Why Clean Copper Pipes Before Sweating

Video Transcript

"Hello my good friends, Don Golden for Expert Village and we're talking about copper piping. We've shown you how to put the joints together, how to clean them, how to prep them. Again cleaning is a very important part of this. Cleaning with the emery cloth, cleaning the inside and the outside of the pipe but let's just take a for instance here. For instance being you know what, I don't want to clean this pipe, or I'm going to do a shoddy job for somebody because I want to get the heck out of here. Well I'm going to show you what happens if you try to do that. If you take a piece of this pipe and put it on here without cleaning it and without prepping it the you're joint is just not going to be very good and it might not even hold. Let's see what happens. I am going to fire this thing up and we'll put some solder on there just to show you the difference. I am going to heat it up and remember we didn't clean this, we didn't flux it, we didn't do anything. We're just heating it up. Now you notice it is not even going inside. It is just gathering on top and falling off. Nothing, gathering and falling off. I think I've made my point. You want to make those joints very clean and very ready to take the solder; otherwise, you've got nothing going on there."