Push fit plastic joints on copper pipes? Is it a good idea?

I can see a market for harder single lenghts of 'decorative finish' plastic pipe. Unless this already exsits? Could be used for radaitors tails as well.
Exists, sort of.
Talon do chrome and white snap-on trims in 200mm, 1 metre and 2.5 metre lengths in 15mm and 22mm.
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sorry continued from my previous post.

Yes very true, and whats more, when I was there with one of my brothers, who is into electrics as well, to see the initial damage from the loose plastic elbow, or if I can call it a burst pipe! and to see what we can do for her to get her out of this situation, whether we need to get her Insurance involved in this matter, where up on, we must not do any repiars, until an Insurance accessor has visited the place, but we decided that the damage was not worth claiming for due to her £250 insurance access.

So we decided that it was best to leave the place to dry naturally for a couple of days before we should switch back on her electrics, restore her plumbing, and instead we arranged for her to be put up with another one of her relative nearby.

it was on this initial visit that my brother reported feeling the chill in his spine, standing near the bathroom, his hair rose on its end, and then moved into her bedroom, where at a one particular spot he started to feel immense pressure in his head, and his heart rate started to race away!

her bedroom is adjacent to her bathroom, and immediately under her bed is the kitchen where the boiler is fitted. All her bedroom windows are closed, and double glazed, the boiler flue is to the exterior wall below her bedroom, as she has a corner house.

My brother started to feel the heat in his head, I asked him to step asside and let me stand at that spot, to see if I can feel anything, but I did not!

Then two days later, we went back to her house with her, and another brother who is her son in law, and had come over from USA, (not the one who felt strange phnomenon) hence why I said she is my distant relative.

Her son in law (my brother from USA) his prime objective was to come over and set up appointments for her, with some hearing specialist , because by now everyone in her family was sick and tired of her hearing this noise that no oneelse could hear!

The specialist gave her some prelimenary hearing tests and said her hearing is average for someone her age (82) ! the tests were not conclusive and he could not asess or confirm for sure whether she was y suffering from Tinnitus, but suggested she may be be.!

that is because no one can hear someone in their head!

But she is not convinced she has a problem, she would not have spend another £1400.00 on a new boiler to rplace a year old Vaillant that she paid £2500.00 for that first installation!

now she is considering yet spending more on a 3rd boiler!


So 2 days later, I went back to restore her electrics, after first checking that everything was dry and safe before reconnecting ger supply!
A 60watt tungsten bulb was half filled with water! You might wonder how the heck did that water get in that bulb! I wish I had a camera and took some pictures of that bulb!

Then I went upstairs, where this plastic fitting had come off, and I had purchased another plastic elbow from a local DIY hardware store, for now I was just going to restore her water supply and will be getting someone there to replace all her plastic joints later on.

This is when all of a sudden, i started to feel heavy headed, and a chill rose in my spine! I became concious of what my other brother had felt two days ago, so now I am scared myself! There is some strange going on here!

Any way, i tried to get on and pretended that I was not scared, and opened up her water mains and her water supply was restored and her shower was back in action!

I just wanted to get the hell out of there!! I started to feel my head feeling quite heavy like a mild headach.

I am actually dreading to go back, but her son in law (my brother from USA) wants me to help her out if I can, he is gone back to the States,
and I have arranged with someone (a plumber) to go back there, he will be removing all plastic fittings and replace them with metal, whilst I will be checking all her appliances for correct wiring in plugs, and same time make sure all the earths from sockets have a low resistance earth to the consumer unit and connected to mains incoming supply earth.

But before I do anything, I will be measuring if there are any voltage potentials across each plastic joints, by scrapping off the paint on the copper pipes and measuring for voltages, as I am now convinced that is where her problems lie, and pipes can act as resonant loop antennas, and can receive or pick up high frequencies (microwaves) and cause heating effect like in a microwave, plastic joints acts as capacitors, and the particular installation configuration can act as a tuned antenna! Just a theory for now!

I hope I will be able to help this lady out of her misery she has been suffering from for the past 3 years!

One way or the other, only after carrying out fix can we determine if she is really suffering from Tinnitus. (as they say, might just be in her head!)
 
I do hope you find the root of the 'phantom' noise, but I am far from convinced it has anything to do with the plastic connectors in runs of copper pipe.
And you are mistaken in thinking that connecting metal baths to earth protects against earth leakage currents. The purpose of such bonding is to ensure that metal parts are at the same potential - especially during a fault before the protective device operates - to reduce the risk of shock.
There is no safety to be gained (and some to be lost) by connecting isolated metal objects (fed by plastic pipes) to the electrical system needlessly.

