Over the weekend I was at my daughter’s home in Minneapolis. She and her husband needed to change a hot water faucet at the laundry tub, so I helped out. I shut off the water at the water heater and made the faucet change. However, when I went to turn on the hot water….no response. It turns out the gate in the old gate valve stuck in the closed position. This was not a good outcome.
Son-in-law Sam took off for the hardware store to see about a valve repair kit. I’d never worked on a gate valve, so I was not sure how easy it would be to get the valve opened and the stuck gate pulled back out. When Sam returned he had a new ball valve called ‘sharkbite’. He said the salesman assured him it would work and we would like it. I’ll have to admit I was skeptical. However, we used a pipe cutter to cut the copper lines above and below the bad valve. We followed the directions for the sharkbite valve and installed it. When the water was turned on not a drop leaked and the new ball valve works great. This appears to be a great product to use when you don’t have soldering tools to make a standard repair in a copper pipe water system. I’m impressed at how easy the sharkbite fitting is to use.
