Please wait...
Yeah, it’s been that cold. Cold enough that my electric bill showed up looking like a ransom note. $1400 just to keep the pipes from turning into modern art.
At this point I’m convinced the whole “AI economy” is just a polite way of saying “hope you enjoy financing the grid upgrades we didn’t build for the last 30 years.”
Tankless heaters freaking out, utilities freaking out, my wallet freaking out… winter’s the only thing around here that’s running reliably.
2026-02-20 01:56 from IGnatius T Foobar
Yeah, it’s been that cold. Cold enough that my electric bill
showed up looking like a ransom note. $1400 just to keep the
pipes from turning into modern art.
That is just bonkers.
So glad I am a poor bastard in an area with an unreliable power supply, so I can heat my house burning horse poo and I am pretty much forced to produce my own electricity anyway.
Unscheduled fun project! I went to the garage to see if the final coat of poly had dried on my new custom speaker stands, and there was water all over the floor. Wandered over to the laundry closet and found a hot water heater spraying a fine mist of hot water all over the place. Fun.
Removing the old water heater was an adventure. Some shady mamaluke had used solder on pro-press fittings, and used compression fittings where they should have used solder. So tomorrow I have to redo all that before I can put a new water heater in.
You know what ... I'll enjoy the project, I always do. But it's frustrating to spend time and money just to get back to where you were before. It's way more fun to have something new at the end of a project.
Oddly, i just was going to do plumbing at my sisters yesterday too. Swap out an old dead softener. Should have been a 10 minute project.
But, the previous installer soldered down screw on connectors ( wtf ) so it has to be cut out. Normally id not care and just cut it off as i can solder just fine ( and/or crimp ), but the lines are so short between the 1000 elbows and 2x the needed shut offs ( another wtf were they thinking, it actually had 4 shutoffs, 2 bypasses, and connectors going in circles in the space less than a foot square... ), that i suspect it has to be cut from inside the wall and start over. And i don't want to be cutting into her wall.
in theory i could unsolder some of the connectors and regain the extra pipe to grab on to, but that is tricky, im way out of practice for that, and if you screw it up, you have hosed the entire house water supply and have to cut the wall out to rescue things. Once you start, you cant punt..
Unscheduled fun project! I went to the garage to see if the final coat of poly had dried on my new custom speaker stands, and there was water all over the floor. Wandered over to the laundry closet and found a hot water heater spraying a fine mist of hot water all over the place. Fun.
Removing the old water heater was an adventure. Some shady mamaluke had used solder on pro-press fittings, and used compression fittings where they should have used solder. So tomorrow I have to redo all that before I can put a new water heater in.
You know what ... I'll enjoy the project, I always do. But it's frustrating to spend time and money just to get back to where you were before. It's way more fun to have something new at the end of a project.
But, the previous installer soldered down screw on connectors ( wtf ) so it has to be cut out.
A lot of fixtures now come with ports that can be either soldered or threaded. Shower valves, for example. Many of them have a bore for 1/2" copper to be sweated on, and that bore is inside a male thread fitting to which you can attach a PEX adapter.
That threw me for a loop when I re-plumbed my shower, until I realized that it was a one-size-fits-all fitting.
This was installed at least 20 years ago.
And this was an actual threaded fitting they soldered, not that they chose a solder version.
But, the previous installer soldered down screw on connectors ( wtf ) so it has to be cut out.
A lot of fixtures now come with ports that can be either soldered or threaded. Shower valves, for example. Many of them have a bore for 1/2" copper to be sweated on, and that bore is inside a male thread fitting to which you can attach a PEX adapter.
That threw me for a loop when I re-plumbed my shower, until I realized that it was a one-size-fits-all fitting.
Up there you wrote "and/or crimp". Do you have a ProPress tool? If you spent the $1000 on the tool I don't see why you would use any other kind of fitting.
As for me and my house, it's all solder.
And it really does amaze me that a layer of solder thinner than a human hair can hold up against full municipal water pressure. But it does. I've had it explained to me so many times and it's still amazing.
No. While i did consider getting a Milwaukee press, i just couldn't rationalize that much for so little use id make of a tool.
Up there you wrote "and/or crimp". Do you have a ProPress tool? If you spent the $1000 on the tool I don't see why you would use any other kind of fitting.
As for me and my house, it's all solder.
And it really does amaze me that a layer of solder thinner than a human hair can hold up against full municipal water pressure. But it does. I've had it explained to me so many times and it's still amazing.
I must confess that I have a couple of sharkbite fittings in my house. They were installed because I did a kitchen remodel during the supply chain crisis of 2021 and some fittings I needed weren't available in any other type. They'll get replaced someday.