Rudolph Plumbing & Heating Inc

As everyone is dealing with this global health crisis, more than ever they will be counting on their plumbing to be working properly. With this new concern in mind, when you require service you'll probably want a plumber who takes hygiene seriously and is appropriately equipped with suitable PPE. Modern plumbing has been providing us all with top-notch hygiene for our entire lives, and we need it now more than ever before. You may see me out in my PPE, be it on a jobsite, ...a supplier, a hardware store or even when I need to get groceries. I wear my protective gear everywhere indoors except for my home or inside my service vehicle, and I do so for the benefit of all of us. Its also how my entire household goes out, again for everyones benefit. We're all susceptible to how the weakest link conducts themselves so we all need to scrutinize how we do everything. Aside from the PPE noted I am also washing down my vehicles door handles, steering wheel, shifter, radio controls, arm rests, window switches and even my key fob at least daily. My phone case and Ipad case both get numerous daily cleanings too, as well as any tools I use. If I find a stone left un-turned, I'll disinfect that as well. Heck, I even remove the filters and clean my mask itself routinely. Keep yourselves safe and call should you need plumbing or heating repairs. I'm here for you now, just as I always have been. I'd like to give a shout out to all of my fellow tradespeople who are doing their best to keep everything working for Canadians in the safest fashion they can, be they electricians, HVAC mechanics or even my competition in the plumbing field. I'll also thank those working at my wholesale suppliers, where rather than going inside, they now require that we call in our orders from the parking lot or place them online. We're all in this together. Stuart Rudolph

If your business or workplace has bathroom sink faucets with handles, consider calling us to upgrade to the superior hygiene offered by hands-free faucets. Aside from preventing the cross-contamination of having to touch handles after having already washed, they also conserve water. At least one brand has the impressive feature of recharging its battery from a tiny, built-in hydro-generator!

Here I’m featuring yet another job that required a pipe freeze, though a much larger one compared to my previous post. This is a different hotel client that required a 3 diameter valve to be replaced on their main water service. Due to not wanting to drain all 9 stories of piping above the water meter room to accomplish the repair, I opted to freeze the 4 diameter galvanized water main just above the junction of the two parallel backflow preventers. This was chosen both to ...reduce the down-time that would be required to drain the water lines in the entire 8-story building but also the time to refill it and vent out air from the water lines throughout the building, it allowed the repair to be performed both more quickly and more safely. The freeze was started at 12:30 am to minimize disruption to the hotels guests, and the water supply was restored by 2:45 am. A 3 flanged gate valve was installed on one of the two parallel 3 dual check valve assembly backflow preventers due to the previous valve not fully closing.

Here’s an example of how to accomplish a water line repair on a building that would really prefer to not shut their water off, in this case a regular hotel client of Rudolph Plumbing. The valves serving their commercial laundry machines were leaking very badly and were impeding a repair to one of the washers. I had to undertake my repair first to allow the commercial laundry repair tech to perform theirs. Note the use of shock-arrestors, these prevent pressure spikes & jarrin...g movement of the water lines when the washing machines electric valves close rapidly. I traced the water lines through the ceiling and determined that there were not any valves to isolate the hot & cold supply lines from the building mains. Shutting off the water to a hotel with 82 guest rooms is best left avoided so I opted to utilize my pipe freezing kit, which allows me to freeze an ice plug in the water lines. The kit has collars to fit pipe up to 2 diameter and uses liquid CO2 (carbon dioxide) to form dry ice around the pipe which freezes the water within. I have another kit that uses a different type of collar that can freeze pipes up 6 diameter, though the largest pipe diameter I’ve frozen to date is 4 (also at a hotel, though easily a few hundred more rooms by comparison). In the middle photo with the water lines cut, note that there is live water pressure above the black plastic collars that the coiled plastic CO2 lines are connected to. Previous freeze jobs included replacing the isolation valves to the baseboard heaters in a downtown office tower; every time that landlord had a vacancy on one floor they would take the opportunity to replace the existing 40+ year old valves, about 14 of them per floor, all work on night shift due to having to turn off the 21-story buildings heating boilers and circulators. Another freeze job of note was the previous Canadian Blood Services building just down the block from Lougheed House on 13th Ave S.W. That building could not have the water shut off whatsoever due to the fact that their refrigeration equipment was water-cooled. Turning off their water would ruin their stored blood (no stress freezing that one!! )

Here is an excellent example of what not to do with a domestic hot water recirculation system and what I did to right a chain of previous wrongs. This is a domestic hot water recirculation line in a Calgary location of a major North American hotel chain that burst entirely in two, the leaking water damaged electronic controls on 3 major pieces of heating equipment (both commercial water heaters and the boiler that serves the pool and hot tub). It was nice to fix it properly s...o that they won't suffer property damage or downtime in the future. Its a shame that the previous repair contractor passed themselves off as being competent when they clearly had no business working on such things. Stage 1 was isolating the leak upon arrival. Stage 2 was restoring the hot water for the entire hotel, stage 3 was replacing the poorly MacGuyvered sections of tubing and the circulator. All this while the hotel was at full occupancy. I was able to isolate & drain each water heater individually for the tie-in of the new recirc return connections, by doing this one at a time I maintained a constant hot water supply to the hotel. Performing that in the mid afternoon was ideal as it was the off-peak time for the guests hot water needs. Some might note redundant valves at the connections to the tanks, those were used so that I could restore the hot water as soon as possible and minimize down-time.