A homeowner in Carnation found water under the kitchen sink and traced it to one of the shutoff valves. Caleb came out on a Wednesday afternoon in May, found a leaking angle stop on a house piped in CPVC, and quoted the fix: open the wall, convert that section to PEX, and install three new shutoffs. He was back the following Monday and done by early afternoon.
What We Did
The valves under a sink are called angle stops, the shutoffs you reach for when a faucet or a dishwasher line fails. Here one was weeping, and the pipe feeding it was CPVC, a rigid plastic supply pipe that grows brittle with age and cracks at its fittings. A new valve on an old CPVC stub is a short-term repair, so Caleb proposed replacing the piping behind the valves while he was in there.
On the Monday he opened the drywall at the back of the cabinet, cut out the CPVC section and ran new PEX, red for hot and blue for cold, to the stub-outs. Then he set three new quarter-turn angle stops and connected the supply lines for the faucet and the dishwasher. The visit took about four hours, most of it in the wall.
Why It Matters
- A leaking angle stop is a warning about the pipe behind it. On copper, a new valve is the whole fix. On old CPVC, the fitting the valve threads onto is the next thing to crack, which is why Caleb replaced the section rather than the valve alone.
- Replace all the stops at once. Three valves share one open wall and one water shutdown, and the dishwasher valve nobody checks gets replaced with the two everyone sees.
- Quarter-turn valves close when you need them. The old multi-turn stops we meet under valley sinks seize or weep once they are finally turned. A quarter-turn ball valve shuts hard and fast, years from now.
- Look first, then fix. The Wednesday visit found the pipe material and priced the job, so the Monday visit came with the right parts and enough time to open the wall and close it again.
Why Carnation
Carnation is 15 minutes up the valley from our shop in Fall City, close enough that a two-visit job fits the week without a wait. We see a lot of kitchen plumbing in and around town: faucet work on Tolt Hill and off Tolt Avenue, a kitchen drain cleared for a five-star review, and this year a cracked toilet tank replaced in town. When CPVC starts to leak at its fittings, converting a section at a time, as here, is how most of it gets replaced.
Fix a Leaking Shutoff
Call 425-549-2400 or schedule an appointment.
More: leak detection and repair · a CPVC leak repaired in Duvall · plumbing in Carnation · faucet repair questions · toilet questions answered