Good ears and a good flashlight

Leaking fixtures can waste a lot of water and money. For a customer who owns a large apartment building with a flat roof and has a high water bill, you can narrow down the problem areas with a good flashlight and good ears. Go to the roof early in the morning before tenants get up. Go to each stack and listen for water running. Use the flashlight to look down the stack. You can see condensate on the inside of the stack if water is running. If water is running a few floors below, you can actually see the water.  This tells you which columns have a problem. During the day, you can check the apartments on these particular columns. This saves time over checking all apartments in a large building. By doing this, I have cut a customer’s water bill in half! Remember, good ears and a good flashlight.

Albert Sciulli

Albert Sciulli Plumbing & Heating

Pittsburgh

Save money with a copper nipple tray

It amazes me how much good copper pipe my fellow plumbers waste by scrapping it. Basically, a piece of clean copper pipe does not become scrap until it is shorter than a make-up piece for that particular size of pipe. I drill holes in scrap lumber we find on the jobsite and use it to make a copper nipple tray of sorts. I save hundreds of dollars a year (including the small investment of time) by having short copper pieces organized and available when I need them. Half the time, the piece I need is already cut!

Andrew Lindsey

Pioneer Plumbing

Houston