It does sound pyschological to me, but I hope you can prove us wrong.
Best of luck!
 
I do hope you find the root of the 'phantom' noise, but I am far from convinced it has anything to do with the plastic connectors in runs of copper pipe.
And you are mistaken in thinking that connecting metal baths to earth protects against earth leakage currents. The purpose of such bonding is to ensure that metal parts are at the same potential - especially during a fault before the protective device operates - to reduce the risk of shock.
There is no safety to be gained (and some to be lost) by connecting isolated metal objects (fed by plastic pipes) to the electrical system needlessly.

It does sound pyschological to me, but I hope you can prove us wrong.
Best of luck!

Thanks for your comments, yes I am hoping that I will find some other cause to her problem other than her boiler or the pipe work, i really think it is to do with her earthing, and the fault currents or the return currents that should be flowing back through Neuteral are now running bacj through her pepiework! causing all sorts of things I have said above, electrolysis, gas being generated etc etc.

As for safety against electrical shock, the best thing is indeed the use of RCD in all vulnerable areas.

Now her house has an ancient fuse box that requires fuse wire! and no RCD! and may be if she had an RCD, this thing may not have occured.


I do not know why one of the 4 joints used in the bathroom alone, one decided to slip out, it was also different colour (grey) as opposed to the 3 others which were white! I replaced it with a white one.
 
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But before I do anything, I will be measuring if there are any voltage potentials across each plastic joints, by scrapping off the paint on the copper pipes and measuring for voltages, as I am now convinced that is where her problems lie, and pipes can act as resonant loop antennas, and can receive or pick up high frequencies (microwaves) and cause heating effect like in a microwave, plastic joints acts as capacitors, and the particular installation configuration can act as a tuned antenna! Just a theory for now!

One way or the other, only after carrying out fix can we determine if she is really suffering from Tinnitus. (as they say, might just be in her head!)

I am sorry to have to say that the enboldened bit is ( in any normal domestic situation ) total rubbish.

Perhaps 1% of my working hours were spend dealing with people without any technical training who expressed views like that.

We had a very clever fellow who was the Head of Technical Services. He was probably the foremost expert on multi cavity high power Klystron amplifiers and I often had lunch with him in the staff restaurant. He described "hearing" 100 hz mains hum from power transformers near where he lived. I suggested he got his hearing checked as it sounded like titinnus. At first he would not accept that it was his hearing at fault. After a few weeks he confessed to me that he did get his hearing checked and it was confirmed as being titinnus!

Tony
 
copper pipes often act as a second line of protection against earth fault currents, for example if a bath tub or a sink is not bonded to earth, the pipes can act as a second line defence, but if you use plastic fittings, this defence is no longer possible.

No its better if pipes are electrically earth free
using a plastic fitting can actually increase safety not decrease it

Matt
 
But before I do anything, I will be measuring if there are any voltage potentials across each plastic joints, by scrapping off the paint on the copper pipes and measuring for voltages, as I am now convinced that is where her problems lie, and pipes can act as resonant loop antennas, and can receive or pick up high frequencies (microwaves) and cause heating effect like in a microwave, plastic joints acts as capacitors, and the particular installation configuration can act as a tuned antenna! Just a theory for now!

One way or the other, only after carrying out fix can we determine if she is really suffering from Tinnitus. (as they say, might just be in her head!)

I am sorry to have to say that the enboldened bit is ( in any normal domestic situation ) total rubbish.

Perhaps 1% of my working hours were spend dealing with people without any technical training who expressed views like that.

We had a very clever fellow who was probably the foremost expert on multi cavity high power Klystron ampifiers and I often had lunch with him. He described "hearing" 100 hz mains hum from power transformers near where he lived. I suggested he got his hearing checked as it sounded like titinus. At first he would not accept that it was his hearing at fault. After a few weeks he confessed to me that he did get his hearing checked and it was confirmed as being titinus!

Tony

As I said I can't rule out various options for now, there is probably a million to 1 chance that it is the radio signals including radar signals, interacting with her through her plumbing layout. There are too many coincidents, her problems started when she had her central heating installed for the first time ever, before this she used underfloor electric heating.

I think it will probably be her earthing and electrical wiring issues causing the actual problem, but because of the plastic pipe joints and elbows, the current is forced to flow through the water around the joints and whereas if it was all copper then the current would take the easiest path and only flow through the copper conductor like a farady cage effect.

We will have to wait and see, i am going over to see it this week or at the weekend. just waiting for the plumber guy to tell me when he is free.

