Have you ever seen copper pipe split in half by water leak?
Check this out.
Interesting one this one. We came out to a house in Bassendean. There’s a water leak. They put this IKEA wooden flooring over the top of the paving to make it look a bit better. And the whole thing was lifted up, and there was heaps of water there. We said, “This is a really bad leak.” We haven’t seen it this bad for so long. The actual pavers were all pushed up.
The Issue
So we dug it out, and you can see inside that one pipe, which we think is going to be the hot pipe, has blown. It has shot sideways into the cold pipe, and like the sand blasting just cut the whole thing in half. And so then it had the leak that was going, plus the cold pipe has been cut in half now. So that was just blasting out as well, and that’s why it all swelled up.
Now we’ve had probably three times in our lifetime where the hot main or whatever has blasted up into the gas. It punched the hole and filled the gas main up. Well, luckily this was in the same trench, but it was avoiding the gas pipe, which was lucky.
The Leak
We’ve pulled up this IKEA decking stuff, and the pavers are all pulled up. You see, here’s the hole obviously. That’s coming out. So that just sprayed this way. And with that sand that was swirling, it just cut through this pipe. So the pipe’s been pushing water, and so it’s going to have sand and everything going up in into that pipes. And yes, it just cut it through, so you can see the power of it. So very lucky that it wasn’t facing up this way into the gas because then, again, it just fills the gas up with water, fills the meter up, the hot water system, everything would have to be cleared out.
So what we’ll do is we’ll just turn the water on, and then you can see it where it was coming out. You can see how it would’ve cut through the pipe nice and cleanly. So we will cut those two sections out and fix them up.
All Fixed
Here’s the repair. Just hook them both on, cramp them all. But you can just see the hot pipe here, there’s something in that soil have just eaten it away. That’s why we don’t rate copper that much. Anything in the soil can just, especially when it heats up, you get that sort of bit. So we think the hot pipe is burst first, because you can see that’s the one’s been taken out. And that’s what punched the hole into the cold, and then the cold just gone back and because it’s higher pressure, just cut through that hot main.
So back in the day when they said, “Do it proper, do it copper,” we didn’t rate it. It was in the ground, so we think you’re far, far better off going with the plastic, like the Auspex or one of those REHAU or something like that pipe because it doesn’t get affected by chemicals and all that sort of gear. We think this is probably going to happen again because if the rest of the pipes like that then yeah, it’s going to just keep happening until we end up replacing them all. We’ve done quite a few of them. We’ve just taken up the paving, replaced it all, and then never had an issue again.
If you need any help with this, just give us a call. We’ll be happy to help.
