filters behind grilles. Not your typical place! Nice looking ceiling though :-D
Personally, I like leaving basements unfinished and using them as workshops and storage spaces, so fine details down there don't matter so much. I can sawzall through a pipe and slop the gunk inside into a bucket on the floor and not worry about it.
Bill
Bill,
I didn't mean dropped ceilings were a bad idea, just not something you put in so you can leave existing leaks in your plumbing to be fixed at some later time.
I've seen some gorgeous dropped ceilings in commercial and institutional settings. For some reason they don't seem to have made their into the residential market. They would solve a lot of the issues we talk about when discussing service cavities.
So there are two straight runs (just beyond the crack and then about 2 feet upstream) where I can to cut the pipe. What is the best connector piece to use for those straight pieces? Assuming that is the best route, cutting on straight pipe.
You can't cut the elbow and couple to that, since the dimensions of the bending part of the 90 won't fit other pipe fittings. You can ONLY cut the straight parts of the pipe.
What I would do is cut to the right of the crack in the picture, being sure to allow an inch or two of good pipe between the crack and the cut line. This helps ensure that cutting the pipe won't just cause more cracking. I would cut above the straight "vertical" piece on the left of your pic. Leave enough room to fit a DWV coupling (which is not as long as a pressure coupling), then use two of those and a new 90 along with some straight pipe to complete the repair. Hopefully you will have enough play in the pipe if you remove that hanger to be able to build up the horizontal part first, and then press it upwards onto the vertical piece.
If you don't have enough play to do what I describe above, use a "repair coupling" one one side of the repair. Repair couplings don't have stops and can slide all the way onto the pipe. To use one of these, mark the cut pipe 1/2 of the width of the coupling using something like a sharpie marker. Slide the coupling all the way on, then pull the pipes together, then slide the coupling back over the other piece of pipe until you see your mark. This way the repair coupling is centered over the cut line, with about the same amount of glue joint area on both pipes you're coupling together. BE SURE to hold the pipes tightly togther for a bit here since these couplings are not as tight of a fit and you don't want the pipes to seperate while the glue sets.
BTW, be sure to use purple primer and solvent when making the connections. Clean the pipe well prior to gluing too, sometimes gunk from leaks on the surface of the pipe will prevent the glue from making a good bond, then you just end up with the leak moving to the fitting after making your repair.
One other thing that might help you out here: Since that vertical pipe looks to be pretty short, you can save some space by using a "street 90" instead of a regular 90. A street 90 has one male and one female connecting end, so you can put the coupler directly onto the 90 instead of using a section of pipe. If you're lucky, the 90 plus the coupler will get enough overall length to fit onto the remaining part of the pipe after you cut things. Sometimes using a pressure coupling instead of a DWV coupling here helps too if you need a little more length. The only difference between the two for this application would be the pressure coupling has about twice as much area for the solvent weld area, so it's a little longer. Use whatever makes the best fit here.
Bill
1. I keep reading this title with the last two words transposed. It's attention-getting that way!
2. Last week I had to tear down a chunk of my mom's living room ceiling to find a leak. I did the same thing in almost the same location a few years ago but it was just far enough away that I didn't see the slowly leaking shower drain and assumed it was from an ice dam. Fix the pipe and repair the drywall.