I’m trying to get hold of some copper pipe cheap(er than Bunnings.)
Hit me up if you can help.
XX
I heard there’s heaps for free at new housing estates.
how much pipe do you need?
i’ve probably got a some short ~10~20cm bits and various screwed and soldered fittings
^ Reasonable amount - 9m minimum.
1/2" or 3/4"?
^ 1/2"…might look at 3/4" inch at a stretch.
Oh, and it needs to be bendable…annealed? Coil? I’m no plumber…
The plumber I work for gets his from Bentons.
You want a coil of annealed. Hard drawn is the unbendable stuff (unless you have an oxy).
Very few plumbers will just give it away. Copper is expensive and useful shit!
Cool, I’ll try Bentons. Happy to pay for it, just that Bunnings only sell 3m and 18m lengths and I’m not interested in learning to solder copper joints at this stage.
Plumbing Plus is also ok. Various stores around the place, much like Bentons.
soldering copper is ridiculously easy i have flux, solder and MAPP torch you can borrow.
No need for soldering if you need to join bits together. Can just be inline, 90 or T connectors with olives and do them up with spanners. Copper Olive Tees | Plumber Direct Commercial
Not recommended for anything that you can’t then access later though if they leak! (i.e. stuff inside a wall).
^ Cheers, guys. I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible, so joining pipe isn’t an option.
Hey Mik, do you know if any places sell it by the meter? Or am I always going to be stuck with too much/not enough?
This
I had problems with fittings coming undone when tightening other fittings and several leaks (test before closing stuff up 
) as it was all ending up inside brick walls behind tiles/cement render soldering was the best option for me.
It really is fucking easy though, had an almost religious experience when i did my fist joint and realized how goddamn easy and unlikely to leak it was
#almostproplumber
(still working on the plumbers crack)
You can also hire a press-fit jaw clamp system and buy press-fit fittings, which is even easier than using spanners. And they’re guaranteed not to leak.
what are you trying to do?
Immersion chiller for home brew. Actually finished it about 30 mins ago! If anyone is in the market for 9m of copper pipe, PM me.
Interested to see a photo how you built it without making any connections?
The couple of still’s I’ve built for mates out of copper, took a good dozen or so run’s to get the taste out of the spirit. Hopefully it doesnt ruin your first few batches of beer run around it.
^ It’s basically like this one on the left:
The only connections as such are the vinyl tubing from the tap and on the other end which are attached with a hose clamp. I didn’t do a great job, I was rushing a bit and the tubing kinked a bit when I tried to use a paint tin to create the coils, and I was surprised that the minimum radius is still pretty large. Having said that, water seems to run through it and it fits in my urn, so I’m putting it down as a success.
Regarding copper taste, a lot of people use immersion chillers and I’ve never heard anything about it. I just did a quick Google search specifically for copper taste and it appears while a little bit of copper will get into your beer, the taste will be undetectable.
Well done!
I wish I had seed this earlier. When I was an apprentice plumber I had a side “business” making vaporizers for fumigation. Similar principals were employed.
Weather it was pre annealed roll or hard drawing lengths it required a fair bit of heat to get tighter radius bends. I used 150mm fence post with a hole drilled in it for the starter and roll it up on that. the coils used to go in large paint tins and then finally went into ss buckets with a wok burner underneath.
If your copper is rubbing against any other metal in the urn you may need to protect it from dezincification. Grab some 16mm close link polyethylene (rehau brand or similar ) and split it to snap over the pipe in the sections that it is touching.
if your copper suffers from dezincification it wasn’t really copper in the first place*
for those playing at home dezincification is leaching of zinc from the copper zinc alloy that is brass.
it leaves behind a spongy copper version of the formerly solid brass object
In this instance it’s galvanic corrosion that’s the problem, solution is as per Huge’s post
- no doubt there are impurity levels of zinc in commercial copper tube but them leaching out is not likely to cause massive problems. I can’t download AS1432 to confirm because i work for an engineering company, specializing in pipelines, that has a AS subscription that does not cover pipe related standards (armholes)
p.s. enginerd knowledge bomb. the “DR” stamped into brass plumbing fittings means dezincification resistant. personally i’d take that with a rather large grain of salt as most of the things I’ve tested have been decidedly un-resistant.