As you can see, the two lock nuts on the regulator has enough clearance and (assuming they aren’t completely frozen), should be allow the regulator to be removed.
The concerning part is the bottom elbows. Yes, there appears to be two of them.
Any change of attack? I think the bottom part of the drywall needs to be removed. It’s probably going to get destroyed anyway with any sort of heat to the pipe…
I’m thinking maybe remove both elbows at the bottom and just have a clean pipe running up from the ground to work with…
I also measured the pressure on my pipes. It looks to be around 80-82 PSI…Ouch…I guess it’s been that way for awhile now…[/quote]
I was concerned about the space too , but you have plenty of room there. Here is the trick with the pressure regulator. When you go to put it back in, your tolerances are pretty tight , it you force it together too much you put in strain on your newly soldered joints, but what you can do, to have a little play , is put the valve and regulator in before you solder it all back up. Build an assembly between top and bottom runs of pipe. Those top and bottom elbows are your friends. Fit and solder/wrench together every thing between them and solder them last. You don’t want to solder half a fitting at a time so don’t do that to those elbows, do them all at once. (technically you solder half a fitting at a time but don’t do half and come back and solder the other half later. More or less heat up the whole coupling or elbow then smoothly transition from soldering one side to the other, it that all makes sense. Otherwise you get weird stuff happening in the joint.
Don’t cut anything with a saw, you don’t want to hammer your pipes with that kind of vibration and you can use your pieces to leverage of the heated fittings in demo. You have to remember that you could break a fitting down the line somewhere if you are too rough. You’ve got this!
Sorry if some hints are redundant, not going to read the whole thread. Spray your flammables down and have a spray bottle on hand to cool any wood that might get a little cooked. It doesn’t matter if it happens a little bit. Try not to water cool your solder joints though. Again perfection is not needed just some concern. It’s only plumbing you can take it apart and do it over if you need to.
Practice a few solder joints that have nothing to do with the project first too. Use youtube and don’t worry if they don’t look nice and full like a perfect one does , don’t “retouch” if you don’t have to. Just eye to make sure the solder flows nicely. If you get a severely blackened fitting , yank it and do it over.
Also for a small non-pressurized drip you can ball up white bread and shove it in the pipe , don’t do this in front of the pressure regulator though. you might have to take off a faucet screen to get the bread out if you do this, but it works. You can buy these little gel ball things instead of using bread , but I never have. THe new valve in your picture has threads so you would need to buy male to to solder fitting pieces for that or get a valve with solder fittings. Sweat your largest fittings in an assembly first and let them cool ,so as not to get things too hot for the small fittings.
