Do You Know All of These Things a Good Plumber Should Know?

A plunger is a tool usually found in the bathroom, behind or beside the toilet. Plungers are tools used to unclog stopped-up toilets by using suction to force free the blockage inside the pipes under the toilet.

Pipe wrenches are like monkey wrenches, except for two major differences. First, pipe wrenches are used in plumbing, and that's all. Pipe wrenches have to be able to hold a tight grip and apply leverage so plumbers can install pipes. Second, their name isn't as fun as "monkey wrench".

In the winter, exposed pipes filled with water will freeze, rupture and leak. By the time the weather warms up, the pipes will be knackered. To ensure this does not happen, you should do one of two things. First, if you aren't around, you should turn off the water and leave the valve open so the pipe empties out. If you plan to be around, wrap the pipe in insulation to keep it from freezing, otherwise you'll be in big trouble.

Effluent may sound like something a language student might use to refer to their mastery of French, but it isn't. It's a fancy word for wastewater, and by wastewater, we mean water drained from sinks, showers, toilets and urinals.

The basement is almost always the best place to look for evidence of a leak. Basements will usually show the leak in the form of buckled ceilings, droplets of water coming from the ceiling, puddles on the floor or mold.

Warm air under the sink is often a sign that there is warm water leaking from somewhere. This could be due to a clog, or something else. Either way, it needs addressing.

You don't want the water leaking out of the radiator, so by pushing the valve back, you ensure that the condensation that becomes the leak will just roll back into the pipes from whence it came.

Standing water in the basement is never a good sign, but if it is under your water heater, then it's a sign of major damage to the device. While it may be possible to fix this, if this is a chronic problem, replacing it is often cheaper than fixing it, both long term and short term.

Washers wear out, and when they do, the effects of their failure can cascade through the system. If a washer goes, you could wind up with a leak, but that leak could get into a confined space and freeze, expanding and creating cracks in the structure of your home. Keep track of when things are installed so you know when to replace the washers, and make sure you buy duplicates when you install the first ones.

ABS, or acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene, is a plastic used to make, among other things plastic pipes used in plumbing. The pipe is usually black, and is used in a variety of applications.

The hydraulic ram is a device that uses the explosive force of water hammer (pressure surge due to changing the direction of liquid) to force some water in a direction chosen during the setup of the hydraulic ram, usually uphill. The only drawback of the hydraulic ram? It wastes a lot of water that it needs to generate force, but it doesn't pump uphill.

A wafer check valve is a kind of check valve used for one of two reasons: Either there isn't much space in the location where the valve is installed, or there is motive to save weight.

A Clevis hanger is a piece of simple engineering used the world over. Normally, pipes would have to snake along a surface, pass between walls, or lay atop a large grid of wire to have the support needed to cross long distances. In order to install pipes in large spaces where a pipe needs to snake along a ceiling without support from walls or a floor, U-shaped Clevis hangers are bolted to the ceiling to support the pipe.

"Coffee Station" may sound like a place to refuel the USS Enterprise, but it's a technical term for the sort of break room where there is a coffee maker, sink and fridge. Different municipalities have different rules around how these spaces must be set up, though, so don't think for a second that things in the coffee station were set up in a haphazard way.

A combo or "combination" sewer is a sewer that allows both wastewater from buildings and domiciles and floodwater from storm drains. You see them less and less these days, as various problems arise from them, and building two separate sewers has become much cheaper than it was when the combo sewers were built!

All core toilet rooms are bathrooms, but not all bathrooms are core toilet rooms. Core toilet rooms are rooms in office buildings that are designed to handle several toilets at once, a requirement which necessitates a different setup for pipes going into and out of the room.

This bump does an important job. Inside it, a pipe comes up from your dishwasher, points down and stops, like a faucet. Below this is another pipe's mouth, which catches water from the first pipe. Thus, water can flow out from your dishwasher, but not up from the wastewater stack, into the dishwasher, because the two pipes are not connected: There is a gap between them.

Septic tanks are full of ... well, you know. Human waste. As a result, they contain a lot of explosive gases and toxic chemicals. Do you think that adding gasoline to that cocktail sounds like a good idea? Of course not. This is why septic tank owners are specifically warned not to do this.

