Shower Valve Replacement Made Easy (Delta 1700 Install Step-by-Step)

So I'm helping my friend install a new Delta shower valve tomorrow. Okay, we're going to be using these Pex ring fittings. These typically I think go with ProPress, but guess what? They fit right here. I'll be able to solder them up easy on there. And you know what? I got little Fix-It here today and he is actually going to do a little soldering with me. All right, I'm going to do up these two and then he's going to do the vertical one. I realized that we I don't have a flux brush. I uh I haven't had to really solder in a while. Here we've got flux and we have some we have some solder and we need a little bit of emery cloth right here. So we'll take a little bit of this. We actually don't even need that. We could just use this. You know, this is a multi brush cleaner. You can do half inch and 3/4 both inside a fitting and outside the pipe. So we can go right here and we can clean this and make it all shiny or it's got this piece right here. We just go right down in there. This will shine it up nice, too. Take this, put that right in there. Get that all cleaned up. And that's just going to help everything go together. I'll have no solder joints to do tomorrow. I'm going to actually ProPress this piece in place once I get there. So I'm just doing all this pre-work right now. This is actually a ProPress crimp fitting right here, a Viega Pex crimp fitting that we can go right in, crimp that and then we'll be able to put a uh a ProPress coupling on right here. And I'll show you guys the tool for that as well. It'll be great. Everything's prepped. I always like to mix my my flux, man. No matter what, I always like to mix it. Just because it separates, especially if you're in a hot climate. If you've ever had your flux separate and something not solder up for you, it is awful. And we got to go inside. Just make sure you're touching everything there. Okay, get all this fluxed up. We're going to let little little fix it hit a joint here. Another thing you want to do here is you want to ream out that pipe. You do not want any burr on that. Working it back and forth a little bit until we start seeing that flame go green. You'll be able to tell once that flame goes green. A little bit too much there. See, there's a little bit of ball underneath this one, too. >> Yay. >> So, you can see it like That means that I used just a little bit too much solder. I'm going to hold this with you. And I'm going to help you with that, and then I'm going to tell you when to let that put that on, okay? So, we're just going to go back and forth. And so, what this does is when you heat this side, it will actually suck the solder in over here. It's called capillary reaction. And so, we'll just heat this up. We'll give the pipe a little heat up, too, cuz you want that to be hot. All right, we're getting there. Try it now. Try it over on that side. See what it does. There you go. >> Oh, that was perfect. >> Okay. No, that was great, dude. >> This one a little high. >> You did You You know what? That actually is a perfect solder joint. You went a little high right there, but if you look at this >> Overall, it's good. >> Look the whole way around. Look the whole way around. That's a perfect joint, dude. Like really, that's a perfect solder for your first time. Great job. And now we'll just let that sit, and we're going to let it cool. We'll ahead and we're wiping these joints off. You You want to get all of this flux off of here. So, we'll be changing out this Kohler shower valve today. We're putting on a new trim kit. We're putting on a Delta 1700 series trim set up. Looks a little bit nicer here. Pretty slick. And comes with the Delta multi-choice valve. Get back in here in the closet. And this is what we're looking at. Now, we should be able to chop here, chop here. See if we have enough room. We might have to add a PEX connector. We'll see how that works out. First thing we got to do is find the water shut off. So, come along. Let's get to fixing. All right. So, I found a little crawl space here. So, we have a manifold right here. I wish there was a key attachment cuz I'm not trying to These I don't like these things that much, guys. Not going to kid you. I think I found the panel for where their shutoff valve is. All right. Here is the shutoff valve with this pressure regulator. I'm just going to go ahead and we're going to kill everything. All right. All right. Now, we're good. Come downstairs to the bathroom below the shower. We'll open up the hot and cold. Let that drain out down here. You can hear it draining through there, which is great. Now, we're going to pop this trim off. There should be more than enough room in this for our new valve. Once we get this out, we'll check the location. We'll get it hooked up. I thought this would be a quick easy cut. This would work out for us, but it's not going to. Just in case there's some water stuck in couple of these lines right here. Don't want tons down in the wall