I haven't got the time to tell you how I almost tried to incinerate a noisey neighbour's Hi-FI as he used to blow my ears out with his loud music, into the early hours of the morning, and as I stsrted to strip my microwave oven, to get its megatron out, half way through the music stopped, it was around 4 am and a week day, then i stsrted to refit it back again!

I was going to project the Microwaves directly at his Music centre which i knew was on a shelf immediately behind my bedroom wall, so I was going to try and cook his HI-FI through a 9" brick wall, whether it would have worked or not, I was almost there to have a go!

Earlier on, i bought a universal remote control, and programmed it to react to his system, and gave it to another tenant living with him, who was also sick of his loud music! , and this other tenant would then control his volume control remotely from a gap under his bedroom door! It worked for a while until one day the basted found out who was remotely controlling his sound witha universal remote control as he suddenly opened his bedroom door and caught this other tenant red handed with a remote in his hand!

and so i had to find another method and Microwave attack came to my mind! lol this was about 15 years ago!! This would have been my last option!! There were risks involved to not only myself from bouncing waves but him getting cooked too!
 
I haven't got the time to tell you how I almost tried to incinerate a noisey neighbour's Hi-FI as he used to blow my ears out with his loud music, into the early hours of the morning, and as I stsrted to strip my microwave oven, to get its megatron out, half way through the music stopped, it was around 4 am and a week day, then i stsrted to refit it back again!

I was going to project the Microwaves directly at his Music centre which i knew was on a shelf immediately behind my bedroom wall, so I was going to try and cook his HI-FI through a 9" brick wall, whether it would have worked or not, I was almost there to have a go!

Earlier on, i bought a universal remote control, and programmed it to react to his system, and gave it to another tenant living with him, who was also sick of his loud music! , and this other tenant would then control his volume control remotely from a gap under his bedroom door! It worked for a while until one day the basted found out who was remotely controlling his sound witha universal remote control as he suddenly opened his bedroom door and caught this other tenant red handed with a remote in his hand!

and so i had to find another method and Microwave attack came to my mind! lol this was about 15 years ago!! This would have been my last option!! There were risks involved to not only myself from bouncing waves but him getting cooked too!
:eek: :eek:
 
Push fit's are definitely easier to work with for the average DIY'er. I'm about to cut into a 20mm Uponor(sh*t system) bath feed pipe and have to T off to 15mm with compression, but I'll be using JG Speedfit from here to the isolator(compression) and out the other side because I'll get a nice long curve down through the floor and into the shower. To connect the pipe to the shower though I'm still swithering over a JG connection or whether I should just do that bit in compression too?
Glad I found out chrome is no use I'd considered that(effing dear now anyway!), and standard copper looks ugly. The JG at least looks neat and matches the tiles! ;)
 
I haven't got the time to tell you how I almost tried to incinerate a noisey neighbour's Hi-FI as he used to blow my ears out with his loud music, into the early hours of the morning, and as I stsrted to strip my microwave oven, to get its megatron out, half way through the music stopped, it was around 4 am and a week day, then i stsrted to refit it back again!

Megatron is a character from the Transformers franchise, created by toy companies Hasbro and Takara. He is the primary antagonist and leader of the "evil" faction (primarily the Decepticons) in most of the various Transformers universes!

All you would have needed to have done was to open the oven door and push in the safety interlock switches.

Of course the attenuation of a 9" brick wall would probably have been about 60 dB + so no significant power would have got through the wall.

Microwave ovens operate at about 1800v dc so you would probably have killed yourself from electric shock!

Tony




PS Part of the procedure for assembling push fit connectors is to pull the pipe sharply back so that the teeth dig into the plastic or copper tube. If that is not done then the fitting is at risk of coming apart.
 
davidickefromlondon I don't think your problems are caused by pushfit fittings or dodgy earths it sounds more like you've had a dodgy acid tab or some extra strong weed :eek:
 
Similar high pitched noise was produced by a trv and not heard by everyone.TRV changed noise eliminated.

Humming noise maybe a noisy pump and a noise can also be made by the diverter valve on a combi. This noise can travel along pipe work.If problems started when heating installed thats the source of your problems!

The mild headache sensations maybe be caused by a chemical source , paint or insecticide/ preservative etc. Fishy smells defective wiring etc.

Do you have a CO detector fitted ?

If all else fails try
from

http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/


Agile do you have a Tv Broadcast Engineering background ?

Update when you do find source of noise may help others.




Good luck with your problem(s).

PS Wish i could write as good post as you .
Very readable!
 

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