Thursday, July 14, 2011

Very Interesting Project - A Must Read!!!

Yes, I did use a catchy title to get your attention.  I may have over hyped this past weekends project a bit.

So this past weekend, I decided to install a water line for our refrigerator's ice maker/ water dispenser.  When we moved into the house, they had not installed anything for one because the original fridge did not have an ice maker or one of those built in water dispensers.  We finally got around to getting a fridge that had these abilities about a month ago, so I decided it was time to stop making ice with the ice trays. (We had been making ice for over a year and it gets old).  I promised (and bet on it) Marn this would be a one hour task and I tried to stick to that.  It ended up taking about an hour and a half.  Oh well.  

To start it off, I ran (not literally) down to Lowe's and grabbed (aka purchased) a wall mounting in line freezer/fridge filter that is replaceable and an ice maker line tapping installation kit.  That sort of fancy equipment runs about 70 bucks for everything, though if you didn't want a filter, it would be more like 20 bucks.

After that I officially started the project by drilling a hole into the floor behind the fridge.  This was a little scary considering i didn't know where the joists were because my stud finder was not being very helpful.  Fortunately, it went right through without a problem and I was able to start feeding the water pipe down into the basement.  The plan was to hook the water up to one of the water lines in the basement using a self tapping valve (this is a pretty common method).

After getting the tube into the basement, I had to crawl under our kitchen crawlspace.  To get an idea, our house has a basement that was added after the house was built, plus several additions.  Because of that, we have kind of a maze of crawlspaces with only a few holes punched in the foundation walls for access.  I don't know if you can tell how narrow this opening is, but when i climbed on in, my rear end was touching the floor joists.  The picture below is the entrance under the kitchen.  I couldn't fit through the other opening in the basement because it was full of water lines.  You can see the piece of card board that I put down to try to keep from getting dirty.  It didn't help much in the end.
The next picture is a close up shot of me on my way into the crawlspace.  You can see my flashlight waiting for me to go in.
This picture is right as I climbed inside.  The clearance had to be just a little over a foot.  You can see all the junk left from the construction workers and all the spider webs that got all over me. Toward the back, I was shining the flashlight on the place where the pipe was coming through the floor under the fridge.
Here is another shot showing the other opening from the basement that I couldn't easily get through and all the water pipes.  I ended up tapping the line right as it entered into the basement so that I could turn it off if I needed too and also because that was one of the only copper lines accessible.
So after I climbed around in the basement for a bit, I got the line run across the space and tapped into the water line.  It took a while to get the water filter hooked up because it kept leaking until I put thread sealant tape on the fittings.  I should have used the sealant originally, but I was trying to shortcut my way so that the project would not take more than an hour.   The photo below shows the completed filter install on the wall behind the fridge.  I put the filter on the side of the fridge so that I can change it in the future without having to roll the fridge out
So there it is, my interesting weekend project.  I also finished the floor on my shower project, but ill upload a few photos and words about that later.  This week and weekend we are planning on trying to finish our upstairs bathroom shower project (there's a few older posts about it).

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