New installations both improve and extend the plumbing facilities of the home, bringing them up to date. If you use piping already installed in the house to give yourself a head start, you can achieve the desired results with a minimum of elbow grease and expense. Small jobs may prove as rewarding as big ones.
Fitting an outside tap will result in labour saving for many cleaning and watering chores. Larger projects such as plumbing in a washing machine or installing a shower unit may also improve the efficiency of domestic life. Once you get started, seemingly complicated projects often turn out to be remarkably straightforward. When you replace an old fixture with a new one in the same location, the plumbing connections are simple mechanical fittings; no soldering, threading or cementing need be involved.
Replacing a noisy wash-down type W.C. with a stylish and virtually silent new siphonic one, for example, is largely a matter of loosening nuts with a pipe wrench and removing screws with a screwdriver to take the old cistern off the wall and the old W.C. pan off the floor—and then reversing the process to secure the new close-coupled fixture in place. The chances are that the trickiest part will be lifting the components into position—vitreous china is fragile as well as being heavy, so you will need a helper to manoeuvre the cistern and pan safely. Wash basins call for even less effort to replace. Ready-made fittings go into place quickly.
Wall-mounted wash basins are supported by specially designed brackets packaged with the basins. Should any soldering of the joints be necessary, the use of integral solder-ring fittings makes this the easiest of tasks. Modern vanity-type wash basins are simply set into a waterproof laminate surface or secured with bolts and wing nuts. Neither kind of wash basin is difficult to install in a room which did not have one originally: a bedroom, a utility room or even a darkroom. It will be necessary to extend the waste and supply lines, but if the distance between the fixture and existing waste service is kept within the recommended maximum length you may not need to install a special trap or vent pipe.
Similarly, the installation of a shower and the plumbing-in of an automatic washing machine are only complicated by the practical considerations of accessibility to existing supplies and wastes. Before starting any work, familiarize yourself with the layout of the supplies and the drainage, by roughing out on graph paper a diagram of the house and its existing plumbing facilities. In all modernizing—additions as well as replacements – remember that you need never feel limited by the extent of your present piping. Adapter fittings make it possible to join new pipes to old ones; and plastic piping may be used to short-cut many of your plumbing projects.