Hot Water Takes Forever? Replace Your Recirculation Pump in Minutes

over my neighbor's house. She's not getting hot water the way that she used to to her shower. All right. Well, this is what we got. This little pump right here was plugged in, but it was not running. It was done. Zoom up in there. Looks like it's done a little leak in it some point. So, I found a good replacement. We're going to cut the copper over here. Got some PEX here. I'm going to cut it out a little bit higher up here. And we're just going to redo the whole thing in copper. So, come along. Let's get to fixing. >> [music] >> Gold's Gold's. This is what I found was a Gold's. All right. So, they must have bought Lang when they went out of business something, right? But this is what we got. It's essentially the same thing. And just a a little bit different. The last one was solder on. This is FIP. So, this is threaded in. And then also this has a little switch on it where you can turn it up just a little bit higher. You can make it go a little bit faster if you wanted to. So, the fastest and easiest way is probably going to do a shark bite like they did here. But I'm not going to do that. And we could have done some PEX again like they did over here, but everything else is copper. So, I just assume cut it out, put copper back in. I was going to solder. I mean, you can see there's so many solder joints through here. But with it being back there, I didn't want to have to hassle with that. So, instead I brought the little RP 115. We're going to ProPress this. It's going to be quick, easy. And I'll have them back up and running in no time. I do like that you can run up to Home Depot these days and get the Viega ProPress fittings. This is a little bit more spendy than solder fittings or PEX, but it's not more spendy than shark bite though. And personal opinion, I like it better. Been using this for years in the commercial industrial space. I like to go with this Blue Monster Teflon tape these days by Mill-Rose. The three wraps, four wraps, something like that. You don't need that much of this. It is a lot thicker of a Teflon. Rub this in with my nail. Little Mega Lock. You want some pipe dope. Always give it a mix. I like it because I can use it on both plastic and metal. And never really get super hard. And it is good stuff. If you combine both these, it's very, very rare that you end up having some kind of a leak on one of your threaded joints. I don't know if anybody else has made the switch from using an adjustable jaw like this to using the pliers wrench, the adjustable pliers wrench by Knipex. These bad boys, I like them one of my favorite new tools ever. Right? Cuz not only are they adjustable like this, but it's kind of a ratcheting action as well. Check this out. They make these in a bunch of different sizes. Here we go. So, now when I cut that line, I'm actually just going to be able to plug one side of this in and then run it off of that. I don't even have to have an adapter cuz this is my new adapter side. So, this has arrows that tell you the direction of flow. Now, you see where we're at. We're going to take this little ratcheting cutter from Ridgid and we're going to get back in here and we're going to open this line up. These valves are closed. Okay. Get that tight. And start [snorts] going. Every two or three turns, give it a quarter turn. Starting to get a little taste of some water right here. There won't be that much water. Cuz both of the valves are shut off. And that is off. I need to give myself space in between right here. That way I can actually get that with the ProPress gun. Cuz if I don't, I will run into it awkwardly. But there we go. All right, we got a little bit more water coming here. There we go. And when you get this off, you can see it's pretty much the exact same pump. Right? Just the solder version. So now we got a little Rigid reamer chamfer. This isn't a necessity. You want to ream and chamfer your pipe whenever you're doing ProPress. And then another little thing I always like to do is just take a Scotch-Brite pad afterwards and just brighten that up a little bit. Get the last of the little burr. You do not want to damage that O-ring inside. So always chamfer your pipe. We only have one 3/4 piece to actually ProPress in place. That's going to be this one right here. We put that mark right there to know that we're fully inserted. The RP 115 today we're going to be using the copper ProPress, but it actually has PEX press jaws for it as well. You just kind of do that. It ejects it. Slap that in place. Push that down. Stays in. This is a light little ProPress tool. You can get up in there. You can see where my line is. Everything looks good. ProPress good. Switch real quick. So, the 1/2 in. That's what we'll be using the rest of the time. I like to check the inside. Make sure you get all the grit. All right. Everything needs to be out of there. Want to do the outside. The chamfer, a little bit of Scotch-Brite, and then the direction of flow is actually coming back in this way right here. Yeah, it looks good. 7 and 1/2. I know you can use type M copper for residential, the way these guys did here, but I um I'm a big fan of using type L for anything. Just a little bit thicker of a copper. Show you something about this cutter that I absolutely love. Yes, it's ratcheting, but if you needed a close-quarters cutter, it's awesome. Pop this off, you can use it close quarter. Pop this right up here in place, and then you get this bad boy cleaned up. In. Oh, yeah. That looks good. Pull out the freaking Knipex Cobras. These are always locking to anything even in a tight space. Okay, there we go. Now it's on there good. That's better than having to solder in here. All right. >> [snorts] >> Bam. Much easier putting that in than how it could have went because they didn't put this valve in the direction of flow. Now I'm screwed when I open it. So I'm just going to bend that down a little bit. I'm going to take this right here. And now it's not going to rub against that. All right. We're good. All hooked up. That's out of our way. We got that rolling. And our plug behind here and behind here. I'm glad it's long enough. Let's leave it at two and see what's happening. Give it just a couple minutes and we'll go check it upstairs and it should be nice and warm. All right, so there we have it. I helped my neighbor out big time. I really hope this helped you out there as well. If you could please subscribe, click the like button. We'd love to have you keep coming back. Thank you very much and we'll see you again real soon. Check it out. Now Yeah, we got hot water right away. That's awesome. Back in business.