Tools for plumbing work - what should be in your arsenal

A modern apartment or house is designed in such a way that you have to pay for comfort with selective repairs of communications or, at a minimum, inspection and periodic maintenance of pipes, connections, fittings, taps, and connections. Therefore, a set of tools for plumbing work should always be at hand or at least within reach.

Calling a specialist is more expensive, and by the time the technician arrives, the damage from a leaking faucet or liner in the bathroom can be enormous.

What problems do plumbing tools solve?

Few homeowners expect emergency situations with plumbing, heating or sewer pipes. New taps and water supply give hope that they will work properly for decades.

In fact, pipe communications require regular maintenance, periodic repairs or replacement of parts for two reasons:

1. Fitting, connections, taps may be defective or supplied by an unscrupulous plumber, in violation of installation technology.
2. Plastic, silicone and rubber, aluminum and brass in the bathroom age over time and become unusable under the influence of water, air, and heat.

Most pipe and plumbing manufacturers deliberately include a certain service life in their products. It would be possible to make a sewer or water pipe with thicker walls and a larger diameter, and a tap from a high-quality brass alloy. But such plumbing fixtures can last more than 50 years, thereby depriving the manufacturing company of profits from the sale of new batches of products.

Therefore, each tap or fitting has its own resource. Plumbing tools and accessories allow you to maintain and repair them, extending the life of your most expensive plumbing items. We simply replace cheap and disposable components with new ones.

In addition to repairs, a set of tools for plumbing work will be needed to solve current problems associated with the operation of plumbing. They occur in any case, regardless of the service life and quality of pipes, taps, valves, bellows.

Standard problems

Most craftsmen involved in plumbing work keep no more than a dozen different kinds of tools and devices in their work drawer. The skills and experience gained are enough to fix the plumbing in the bathroom with pliers and an adjustable wrench.

Moreover, most of them do not know specifically what tools they use for plumbing work. Everyone in the process of work uses what they are more used to.

But this is not entirely correct.For an ordinary person who is far from plumbing work, it is easier to fix the problem with a special device or wrench, and with a high-quality result. You can buy a ready-made kit for plumbing work, but it is better to assemble it yourself without buying unnecessary and unnecessary parts.

Therefore, a home kit contains tools for solving simple plumbing maintenance tasks.

List of common bathroom problems:

• clogging of sewer pipes - this type of plumbing work occurs most often;
• water leakage at the joints of sewer sections or on flexible connections;
• failure of the mixer cartridge;
• broken hand shower hose;
• wear of the plumbing gasket on the valve or faucet;
• wiring problems;
• broken switch or ceiling light.

To summarize, for plumbing work you need a set of:

• several keys with different types of clamping jaws;
• universal screwdriver;
• flashlight;
• gun or tube with plumbing sealant;
• a device for unscrewing old rusty screws;
• scissors;
• several types of consumables - gaskets, winding FUM tape, a set of metal worm-type clamps of different sizes.

To combat blockages, you need to buy or make a cable for deep cleaning of drain pipes, and purchase a plunger.

Features of plumbing pipes

In most cases, the layout of the apartment is such that the bathroom is located between the kitchen and the bathroom. This makes it easier to plan sewer drains and water supply distribution. On the other hand, the drainage system in the bathroom always suffers from an influx of grease plugs from the kitchen sink. The bellows and drain in your sink, shower or bathtub may not be able to drain the water down the drain.

At the same time, the humid atmosphere of the kitchen, bathroom, toilet has a bad effect on the metal parts of water pipes, and condensation periodically falls out.

Another nuance, most of the sewer plumbing is pipes, tees, turns - made of polypropylene or polyvinyl chloride. The sewer system itself is assembled from separate sections with rubber seal rings. If the plumbing seals are installed incorrectly or the operating procedure is violated, the joint between the sections may leak. We have to disassemble the pipe and fix the leak.

The situation is a little simpler if the pipes are cast iron. There is less plumbing work, as with a polypropylene pipe, it lasts 2-3 times longer, but it gets clogged more often. If the room has proper supply and exhaust ventilation, then cast iron is practically not subject to corrosion.

The water supply may leak at the coupling threaded connection, in places where tees are installed for installing flexible hoses on plumbing fixtures. Soldered polypropylene water pipes do not leak. Metal-plastic ones may sweat at the places where fittings are installed. They are more capricious and require constant monitoring and periodic inspection - be it on the water supply or the heating system.

Constant fight against blockages

For this type of plumbing work, your home kit should have three types of tools:

1. Metal cable in a case, with a spiral tip and a revolving handle.
2. Plunger. You can use a regular one in the form of a hemisphere on a wooden handle or a modern pneumatic one with a rubber nozzle of a reduced size.
3. Universal screwdriver.

For the bathtub and shower you need a plunger and a screwdriver. Using the first tool, you can break through dirt plugs and old soap in the sink.Sometimes you can break through accumulated debris in the bellows and drain of a shower stall or bathtub.

