Unvented Undersink Water Heaters. For D.I.Yers.

I suppose I’m getting old.

Back in the 1960’s I watched plumbers bending 1½” copper pipes by filling them with sand, annealing them and pulling them around a tree.

I doubt there’s many colleges teach that anymore, the village plumber taught me to wipe lead joints between copper and lead pipes in the 1970’s which is now officially banned as well as how repair sheet lead, which I did quite a lot of back then. I was also taught to repair the lead work and replace glass in church windows by a glazier who was then in his seventies who had started to learn his trade in 1920’s who said he was too old to go up a ladder anymore.

Around this time last year I did joint up some lead for my own roof, but it’s not something I have done for a customer for a long time, lead work was once something I thought of specialising in, again it’s something that has changed over the years with the introduction of portable gas bottles and precise torchs, allowing different techniques to be used.

Now most people with a pair of Speedfit cutters and a pack of flexible hoses think they are plumbers, but actually the top end guys are moving onto using crimped fittings and copper pipe using cordless crimping tools, which is out of reach to most DIYers’s unless they are going to hire tools.

The biggest issue is knowing your limits, particularly in an age when people think they can use Google and YouTube to master any skil.

I suppose I’m getting old.

Back in the 1960’s I watched plumbers bending 1½” copper pipes by filling them with sand, annealing them and pulling them around a tree.

I doubt there’s many colleges teach that anymore, the village plumber taught me to wipe lead joints between copper and lead pipes in the 1970’s which is now officially banned as well as how repair sheet lead, which I did quite a lot of back then. I was also taught to repair the lead work and replace glass in church windows by a glazier who was then in his seventies who had started to learn his trade in 1920’s who said he was too old to go up a ladder anymore.

Around this time last year I did joint up some lead for my own roof, but it’s not something I have done for a customer for a long time, lead work was once something I thought of specialising in, again it’s something that has changed over the years with the introduction of portable gas bottles and precise torchs, allowing different techniques to be used.

Now most people with a pair of Speedfit cutters and a pack of flexible hoses think they are plumbers, but actually the top end guys are moving onto using crimped fittings and copper pipe using cordless crimping tools, which is out of reach to most DIYers’s unless they are going to hire tools.

The biggest issue is knowing your limits, particularly in an age when people think they can use Google and YouTube to master any skil.