I had water on the floor of the utility room and seeping into the carpet in the room next door, I opened up the unit because I thought my condensate was clogged. Turns out there is a leak on the inside at a fitting but I do not know if I should tighten anything up or if I have a bigger problem. I have a Premier 5 Ton system that is about 10 years old.
You have to put some details in there to get a useful answer. Narrow down what the question is for that matter? If it is plumbing leak on threaded connections - tighten it. Photos might help.
Sorry, I have no idea how common this is. I thought it was a fitting, but it is not. It is covered in insulation but the pipe with the yellow wires going next to it is spraying out water constantly. The water is spraying toward that pipe joint along the back wall. And for some reason there are double pictures posted.
It looks like you may just be dealing with a water line; thus, you can likely get a plumber to come and and fix it . You can save a few bucks by stripping off the insulation for them ahead of time. If it turns out to be a brazed fitting or on the coaxial coil, you will be looking at a different (more expensive) fix entirely.
OK, I was wrong a second time. The exposed copper pipe is leaking, between the gray joint and the dark brown weld. You can't see it in the picture, but the water is spraying out from the red area and hitting the black foam insulation. This is part of my loop that goes to my hot water heater. The problem is that I turned off both valves at my hot water heater, and the flow of water from this leak has not slowed in the last 7 hours. To me this means that the valves don't work. The original plumber I called to repair it said he would be back in a couple of hours with the right tools. I called him 6 hours later and he tells me that he can't do the job and I will have to find someone else. Even if the water won't stop, isn't there some kind of clamp I can put over the leak and then tighten down to form a pressurized seal?
There is a rubber leak seal tape. That and a couple of hose clamps will help you buy some time. If it is near/on that concentric fitting. You are likely just going to cap off the plumbing to isolate the unit from you domestic. Shutting off the desuperheater. The valves are on the lines to/from the heat pump?
The valves are at the hot water heater. As far as I know, they have never been turned off, so it is plausible that they never worked. The guy who did the plumbing was terrible, and the house has multiple plumbing problems. I turned off the DHW so I thought that would work as well but it makes no difference.
I have used a product made by Blue Monster. It is a compression tape leak repair. It works well, but you might need to lift that pipe to get the tape around the pipe at the leak point. I fixed a split section of pex-al-pex about 3 years ago. no leaks yet.
You may have to shut off the water pressure at the meter if the local isolation valves are leaking by. You would just need to do this long enough to bleed off the pressure in the hot water tank, then either repair the leak or cut and cap off the lines. You could do a temporary repair using rubber tape over the leak point followed with a hose clamp to tighten it down onto the pipe. We call this a soft patch at work.
I did have to turn the water off to the whole house. And it is more of a split than a hole. So I disconnected and capped the lines coming from the hot water heater. I finally had someone come out, but he said I would likely need a new coil. He said the copper they used for the coil was very thin and of poor quality and that they basically vibrate apart after a decade or so. A new coil costs $700 plus whatever they would charge me to put it in. I decided to just leave my hot water out of it and leave those lines capped. I wish I understood that was a possibility at the beginning. Thanks for the advice everyone.
Good advice Urth, Mark and Arkie, that's exactly what I came up with before reading your posts. So what you have is a desuperheater pipe split problem. Replacing a major component at $700 isn't quite the fix I would expect to see for this small issue, but you'll have that with some repair folks. You just have to learn when to say the magic words "No we won't, you can hit the road".
