I was on an earlier thread about finding leaks. We had 2 fairly large dry systems installed in the mid 70's and spending a lot of time servicing them. I was going to try the scented oil method but even after flooding and hyro-ing them, we couldn't find everyone. Some of the mains & risers were behind finish. After finding leaks in both valve's trim assemblies and EOL's (good call Todd) and repairing them, all we could guess were buried grooved couplings. I couldn't go and buy expensive detectors or listening devices. We ended up replacing them with low diff. dry valves, 13 PSI of air instead of 45.
I will add, we found lots of trapped sections of main, doubled the quantity of drum drips. Plus, don't use a sight glass on the lower leg, they leak. I thought it might be a good idea, you could see water with a flashlight but with 2 kinds, brass and ci cross type, the both leaked air. We did use longer sections of 2" in the drums where we could, just for more capacity. Has anyone ever installed a fill line for a traditional dry valve like the priming valves they have for the external reset dry and deluge valves? Just a 1/2" or 1/4" below the gate off the boss and some flexible copper or hose for filling? I looked at that priming valve on the low diff. dpv and thought it might work instead of ladling a coffee cup at a time out of a 5 gallon bucket. Tom _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://fireball.firesprinkler.org/mailman/listinfo/sprinklerforum For Technical Assistance, send an email to: [email protected] To Unsubscribe, send an email to:[email protected] (Put the word unsubscribe in the subject field)
