Also, a personal and possibly inaccurate one. I started last week hunched up over a toilet with my head between the rafters and ended it sitting on the toilet staring at a pressure gauge. In the intervening week I had seen a century of plumbing and possibly social history. The renovation of my house has got to the point where some plumbing needs to be dealt with before I can move on.
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| Lead Piping |
The house was built in 1901, at that time a plumber earned about £2 per week or £100 per year and a "professional" e.g. doctor, vicar or solicitor might have received £400 per year. This is a ratio of 4:1. Today, plumbers are professionals and the equivalent ratio is 1:1 or less. Assuming the relative cost of materials to be the same, the proportion of a job represented by labor has increased. I dredged these figures from some long forgotten book, so this theory hangs by a very slender thread.
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| Iron pipe blocked with rust and limescale |
When the house was built all the things that used water were clustered together, albeit over two floors. The piping was lead, bits of it are still embedded in the plaster. I have never worked with lead but I'm guessing that it's a difficult material. Whilst it is soft and malleable, it is thick walled and some form of bending tool would be needed to get it round corners and because it is heavy it may have taken two men to install, one to hold it in position and the other to fasten it. Jointing would require some skill, too much heat from a blow lamp and the stuff would melt or collapse. I have welded thin sheet metal and know the frustration of letting the work get too hot and watching a hole appear and then grow large. So I'm guessing that plumbing in 1901 was slow, heavy and skilled work.
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| A screwed-up fragment of the Daily Mirror from 1949 with the remains of a Jane cartoon strip |
Sometime around 1949, an attempt was made to replace some of the lead plumbing with iron piping. I found a fragment of a "Jane" cartoon from the Daily Mirror dated 1949 which was probably associated with the installation of back boiler in what was then the kitchen. From 1932 to 1959, Jane was forever saving the nation and losing her clothes with equal frequency, when I worked in a factory in the 1970s old men remembered her with affection/lust. Iron is not an ideal material for a domestic hot water system, if for no other reason than it rusts. by 1980, much of this pipework was blocked with limescale and rust. Unlike lead piping which could be bent into position, iron has to be got round corners with threaded elbows. This required different skills from those needed for lead. The pipe had to be cut with a hack saw, then each end of the pipe had to be threaded. Yet again, I'm guessing, but it was probably the apprentice who did the cutting. A few times in my life I have had to cut up bar stock for some reason or another and I know it to be hard, dull work. The man who installed the iron pipe was highly skilled as he got it round brickwork and joists in a way that would be hard to do with copper. It took me a week to remove this pipework. I used a hole saw to get out the "hidden" lengths which could not be reached with a hack saw, the trick was to drill the pilot hole through the pipe, then use this to guide a hole saw which was half an inch larger than the pipe.
By 1980, the plumbing consisted of lead piping with repairs for frost damage and blocked iron pipe. The owner decided that enough was enough and had the house re-plumbed with copper pipes. This would have been a big job and one which I think was "done to a price". The best routes had been taken by the iron pipes and it was probably cheaper put in 20 metres of copper pipe to take bath water a distance of 7 metres. The boiler heated the hot water using a gravity feed system which was none to efficient, but all this was better than the original installation. I have spectacularly made a mess of plumbing using copper pipe, my biggest mistake being not to practice soldering before I started the main job. These days before I tackle anything big, I find something small to practice on which will either tell me I'm incompetent or teach me how to do it. With the forgoing caveat, copper piping is reasonably easy to work with, it cuts easily, the fittings are not expensive and solder joints can be made quickly. As a novice, I tend to use "Yorkshire" fittings which are more expensive than "end feed" but only require even heating with a gas torch. No one seems to be using lead or iron pipe any more.
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| Copper pipe with insulation |
My skills not being adequate to run copper along the path used by the iron pipe, I investigated "plastic" plumbing. What limited experience and training I have is with metal, but I was told by several merchants, that this stuff is the future and it was only the "old" blokes that won't use it, so I decided to give it a go. It's more expensive than copper, but allowing for the need for supports every half metre or less, it is very quick to work with and has a 50 year guarantee (I am an "old bloke", so I may not be able validate that). I would not have pressure tested a copper pipe, but I did with the plastic and it held 20 psi for 15 minutes, what pressure drop there was, was probably due to the attachment of the pressure gauge which might have been a bit flaky. The job was more like running cables than plumbing. This takes me back to my starting point, if labour is expensive, then productivity becomes important and this seems to be the driving force behind the enthusiasm for plastic plumbing.
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| Plastic plumbing (before making good the plaster) |
At the time of writing, I have yet to connect the pipework to tanks and taps, what I'm hoping for is a much lower heat loss as the water moves from the hot water cylinder to the taps.
Images added after original post
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| This lead tee join supplied the bathroom with water from the main |
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