cavity. Even my little ratcheting cutter right here is a little bit too big to work in this space. Luckily, that comes apart and we're able to just use this close cutter. You got to give yourself options when you're dealing with things like this cuz you just don't know where you're going to end up. Even this one is too much for this. In this instance, we're just going to use a little mini hack. There we go. This is going to be one of your best tools in tight spaces, man. The mini hack never fails. We need to grab a pair of little PEX cutters and I'm going to go as close to this as I possibly can. Let's get it right there. Gives us a nice flush cut. Okay. Probably should have cut that first. There we go. All right. You can see right down in there that's fastened two places. That's how they secured this thing. Yeah. We can leave those two clips in the wall, but we got that piece of copper out of there. Oh, yeah. I think that works out really well. I think that's going to work out awesome. Okay. Yeah. Look at that. Straight flush. My cut wasn't the grandest. I got it out of there. We wanted to go up just a little bit more anyway. I'm going to ProPress up here. Going to hit up the pencil reamer right here and here as well to get a little Scotch-Brite here. I will chamfer that sometimes as well. But really, with just a Scotch-Brite is going to allow for just an easy slip over. There really is no hard jagged edge on this because of that cut and then the Scotch-Brite is just going to dull it down and allow the ProPress to slip right over it. And that's nothing. It's awesome. But, I didn't 100% know what I was working with here. So, I got this as a slip coupling. That means there's no indentation, and it's going to slide the whole way up so that I could slide it down if I had to. So, with that, you want to do yourself a favor, and you want to mark the halfway spot with this. Probably easiest to do it right here. And you can look down in there and measure what the halfway spot is. Or you can measure the whole thing and split the difference. You want to make sure these fittings are pushed all the way together. They're pushed in place. And then mark this one, too. You can see that's black right now. Once we get that the whole way in, that's the indicator to tell you that your PEX is where it needs to be. I'm going to get the PEX pressed in place. We're still going to have some flexibility to move and get this lined up on the other side. So, when I shoot my screws in, this is where it's going to go. I'll make sure my wood does not block this piece right here to press, and we'll be good to go. I was looking for simple, and I wanted to show you guys this really cool little small RP 115. It is the smallest, lightest press gun, 1/2-in and 3/4 ProPress, and 1/2-in and 3/4 Press PEX. Okay? So, I can do both of these with one tool just by switching out the jaws, which I'll show you in a sec. But, right here, we'll just do this one fitting first. Said, make sure that is where it needs to be. That's lined up. And then you just push the button. That's in. Now, with leaving this top one undone, we're still going to be able to take the movement where we want it to change out the jaws. You just grab this knurled button right here, push it in. Twist it left. It ejects. Pop this one off. Take the new one. Push it in. It already locks itself in place. And we're ready to crimp. Make sure that your PEX is in far enough. Right over the fitting. Slaps in. Fits perfect. Light. Easy. Right in there. Done. And so now our PEX is crimped. We only have one more fitting. And then we're able to turn the water back on. But before we do that, I want to cut a 2 by 4 to brace this valve in place. I'm going to mark 12 in. I'm going to go end to end with 245s. And we're going to see what happens with that. We're bumping a 45 here at the edge of this. Perfect. So that should just lay down. Boom. Boom. Right like that. We'll see. Too short. Right principle. Wrong length. Took us a minute to get through that knot. But we're good. Feel like that's going to do what we wanted it to do. Still be able to get our ProPress jaws on that. We'll go ahead. We're going to countersink these. That ain't going nowhere. You can see that that is dead center down from where that is. This is angled the right way. Everything. We just need to put a couple screws in place here and we're good to go. Solid. Ain't going nowhere. Now that's ProPress. Everything is in here. It's all tightened up. There's no movement anywhere. We're good to roll, baby. Let's go ahead. We'll go over to the other side. We're going to install this cartridge. Bonnet nut just screws right off of here. This trim kit is coming with a new shower head, a new handle, a new cover plate, and a cartridge. So, a couple things with this cartridge, right? There is no grease that comes with this. We're going to use some silicone grease. With this 1700 series, it comes with a different set of washers and stuff. This is going to be a thermostat setup that you can set