Leaking Faucet Supply Line
Monday, March 1st, 2010Below is a video of a emergency service call that Dunbar Plumbing was called out to on Sunday February 28th 2010. Customer explained that there was a leak coming from the hot side supply line serving a vanity in the office. Upon discovery, we took pictures of the faucet supply line in question for insurance reasons.
It was apparent that the faucet supply was split and spraying water onto the wood shelving underneath the sink.
Copper in the Northern Kentucky/Greater Cincinnati area has a pretty good reputation for being a good piping choice for potable water systems. However, many conditions can create copper piping to fail as we see in the video. When the copper tubing was removed, the first detection we didn’t find was corrosion of the copper pipe. A stress crack formed in the copper tubing where the solid tubing started to go into the corrugated design. The tubing itself is extremely thin which also might be to blame for why the it did not take much for the failure.
A lot of different possibilities come into play with how this happened. We know that high water pressure is very common in the Covington Kentucky area. This is why the main shutoff valve leading into this building was barely cracked open. This might take care of the amount of flow when the water is moving, but when the water becomes standstill inside the building, the water pressure will instantly go to the static pressure of the main line in the area. Fort Thomas feeds the water to the Covington Kentucky area by gravity. No pumps are required to move the pressure down hill.
We haven’t done a full disclosure on the building’s plumbing system but we would like to think that once we check out other points of interest in the plumbing system, there might be other issues aside from high water pressure.
Carefully we removed the defective faucet supply line and installed a new 20″ stainless steel flex supply line from Fluidmaster. Dunbar Plumbing uses Fluidmaster products in the plumbing industry due to the proven reliability of the products and superior quality against other products that are sold in supply houses, big box stores. The stainless steel braid is a good reinforcement for supply lines but should not be misconstrued for extra protection. High water pressure is an issue that in most cases must be corrected in order to protect the plumbing system. In the area of covington however, most if not all potable piping systems in older buildings were undersized to 1/2″ which creates a problem when a Pressure Reducing Valve is installed along with a Thermal Expansion Tank to control pressure. This will create a sharp decrease in water pressure in the use of fixtures on the second and third floors of a building (higher if more stories of height) when undersized potable water supply piping has been used.
The faucet supply line was tested for leaks through a series of tests before confirming the repair was complete.
