When we last left our hero everything was breaking. Fear not dear reader, things can always get worse!
This is a pressure reducing valve, it goes into the cold water line before the boiler. Our house is heated and our hot water produced by an oil fired boiler and this doo-dad reduces the water pressure going in.
This is the over pressure valve at the other end of the boiler. Its supposed to open if the pressure gets too high. I've replaced that a number of times now. It'll work fine for years but eventually get a little schmoo in it and start to leak. What you must not do when it starts to leak is to flip the little valve thinking you'll clear it. It'll just start to leak worse.
In replacing the over pressure valve this time I happened to consult the university of YouTube and found a video that suggests that every time you replace the overpressure valve you should also replace the pressure reducing valve. It just so happened that the pipe to the pressure reducing valve had a leak so I figured while I was there...
You know how this goes right?
Fortunately it only took one trip to the hardware store AND one trip to Lowes. Lowes had the pressure reducing valve in stock and its pre-calibrated which means I didn't need a gauge to set it properly. Getting all the correct fittings was a bit of a trick and I did need to use one sharkbite fitting to adapt PEX to copper. I'm not the greatest pipe sweat-er (as opposed to a pipe sweater which, I guess, is insulation.) and it was getting late...
So yet another failure but in this one also a repair. In the next couple installments you'll see that we start on the comeback trail...
