When it comes to do it yourself plumbing, there are a few no-nos worth knowing about. Learn about these DIY don’ts and avoid plumbing disaster at home!
It’s 3:00 am, and your toilet starts overflowing. You’re in your pajamas, plus you don’t want to pay extra for an emergency plumber to come out.
So to save some money, you decide to shut off the water and handle this problem yourself.
As you may have guessed, that’s a bad plumbing DIY project to take on.
Here are four other examples of when do-it-yourself plumbing could end in disaster.
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Serious Clogs
With small clogs, such as hair and food debris, those are fine for you to “DIY.” All you need to do is fish around in your pipes, clear it of the debris, and/or use some cleaners to open the pipes back up.
With anything more serious, it can indicate a problem with not just your house’s plumbing, but further down in the city’s plumbing. In that case, you’ll definitely want a professional plumber to handle it.
Installing Your Hot Water Heater
Once you’ve bought a new hot water heater, there’s nothing to it, right? Just simply hook it up in the spots that the old water heater was connected to.
But if you do it wrong, you might get some leaks. Not only that, but chances are, your water heater’s heated by gas. And if you hook that up incorrectly, that can lead to some health issues and/or even a house fire.
Obviously, this problem is best left to a pro plumber, as they’re trained to hook hot water heaters up correctly and safely. Don’t try and do this yourself.
Installing a Dishwasher
Along the same lines, you might think a dishwasher is easy to hook up yourself. It doesn’t involve any gas like with a hot water heater, so it seems like a relatively easy job.
But the thing is, there are many nooks and crannies in your kitchen. Once you fit your dishwasher in, if you have any sort of leak (say, from a kinked waterline), it may take you forever to notice. And by the time you do, you’ll have major water damage in the kitchen you’ll need to shell out big bucks to fix.
Rerouting Sewer Pipes
This job in itself already sounds tough and complicated. And as the name suggests, sewer pipes carry, well, sewage. If anything goes wrong, not only will you wreck your home’s plumbing, but you may have raw sewage all over the place as well.
Rerouting sewer pipes takes the use of a blowtorch, so unless you’re familiar with those, that’s also why it’s a bad idea. Needless to say, leave this job to the experts.
Do-It-Yourself Plumbing Can Go Wrong
Because do-it-yourself plumbing has a huge potential to go sideways, it’s always best if you get a professional. While DIY plumbing repairs may seem cheaper at first, it definitely won’t be when you have a burst pipe and you need someone to come fix that anyway.
So avoid the headache that can come with DIY plumbing repair and instead, call a pro at the first sign of trouble. You save both time and money by doing so.
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