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Average Guy DIY | ||
Hot Water Outdoor SpigotThis is one essential ingredient in creating and maintaining good ice in a backyard skating rink. Spray the ice the night before with hot water, and wake up to glassy smooth ice the next day. Acheive incredible results by spending just a few hours adding hot water to an existing outdoor water spigot. I was lucky that I had a hot water line within a few feet of the split that heads to the outdoor water spigot. But the procedure is the same for anyone: Find the hot water line closest to the outdoor spigot. Cut the hot water line. Put in a tee. Cut the cold water line between the inside shut-off valve and the outside of the house. Put in another tee there. Connect the two open ends of the tees, making sure to put another shut-off valve in between. Sweat all the joints, and you are done. Sounds too simple, right? Well it is fairly simple if you are comfortable with soldering copper pipe. And as you can see from the pictures of my joints, I am no pro. I focus more on function than fashion when it comes to soldering copper pipes. Most of the time, the pipes are going to be hidden inside walls, and I feel a lot more comfortable knowing that all my joints are solid but not necessarily pretty. 
I started by going to the local hardware store, where I purchased the copper pipe, elbows, unions, valves and tees that I needed. I needed two tees, a handful of unions (extra just in case), a few feet of blue line copper pipe, and two valves (I also replaced the old gate valve that didn't quite work well with a ball valve). Ball valves are better for shut-off valves but not as good if you want to regulate the flow. When purchasing the copper, make sure you get drinking water grade rather than waste water. For instance, the pipes are labeled with a blue dashed line instead of a red line. The basic rule is that the more expensive stuff is the drinking water grade. Total hardware list 
Rough Cost = $30 (the ball valves are around $10, so that is the majority of the cost) 
The first step was to close the water main shut-off valve. After that, I drained the pipes by turning on the faucet upstairs and the faucet in the basement. I also opened the outdoor spigot that I would be adding the hot water line to. After the water was drained, I started cutting the hot water pipe to add the tee. Making the cut is easy with a pipe cutter, but cutting the right size gap to fit the tee tightly is tough. The goal is to get as much overlap as possible between the tee and the existing pipe. But, with the max overlap, the opening has to be stretched very far to get the tee inside. Overstretching the existing pipes could cause other joints to fail. So there is a compromise that needs to happen. 
After the existing pipes are cut for the opening, they need to be reamed with the reamer on the other end of the pipe cutter and cleaned with an emory cloth. Clean pipes will take the solder much better, providing a strong joint. For the next step,I grabbed a tee and cleaned the inside with a wire brush. I added flux liberally to the outside of the pipes and inside of the tee. I then fit the tee into the opening of the previous cut pipe. No soldering yet. I try to fit all the pipes together first, then grab the torch and solder and go to town. 
Next I took out the existing leaky gate valve on the cold water line by cutting the adjoining pipes. I repeated the same reaming, cleaning and fluxing as written above for all the remaining joints. I added a new ball valve where the old gate valve was. Then instead of connecting the pipes back up with an elbow as was previously done, I added a tee to the cold water line to allow the hot water line to join. The hot water tee was then connected up to the cold water tee with a couple of elbows and ball valve in the middle. 
After all of the pieces were in place with plenty of flux on the clean joints, it was time to solder. A couple of points about soldering: heat rises and solder flows towards the heat. So I started by sweating the lowest joints first and then moved up. Also, I added the solder to the opposite end of the joint I was aiming the flame to. So now that all the pipes were sweated properly, I could use the hot water, after turning on the main shut-off valve, of course. I only recommend keeping one ball valve open at a time, unless the outside spigot is wide open. Otherwise, the hot water line and cold water line will join, and depending on water pressure in the two pipes, hot water might end up in the cold water line in other locations in your house, like the kitchen sink. Another piece of important information: you need a special hose for hot water, a standard garden hose will not work. Make sure you purchase a hot water hose, like the one in the Recommended Tools column. Submit to:
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