Here are the following steps to install a water line to your fridge:

- Shut off the water supply to your fridge

- Relieve the pressure from the old water line by bleeding out the water spout (if present).

- Disconnect the water supply using an adjustable wrench.

- Once the new fridge is in place, connect a braided flexible ¼” supply line (ice maker supply line) to the fridge and the water supply.

- Turn on the water supply and run plenty of water through the line to purge the air and clean the waterline.

Repiping a house is often more difficult than installing new plumbing in a new home because of the presence of sheetrock, cabinets, and other obstacles that are non-existent in the new construction process. However, our repipe specialists at Tennessee Standard are capable of replacing your waterlines with minimal damage to your home. Before the age of flexible PEX piping, waterline repipes were extremely invasive and required removing extreme amounts of sheetrock to replace the water main and its branches. With high quality pex piping, talented plumbers are able to pull new waterlines up walls into the attic and through floors into the crawlspace, creating a new water supply system in your home. It is incredible to watch how they systematically run these new lines to replace the existing system.

If your home is on a crawlspace, the most common way to repipe a home is to run the waterlines down through the floor in the backs of cabinets and bring them all into the new hot and cold water mains beneath the floor. New valves and emergency shutoffs are also installed to ensure the longevity of the system.

If your home is on a slab, the waterlines can be run up through the walls, behind the cabinets, by drilling down from the top plate of each wall in the attic and fishing the lines up the walls with special instruments. In the attic, the new waterlines are connected into the new water mains and insulation is heaped over the new water system to ensure that heat from the home gets to the waterlines and the cold from the roof does not.

Give Tennessee Standard a call to get a custom quote on your whole-home repipe. We can eliminate those copper pinhole leaks and other waterline leaks with a new PEX waterline system, making your home leak free for many years.

Repiping a home typically costs several thousand dollars depending on the size and layout of your home. It may surprise you how close a repipe specialist like Tennessee Standard can get in price to the install price of the original waterlines. It is more difficult to repipe a home than install waterlines in new construction, but the cost can be kept down if your repipe specialists really know their craft.

By code, water lines must be buried 12 inches below the frost line for that region. In the southern regions of the USA, the frost line is generally only 6 inches, making the minimum depth of an underground waterline only 18 inches. That being said, we often find water lines buried much deeper than 18 inches, adding difficulty to exposing underground waterlines. In the northern regions of the USA, the frost line can be deeper than two feet, requiring the water lines to maintain a depth of 36”. This poses a completely different challenge when repairing these waterlines.

The answer to this question depends on your personal goals and expectations regarding your property. Directional boring allows the plumber to pull a thick protective sleeve back from the home to the meter, protecting the waterline from damage of abrasions over time. This also prevents digging up the yard and the consequential erosion that is inevitable. Directional boring is the safest, least invasive, and longest-lasting way to replace a water service line.

Trenching a waterline is often cheaper than boring if there are not obstacles like driveways and sidewalks to navigate around. Trenching equipment is less expensive than bore machines, bringing the cost down to install the line. However, if you have to cut concrete or asphault to trench the waterline, the directional bore quickly becomes the cheaper option.

Industry leaders would agree that directional boring is the best option for replacing a water service line, but in situations where cost is the most important factor, you may be able to save a little with the trench.

A directional bore machine is a piece of equipment that pushes heavy rods through the ground, steering the bore with an angled head that can redirect the bore up to 10 degrees per rod. Each rod is roughly 10 feet. If the bore machine hits a tough object like an underground stump or a concrete footer, the machine can go into drill mode and drill right through the obstacle while simultaneously pumping water to the drill head to keep the temperature from hurting the head.

When directional boring, a spotter carries a location device that lets the bore operator know where the head of the bore machine is at all times. It is extremely important to have all utilities in the area located before performing a directional bore. When the bore head gets to the target, the bore operator connects a device to the bore head and pull the protective sleeve from the target, back to the entry point of the bore machine. Waterline or data cables can then be easily pulled back through the protective sleeve.

Some directional bore machines are capable of boring out thousands of feet. This is often determined by how much rod the bore rig is equipped with. In the plumbing realm, we typically will only bore 300' at a time, installing a yard box and shutoff valve at each 300' point, before continuing the bore, so that the manageable waterline sections can be isolated if a leak ever arises in the future.