your favorite hot water temperature on this valve, and then you can just open it fully, and it's going to go exactly to where you want every time. This uh thermostatic, this control valve, there's everything are just going to last a bit longer if you put some silicone grease on them. That pushed in, hooked up, and then it's just going to pop right out. I don't think it's all the way in. It's not. Yeah. So, you want to get that the whole way in. The silicone grease is also going to help you push this in. You can see that that's in there completely. Just a little bit. We've got this O-ring right around here that I want to put some on as well. There will be a big H on the like 1400 series or something. The 1700 a little bit different. Once you pop this piece out, cuz you're not going to use that, you're going to look right here on this black piece right there, and it actually says hot side. Okay? Just make sure that goes on the left. There we go. That's in. Get that nut tightened down. And that's it. Really, you just make sure that's hand tight, and that's going to be good. You're going to want to grab this large O-ring, slide that over the bonnet nut, and just get it back here on this valve body. You can get it up close on the backside, and you'll take this collar, and just slide that over, and that's going to slide perfectly in place. Okay? Want to take this Delta trim plate. This is going to right there. There's one. Okay. There we go. There's two. That was a pain in my bum. I don't like to over tighten these, so I just use a screwdriver. This happens to be an 11-in-1. Around the backside of this plate is a gasket much like this one. I am still going to put some clear caulk around this. There's a little divot hole that maybe you could see leaking like kind of like this one right here, and I won't caulk that, but I'll caulk everything else around it. It's on. Okay. This piece, like so. It'd be for hotter or colder. I think you This is like your limit. So, I think you roll it back. I think this is as good as that will roll. Okay. So, let's try that. See if that is what we can do here. Screw this in. This honestly was just a little bit confusing to me of how this goes in place, and I'm pretty sure this is it. Does not want you to over tighten it. Once we get it to a good stop point, I think that's where I can go there. On off. Colder, hotter. Get it adjusted. Right, this will go pretty far. It'll just where you want it. This piece right here. It just actually clips on the couple of tabs you can see tabs right there. I just start on this handle side. Go right there on that side. That's secure. This will give you more hot water. Get that where you want. That'll give you colder. That's going to be cold. But now, you set this to where you like. Well, then all you got to do is turn it on. And you never have to touch this again and you're going to get that perfect temperature every time. So, pretty cool. I like to grab a pair of channel locks. Just get that in this hole right here. Pull and turn. Just get that started. Now, this can just pop right off. Pick that stuff out of there. Cuz it's just going to get trapped in the shower head. We're going to go with said Teflon and pipe dope here. Put this on righty tighty lefty loosey. Minimum of three wraps. With this thicker type of Teflon. With the skinnier white stuff like it's really thin, I would probably do five, seven. Megalock is my dope of choice. Just because it's good for plastic and metal. It's just a good all purpose thread sealant. That popped up. Take a piece of Teflon. I'll rip it off, fold it over. It's how I like to do it. I know some people pull it down and whatever, but I I don't know. I just always learned that you fold it over. It gives you double the coverage. Just work it in with my finger. So, I'll just get right here. Like so. Adjustable pliers with flat ends and See, you get right there. You don't see a bunch of Teflon. That's nice and sealed up. We can get all this sealed All this works in here. Fingers crossed. And then I'll caulk it out and we'll be gone. And we're just going to just slowly open this. We're slowly bringing this back up and get all the air out of it. We've got some water coming there. There we go. Okay. All right. Make sure nothing's blowing up here. Oh, yeah. Okay. Make sure that's as hot as it's going to go. It is. All right, guys. We did good. Okay. Now he can adjust this any which way he wants right there and rock and roll. Everything looks good here. We got no drips back here at all. Awesome. This is secure now. Got an access panel there covering it. I got some clear siliconized acrylic here. It's going to look good. All right, folks. There we go. I got my friend hooked up. Right? New shower trim, new shower valve. Now he can finish changing up a couple tiles, routing his shower, and he's going to be taken care of. So, I really hope the videos are helping. We're just trying to help people. We hope we're doing that. Thank you very much and we'll see you again real soon.