Need help identifying part.

[Lashen]

Not sure what happened. My thread from a moment ago seemed to delete after typing all that up and posting photos?

Hi, have at least one burst over winter, though not necessarily the pipe itself. At first I thought it was the meter in my basement because there was only some spray from around the freeze plate, but, there seems to be a forward flow now with very little coming from where it once did. Numbers are working again, etc.


Not far past my water meter, a connection seems to have popped partially. I need help identifying what this part might be, and hopefully fix myself because money is very tough right now (even if temporary like some kind of compound). I can't tell if this is a coupling or not for the water meter? It's close to one of them.


Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[cmwand]

Hard to be 100% looking at the photo, but it looks like that's a brass union coming out of your water meter and that one side of the union has cracked/burst. Unions are fittings with two halves that thread together and are used to connect things (such as a water meter) in the middle of a pipe run that you might want to be able to remove/replace in the future without having to cut and re-solder a bunch of fittings. Chances are you have a similar fitting on the other side of the meter too (again, hard to tell from the second photo) that allows you to unscrew the union fittings and remove the meter. It also looks like that burst brass union is connected to a brass press fitting like this one to transition it to the copper pipe.

You might be able to get lucky and find a union that matches the length of the existing one, but that union looks longer than ones I'm used to. If you can't find a union that is the same length as your current union, then you're going to have to modify/extend the copper pipe where the union attaches to it, and that's going to require either a copper press tool (not worth buying for a single fix) or sweating (soldering) a new fitting onto the end of the copper. If you're handy with a torch, it's a pretty simple fix; if you're not handy with a torch, then not so much. You might be able to find a SharkBite fitting like this one that would work with the new union you'll have to install, but I personally am not a fan of using SharkBite fittings for permanent solutions (I'm sure you'll find others who disagree with me).

Good luck!