Gas Pipes and Fittings

A compression type fitting on copper pipe.

I  wrote this a while back.  One of the last things I wrote for a while.  If you have been following my story from the beginning, you will recognize when this was actually went down.   You see because it was really…

…in a roundabout and really indirect way, the fault of my friend the Naughty Bookkeeper.   I posted a few weeks ago about hooking up the furnace.  I wrote it all out and posted it.  She has been really supportive of my project and always Likes & Shares my posts on Facebook.  (Which is great for getting word out about my project) Almost immediately from one of the Bookkeeper’s Facebook friends there was a response.  It was castigating me for my usage of compression fittings in favor of flare fittings in hooking up the gas pipes.  To bring you up to speed in this drama, flare fittings involve a special tool that bends outward, or flares, the end of a copper pipe.   If you have remembered to put the nut onto the pipe first, before you flare, (the bane of flare fitting history) you tighten that nut up against an angled male fitting.   Personally, I have always had trouble getting these types of fittings to seal.   I used instead compression fittings which have in my past been more fool proof.  I also felt I had some Google research to back me up.

A male flare fitting like I should have installed
the first time.

Here’s the complication though.   I used to work as a contractor with the Bookkeeper’s dad.  He had been a small town general carpenter for years and pretty much had to tackle whatever project got thrown at him.  In the span of a year working with him I took my own small-town-farm-boy handy-ism up to an all new level.   One day we were putting in a shower housing, the next we were bracing up a hundred and fifty foot barn so we could cut out and replace the bottom three feet of the outside walls.  So just by that association I have to give the Bookkeeper’s friends more weight than the typical person who is mad at me on Facebook. 

Let me take a little side trip and tell you about  just one job in a day of working with the Bookkeeper’s dad.   It was late march or so, and the two of us met at the client’s house.  It was a beautiful spring day.   Maybe only high 40’s, but bright and sunny.  The sun, really starting to gain some heat now.  It was great to be alive and under thirty.  To think of it now, for the first time in all the times I have told this story, I realize the homeowner was the grandfather of a man once married to the Bookkeeper herself.  Yeah, small towns.   Anyway, he had a task list for us.   We mixed a wheelbarrow batch of concrete and laid up a little two course concrete block raised bed on his patio..   We looked at some other small job on the list, I can’t remember what.   We passed on that one.   Something was going to have to be ordered.  We pushed that back to another day and if it ever got done I wasn’t involved.  Next we replaced a window but it was an exact replacement so that was only about forty five minutes work to pop off the exterior trim, cut the nails, slide it out and pop in the new one.

Then, there was one last job.   The Grandpa had gotten that new “cable Tee Vee” last year and he was sold.   “The wave of the future”, he didn’t want an antenna attached to the side of his house any more.  We walked around to take a look at it.   The house was your basic one story eve-less rambler.  The antenna pole was nothing more than a two inch iron pipe, driven into the ground at the bottom.  At the top it had a bracket with two bolts that had nuts inside the wall of the attic.   The Bookkeeper’s dad looks up at the attachment, then looks at me and says “You’re the young guy.  I’ll go up the ladder,  you take the attic side.”  Frankly, I was fine with this.  It was still March and though the beauty of the day had not faded, the sun was extending away.  Temperature was dropping quick, even in my heavy sweatshirt I was happy to be on the inside.  

Grandpa and I went inside the house and he pointed up to the attic access door.   It was a two foot plywood square in the ceiling of a hallway in the middle of the house.   Poking my head up through the doorway I realized there was no attic floor.   Just a thin layer of insulation between the rafters. Below that little bit of insulation the (likely thin) sheetrock.   I would have to step, from rafter to rafter while bent over at the waist.  Any mis-step, if I put a foot instead between one of the two rafters instead of on top of it, the sheetrock would not support my weight.   I would break through.

Given these details, precise foot placement was imperative.  I had 100% focus on my feet.  Measuring balance each time before I placed a foot forward.  Eventually though I made it to the end of the house.  I let my partner know.   He was just outside on a ladder.  We could speak through some slits, cut through the wood and the siding in the gable end of the house.   The bolts were there, poking through at me, and I selected one of the wrenches.   The original plan had been that he would use his ratchet wrench on the outside to quickly turn the bolts.   Me, holding onto the nut on the inside to keep them from spinning.   Initially anyway, something failed in that plan.  There was something in the way that prevented his wrench from working to speed the job.  We discussed it through the slits, like I was talking to the Good Father in the confessional.  In addition to keeping track of the exact placement of my feet, and my balance, it was decided I had to do the turning from the inside.  The bolts were long.  Lots of turning.  

After a minute or two, once the turning became rote, I didn’t have to focus quite so much.  It was then that movement in the top of vision that caused me to pause.  What happened next occurred to me a number of years ago that I do not confess even to my children.   But I can remember the next five minutes of my life as clearly as I can remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. (Just coffee, two cups.)  I glanced up initially and dropped my eyes back down again.   It took a few seconds of processing time.  Then I slowly moved my eyes back up.   About a foot above my head there was a paper wasp nest.   It extended from the gable end of the house about three feet back on the rafters over the top of me.  It was the largest such nest I have ever seen, including even today with the help of google as I was confirming they were paper wasps.

That nest was literally crawling with walking wasps.  I suppose it was the springtime hatch.  But none of them were flying.   I suppose maybe had we done this part of our task list at one in the afternoon, the sun shining on the black roof above me, there would have been a little more activity.  But as it was, about three pm standard time, that’s getting towards evening in the frozen wasteland in which we live.  In the attic it was just cold enough to keep those bastards semi dormant.   I whispered through the slits “There’s wasps!”   “WHAT? “ he shouted.   “Wasps!” I whisper-yelled in return.   I did my job, I did not pee my pants, and I got out.  I just know that if even one of those wasp’s would have taken flight, I would have freaked the fuck out and fallen through the ceiling into the living room below me.  But I didn’t, and the next day we were doing something else.

So any Facebook friend of the daughter of the town carpenter got more credit when they said I should have used flare fittings or they would eventually leak.  I told The Naughty Bookeeper's friend I felt I had done the best thing, spouted some quoted text from a page I googled.  I promised I would keep an eye on them.  Since then I have sort of.  I poked at them once in a while with a finger. But once I got the temporary countertop in I haven’t been doing as good of job I admit that.   No gas smells, it had to be tight.   

But then, as preparation for going to Craigie’s house to put in that countertop, I needed to get the last of the expanding foam in to seal up that wall.   The weather had turned cold again and I needed to warm up the van to get the foam to work.   So I went to the shop.

Pulling out the countertop, and  getting some last bits done I gave those gas pipe connections a poke when it had been admittedly three or four weeks, damned if they didn’t wiggle.   A little additional wiggling around and I could smell gas.   

I didn’t have the parts to fix it.   I knew that.   It was to late to get to the big box lumber.   I stayed at the shop that night and it was the following morning the owner of the shop showed up early and caught me there.   You now know the rest of the story.   The next day I drove the van home to my house and spent the weekend redoing the gas lines over to flare fittings.   I can see now why they failed.   It was the wiggling around.   The compression fittings more or less form a fulcrum at the waist of the band that surrounds the pipe.   Any wiggling, out on the end of the pipe (the lever) cause the soft copper of the pipe to be deformed inside the fitting.   This will lead to leaks.   Compression fittings might be fine for your ice fishing house but not a vehicle that is twisting and flexing it’s way down the road.  Save yourself the agony I and use flare fittings on your pipes.