The $5 Fitting That Stops a Pipe Eating Itself

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is a joint somewhere in your house that is quietly eating itself. It is not leaking yet. It may have been there twenty years and may go another ten. But when it finally lets go, it will not be a drip you catch. It will be a pipe that splits, probably behind a wall, probably while you are out. And the cause is not age, or water quality, or bad workmanship. It is that somebody joined two different metals together, and the moment they did that, in the presence of water, they made a battery. Not a figure of speech. An actual current, running every hour since the day it was fitted. And a battery runs until one side of it is used up. My grandfather taught me with a hacksaw. At nineteen I cut out a weeping joint where my copper met the old galvanized, fitted a new one exactly the same way, and was pleased with how neat it was. Thirteen months later it was weeping again, same place. I went to him complaining about the fittings they were selling now. He said nothing about fittings. He fetched the old piece, put it in the vice, and sawed it in half lengthwise. The copper side was bright and clean. The steel side, an inch back from the joint where you could not see it, was thin as paper and crumbled under my thumb. What we go through: Why two metals and water make a current, and how the metals decide which one is sacrificed Why copper is the reason the steel beside it is being eaten Why it eats from the inside, an inch back from the joint, where nothing shows The three things that make it go faster, and why some joints last forty years and others eight The commonest place in your house, and the two others The signs: brown staining, white or green crust, weeping and drying, and the drop in flow nobody connects The dielectric union and the brass nipple, and why many plumbers prefer the brass Why your water heater has a rod inside it whose whole job is to be eaten Copper flashing with steel nails, gutters, fence posts and treated lumber fasteners Said before anything else, because it matters most: in a great many houses the metal water line is part of the electrical grounding. Putting a dielectric union in that line can break that path and make the house unsafe in a way you will not see. The answer is a bonding jumper across the fitting so the electrical path stays while the metal to metal contact goes. If that sentence meant nothing to you, that is exactly where you want an electrician or a plumber. The plain limits. Dielectric unions are not perfect and can clog or weep in hard water, which is why the trade often reaches for brass. Old galvanized rusts from the inside anyway, and a seventy year old line is at the end of its life whatever it is joined to. And this is slow, so nobody needs to cut their plumbing apart tonight. Know what you are looking at, so that when something does leak you fix the cause rather than putting the same wrong joint back. Tonight, take a flashlight to your water heater and look at the two pipes where they meet the tank. Either there is a fitting plainly made of a different metal, which is good, or copper running straight onto steel with nothing between, which is not. Tell me in the comments what you found up there. And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead how old your plumbing is and whether any of it is still the original galvanized. Next time we go outside to find the capped pipe in your yard that most people have never found and could not name. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #Plumbing #GalvanicCorrosion #HomeRepair #WaterHeater #DielectricUnion #OldHouse #DIY #Pipes #OldWays #SelfReliance #Maintenance #Corrosion #HouseholdTips #Homesteading