It happens that the blockage is very strong. It is not possible to break through a plug in a sink with just a plunger. In this case, before starting plumbing work, you need to pour a chemical cleaner for plumbing into the neck of the drain hole and try again after 1-2 hours. After finishing the work, rinse the sewer with plenty of water.

If a blockage has formed in the bellows of a washbasin or bathtub, you can remove the dirt plug by disassembling the drain using a screwdriver. For preventive maintenance, it is necessary to unscrew the central screw holding the bellows body, disassemble it and remove the blockage.

When you need the whole arsenal

A more serious clog problem may occur if:

1. There are old ones in the sewer cast iron pipes, in which a lot of garbage and dirt have accumulated.
2. The assembly and installation of plastic sewer sections was carried out incorrectly, without a drain slope or with a “deflection” due to an insufficient number of support points.

A similar situation may arise if the master who carried out the installation work saved on plumbing gaskets and clamps.

What tools for plumbing work should be in every plumber's arsenal?

Approximately half of the work involves disassembling or reassembling connections. Sometimes it is necessary to simply tighten the sealing nut on the coupling in order to eliminate leakage on the plumbing liner gasket.

To repair pipes and plumbing connections, three types of special tools are used:

• coccygeal or gas keys;
• adjustable plumbing pliers;
• adjustable wrenches.

Conventional open-end or socket wrenches used in car repair work are useless for plumbing purposes due to the large diameter of the pipes or couplings, the non-standard size and the large force that must be applied when assembling the coupling joint.

Plumber wrenches are used to unscrew only metal couplings, pipe blanks and union nuts.

Gas keys

The coccyx or coccyx wrench is considered the largest tool in a plumber's arsenal. This type of plumbing tool is used primarily for twisting threaded couplings on steel pipes.

Thanks to the lever design of the handles, the gas wrench allows you to compress the steel coupling with enormous force and unscrew the rusted nut without heating it with a gas torch. A roller on the thread of one of the handles makes it possible to smoothly adjust the distance between the clamping jaws.

A gas wrench can be indispensable, for example, if during plumbing work it is necessary to firmly fix a steel water supply and unscrew a brass tap or coupling.

Adjustable plumbing pliers

Essentially, this is the same gas key, but of a simpler design. A plumbing tool consists of two halves that need to be squeezed with your hand. Instead of a threaded roller, support grooves are used to adjust the distance between the jaws.

To switch from a large diameter to a small one, you need to unscrew the nut on the hinge and move one of the halves of the pliers into the next groove. That's why the tool is called adjustable.

Plumbing pliers are more convenient for working with small diameter pipes or nuts. More often, old couplings and round union nuts are unscrewed using adjustable pliers. For example, the plumbing connection to the compact tank or the corrugated hose of a hand shower is twisted and unscrewed only with them.

A new nut can be tightened by hand, but after 10 years of work, the threads become overgrown with limescale, so you can’t do without plumbing pliers.

adjustable wrench

All threaded connections on pipes that use hex sockets must be loosened and tightened using a wrench.

It is strictly forbidden to use gas wrenches and adjustable pliers to work with hex nuts. In the kitchen and bathroom, all hex nuts on plumbing connections are usually made of brass, so if the tool is not used carefully, they can easily be deformed or even crushed.

You can use an open-end wrench if it is the right size, but most plumbers prefer to use an adjustable wrench. The essence of the tool is that one of the jaws can move, so you can set the size for any nut.

Electrical tools

A bathroom or toilet is characterized by high humidity and air temperature, so electrical wiring is hidden in channels under plaster or tiles, and switches, sockets for light bulbs are used only in a moisture-protected version.

In addition to servicing the plumbing fittings of pipes and taps, it is often necessary to check the operation of electrical wiring and contacts inside the sockets. Therefore, it will be useful to add two devices to the master’s arsenal of tools:

• multimeter with additional continuity testing function;
• probe or neon voltage indicator.

By using multimeter Convenient to check wiring operation. Often you have to measure the voltage in a lamp socket or check the operation of the power supply (driver) of an LED lamp. An indicator (neon) can be used to determine the phase wire in the socket if you need to find a “contact” or current leakage.

Measuring and control devices

Your arsenal of tools must include a construction bubble level and a regular metal plumber's ruler. Both tools are used for working with plastic sewer pipes.

Using a level and a ruler, any plumber can easily determine the presence of a deflection at the joint or a change in the drain slope. All this needs to be corrected in time by installing additional clamps. Otherwise, the operation of the sewerage system will be unstable.

Also, a plumber's toolkit should have a caliper - it can be used to measure or control the outer and inner diameters of pipes.

Tools used when installing heated floors

Before laying pipes in the bathroom, it is necessary to carry out preparatory work, remove tiles or laminate, remove glue and insulation. Clean off anything left on the concrete floor with a grinder.Any heating system based on film, cable or water pipes is laid on a heat-insulating substrate made of polyethylene foam with an aluminum reflective surface.

In addition to working with an angle grinder, when installing underfloor heating pipes the following is used:

1. Scissor cutter - with this tool we cut the edges of the pipes before joining with sleeve fittings.
2. Crimping tool – pliers or hand press for working with sleeve couplings.
3. Manual stapler on a rod - used for fastening a pipe blank to the floor surface.