GPM means Gallons Per Minute, which is the most common measurement of rate of flow. Rate of flow is important because it means all sorts of engineering challenges for pressure and water hammer considerations.

One feature of smart homes is that they often come with fancy, high-pressure bathroom fixtures, which can play havoc with traditional plumbing elements. This has resulted in a lot of smart home bathroom flooding and insurance claims as a result.

Products like liquid drain opener are convenient, but often they damage pipes, don't work as effectively as tools like the so-called "snake" and sometimes, they don't even work. Given the option, use a tool, not a chemical.

S-traps are S-shaped traps, which are pipes designed to isolate particles so they don't create clogs, and can easily be removed. The one you are likely most familiar with is the one under your sink, but there are other S-traps in places like under your toilet.

The oddly named nipple is a part used to connect two lengths of pipe. It is a smaller piece of pipe, threaded on both ends, so it can screw neatly into both pipes. It's handy, when you have an odd length you need to cover with pipe.

The 1800s saw a lot of new manufacturing processes, especially around steel. Steel manhole covers (as opposed to stone or wooden ones) can into existence sometime in the 1800s. It's difficult to say who was first, but there are ads for steel manhole covers dating back to the 1860s.

Of these locations, the roof is the most likely place for a vent to lead. Vents are like smokestacks, except instead of coming from a steam engine or a fireplace, they come from drainage lines leading to the sewer or the septic tank. Vents prevent the flow of gases, liquids and vermin into the home, but primarily they are there to prevent gases from coming inside. To do this, they channel gases up the "smokestack" and out. Venting, get it?

Lead was used in plumbing for all of these reasons: It is cheap, malleable and does not corrode. It is, at the end of the day, one electron away from being gold. Lead is still used in a few select areas, most notably in making shower pans, which are sort of like mini-tubs that sit under showers, to channel errant water that leaks through the shower floor into the drain.

Stop cocks are a kind of on/off valve that can be manually set in order to stop or start the flow in a pipe, be it a gas pipe or a pipe containing a liquid. There is even a kind of stop cock used in medicine, including a three-way stop cock.

A Thermostatic Radiator Valve, or TRV, is a valve designed to regulate the temperature of a radiator by venting it when the temperature goes above the chosen setting. This is handy when you want to stay toasty, but not feel like you're in a bath house.

Spiral heat exchangers keep themselves clean. How? First, spiral heat exchangers are basically two pipes that form a spiral, like a snail shell, only one pipe lets in cold fluid one way and the other lets in hot fluid the other way. The two pipes, being in contact, radiate heat between the two, making the cold fluid hotter and the hot water colder. Due to solids creating choke points as they build up, the pressure of the fluid will then increase on the solids, pushing them free of the system: self-cleaning.

A ball cock is a type of valve designed to control the flow of fluid into a container. When attached to a floater, it becomes the ball cock you are most familiar with: the one in your toilet tank. In your toilet, when the water level is high, the float keeps the ball cock shut. When the water level goes down (from opening the valve that allows the water to flow into the bowl) the ballcock opens the valve, allowing fresh water to fill the tank.

Risers are pretty common bits of plumbing. They are vertical pipes, either plastic or metal, that connect fixtures such as faucets to the water supply stop valve, which connects to the water supply. There needs to be a stop valve for the riser to be a riser.

A plumber's auger (not to be confused with an augur) is a tool used to reach down into a pipe and loosen up and remove clogs. It is colloquially called a snake, because it's basically a handle (electric or manual) that turns a metal snake that is directed down a pipe.

Septic tanks designed to treat sewage don't just hang onto it forever. Instead, they have a valve that allows sufficiently treated sewage to discharge into pre-selected and excavated trenches. This is called a discharge field. Just make sure it's nowhere near your well.

Iron filter tanks are tanks that filter out iron particles in water. This isn't a small feat, but if water is particularly hard, it can be a welcome relief for anyone who wants to take a shower, and for anyone who otherwise has to contend with the residue left in your bathroom.

Gas doesn't smell, which is why mercaptan is added to it. Mercaptan is a gas emitted by rotting blood, flesh, eggs or certain vegetables. It's awful, and that's the idea. If you had a dangerous leak of an odorless gas, you could easily wind up in big trouble. With mercaptan, you will know when something is leaking.