You can carry out installation work manually, but a stapler makes it possible to speed up the process - do the work 3-4 times faster. If you plan to assemble the heated floor from polypropylene pipes, then you will additionally need to buy or rent a soldering iron for welding polypropylene joints.

Gun with sealant

An indispensable tool for any plumber. Most of the elements of pipe fittings, threaded couplings, flexible connections, sewer pipes are mounted on rubber gaskets. However, during the work process, most craftsmen prefer to treat the joint with plumbing sealant, especially if the joint is located in a hard-to-reach place in the room.

The gun is a rigid metal frame with a handle and a lever through which pressure is applied to the bottom of the tube with plumbing sealant. For it to work, you need to press the lever with your fingers. The pressure is transferred to the bottom of the tube and ensures a uniform exit of the plumbing mass from the spout. Working with a gun simplifies installation, especially if you need to lay the strip as evenly as possible sealant at the junction between the sink or bathtub edge and the wall.

Hammer

An electric hammer drill is more often classified as a construction tool than a plumbing tool. But sometimes you can’t do without it. For example, when carrying out work to replace plumbing, wiring, heating systems installed in the floor or walls. A hammer drill simplifies and speeds up hard work whether you need to cut grooves, remove tiles from the floor or knock plaster off the walls.

Rotary hammers are purchased once for a tool arsenal. If the model is chosen correctly, it will last 20-25 years, no less. It is necessary to properly maintain and lubricate the gearbox mechanics, monitor the load and operating time of the engine.

Tools for metal-plastic pipes

To work with metal-plastic, you need only four types of tools:

1. Manual cutter - makes it possible to cut the edge of a pipe blank without a fringe of polyethylene film.
2. Press pliers - if the connection is made using sleeve fittings.
3. Adjustable and adjustable wrench - if a compression fitting with a threaded head is used.

To work in the bathroom you will need a tape measure, a ruler, and sometimes a caliper. A plumber always has these tools in his arsenal, regardless of the complexity and volume of work.

Tools for polypropylene pipes

For the bathroom it is often recommended to use water pipes made of polypropylene PPR, and for the heating system they install a polypropylene pipe reinforced with aluminum foil.

Minimum set of plumber tools for working with polypropylene pipes:

• scissors for cutting workpieces;
• chamfer knife for removing polypropylene to the aluminum sublayer - this is a prerequisite for high-quality welding of fittings;
• electric soldering iron with a set of attachments.

In addition, you will need a meter-long plumber's ruler with a division value of 1 mm, a tape measure and a vernier caliper. All measurements of the length and diameter of the parts to be welded must be made with an accuracy of up to a millimeter.

Any plumber tries to hide the plumbing and sewerage in the bathroom behind decorative trim, so mistakes in cutting blanks are unacceptable.

Pipe cutting plumbing equipment

Cutting pipe blanks is not difficult - for each type of material, its own models of scissors and cutters have been developed. Many plumbers use a hand saw with a metal blade. With its help, you can equally easily cut steel, metal-plastic and polypropylene, even inside the bathroom. You just need to buy a universal jig, with which you can cut workpieces at different angles.

For a major bathroom renovation, it is better to rent a tabletop electric cutter. For one plumber, the purchase will be unreasonably expensive, so such a tool is bought for a team of craftsmen.

Optional tools for plumbing work

There is a whole list of tools that any plumber must have, but are used infrequently, so they are stored separately from the main arsenal. Depending on the condition of the bathroom, they may or may not be useful.

This includes:

• heavy hammer or sledgehammer;
• gas-burner;
• thread-cutting device;
• means for loosening rusty threaded connections;
• measuring instrument of non-standard shape;
• rechargeable lamps.

All of the above is used primarily for renovations in the bathroom, replacing old plumbing with new ones, or solving non-standard problems with the laying of communications.These tools are not in the plumber's drawer, but they are definitely kept within the plumber's reach.

Do not take unnecessary things to the place of work - this is one of the rules of all craftsmen. It's easy to lose a good tool, so most plumbers play it safe.

What handling do all plumbing tools require?

A professional plumber has an arsenal of fixtures, consumables and working tools that far exceed the actual needs. Craftsmen who have to repair water pipes in bathrooms, kitchens, and restrooms prefer to have a supply of supplies.

Many of the tools can be used in the bathroom or kitchen once every 3-4 years. For example, hand pliers for crimping fittings on metal-plastic water pipes are needed once every 5 years for preventive crimping of sleeves.

Therefore, the requirements for an arsenal for plumbing repairs come down to storing tools in a specific system. So that at the right time the device can be easily found, used and returned to its place.

Repairing and maintaining bathroom plumbing will require a fairly impressive set of tools. The entire arsenal must be properly stored and periodically checked in operation.

Tell us about your set of plumbing tools – what do you use most often, how do you store and use them? Which of your arsenal is irreplaceable, and which do you rarely use? Save the article to your bookmarks so as not to lose useful information.