**Soldering Copper Joints in Pipe: A DIY Guide**

As we begin our DIY project, it's essential to understand the basics of soldering copper joints in pipe. In this article, we'll take you through the step-by-step process of how to do it safely and effectively.

**Preparation is Key**

Before we start, make sure you have all the necessary materials within arm's reach. We recommend having a fire extinguisher nearby, just in case. You'll also need a torch with an igniter, a copper pipe with a joint that needs soldering, and some solder paste or flux. If you're working on existing plumbing in your house, it's best to have a tub of water nearby to cool down the area after completion.

**Heating the Joint**

Now, let's get started with heating the joint. We'll place our torch on one side of the joint and carefully heat it up until the solder paste starts to melt and drip onto the pipe. Be cautious not to touch the hot surface with your hands, as it can cause serious burns. As you heat the joint, observe how the solder paste flows into the gap between the pipe and the fitting. This is where the magic happens – the solder will start to flow and seal the joint.

**Adding Solder**

Once the solder has melted and started flowing, carefully touch the copper with the tip of a spatula or similar tool. You'll notice that the solder starts to suck into the gap, filling it perfectly. Make sure not to apply too much pressure, as this can cause the pipe to become misshapen. Take your time, and work slowly to ensure a smooth, even application of solder.

**Cleaning Up**

After completing the soldering process, use a damp rag to wipe away any excess solder that may have dripped onto the surrounding area. This will help prevent corrosion from building up over time. The rag will also remove any charred residual on the pipe, giving it a clean finish.

**Inspecting the Joint**

Now that the joint is complete, take a step back and admire your handiwork. If you move the torch slightly closer to the camera lens, you'll see how the solder has perfectly sealed the gap between the pipe and the fitting. This is what makes soldering copper joints in pipe so rewarding – it's a beautiful sight to behold.

**Tips and Tricks**

One essential tip when working with solder is to practice on scrap materials before attempting a real joint. This will give you a feel for the process and help you develop the necessary skills. Additionally, having a damp rag nearby can be a lifesaver in case of any accidents or spills.

In our next video on house improvements, we'll take you through some more DIY projects that'll make your home shine like new. For now, it's time to wrap up this article and thank you for watching! Don't forget to check out our website for more tutorials, videos, and articles on all things DIY.

**Additional Resources**

* Visit our website at [website URL] for more DIY guides, tutorials, and articles.

* Check out our YouTube channel for a range of DIY videos and tutorials.

* Join our forum to ask questions, share your projects, and get feedback from fellow DIY enthusiasts.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi I'm Shannon from host improvements comm and I want to show you a demonstration on how to solder copper pipe so typically this would be for running your water in your house or that sort of thing the few things that we need obviously is some copper pipe I'm just using a couple scrap pieces here and I'm going to solder an elbow in so I've got that we need some Emery cloth we need a wire brush for cleaning the inside of the fitting we need some solder paste and a brush to apply it we've got some lead-free solder we're just going to use a small handheld torch like a lot of you maybe already own already I've got a clamp just for holding things together here just because this is a demonstration and we've got our fire extinguisher just in case something else that you want to have is maybe a bit of water and a damp rag and I'll explain all that once we get to it but first of all what we're going to do is you need to properly clean and prepare the ends of the tube the copper tubing that you're going to solder together so to do that you want to take your Emery cloth or flying sandpaper and you want to shine up the end of your copper give it a few twists like that and go back about an inch or so something like that something else I should actually maybe show you is actually cutting the copper pipe so we've got a tube cutter okay I'll just cut cut a piece off of here basically this has a little wheel cutting wheel here and some guides and it just simply adjust by a threaded adjustment there until it snugs the wheel up against the copper simply turn it around a couple times give the wheel another little bit of tightening to go a little deeper just keep continuing on doing that until your piece comes off okay anytime you've done that most of these will also have a deburring file on the end because what happens when you cut with these is you get a real burr on the inside of that pipe now so this simply goes in the end give it a few turns like this you can see some little pieces falling out of there and it just gets that burr off of there that can cause water restrictions okay so we're going to deburr the two ends of the pipe where I use like so we're going to shine things up once we've done that want to try to avoid touching that area again or getting it dirty so we're going to try to leave it standing up like that and to take my other pipe that I'm going to attach to shine it up just like that you can see how shiny and clean and fresh looking that is we've just taken off the tarnish on that so the solder sticks properly okay so we've got that one prepared now the fitting you're going to use you can have street but fittings we've got nine B's there's some of their off angles that sort of thing anything you're going to solder the pipe itself for this instance the pipe goes inside of the end of this so we need this little round wire brush to go inside here and basically shine these up because they're tarnished and everything too so we want to get that nice and shined up because that's the surface on the inside of the fitting that's going to bond with the solder and the outside of the pipe so we'll shine those all up safety wise like I said I've got the fire extinguisher here just that's just in case you just you never know you're dealing with fire you're dealing with the torch here in order to heat this up enough to melt the solder and make the connection so you know you might be working right in a corner in the framing or whatever so there's other things around you that can ignite that you don't even realize you know you can be using the torch to heat this up not really realizing that you know six or eight inches over here there's something flammable that you've heated up to the point where it starts to smoke or smolder so you need to be very cautious about what's what's around you not just what you're working on so just a word of advice there so I keep a fire extinguisher bit of water just in case and always be vigilant about what's around you so we've cleaned the the pipe the copper pipe and the fitting okay so we've got that all prepared we can set these to the side now what we need is some soldering paste basically this just helps the solder to flow in the joint that you're making and make sure that you get a nice nice joint so I use a brush I try to not use your hand that you're the oils and stuff on your hand can contaminate the paste and the joint so we want to use the paste we want to basically just brush it on you can kind of see maybe this fitting goes on by a good 5/8 of an inch I would say you can almost see a little bit of a bump here so it gives you an idea about how far that's going which is basically the width of my brush so I'm just going to brush this on just a little wider than the full width of the brush you don't need big gobs of it on there but you need it to be nicely covered so we've got that one done we're going to do both pipes so both ends and just brush it on like so just get a nice uniform amount on there we've got that on both ends you don't need to put it inside the fitting you can if you want but really is no need if you have a good good coating on that on those pipes that's all you need there for that so now what we're going to do again we're not grabbing where we've cleaned it or put the paste we're going to grab this put the pieces together make sure it's bottom braid out or pushed on as far as it'll go here's the other piece we're going to do same thing make sure it goes right in there and it's bottomed out so we've got our our fit there I'm just going to use this clamp to hopefully hold it up while we're soldering so that it'll stand like so so you can kind of see now the idea with the solder with the torch and the solder is you need to heat up this getting to a point where when you touch the solder to it the solder will melt for one thing and then be drawn inside of that joint and the heat basically does that it draws that in and the paste helps so I always have my solder we're using lead-free solder right because we're we're also using presumably a water line here so we don't want lead in it so we got lead-free solder I leave it on the roll it usually comes on a roll like this I just extend out a a bit Bend it however I want so I can so I can work with it this torch has a swivel kind of end so I can kind of get my angles how I need what I'm going to do is light the torch and in this case on this elbow heat always rises so what I do is I usually solder my bottom joint first you know in this type of case because as I'm heating this bottom joint up that heats obviously going through all the pipe - it's going to warm everything up but it's if anything that's rising up here and preheating this one a little bit so I'll start down here get that one all soldered then I'll move up to the top one which will already be preheated and it won't take as much to get it to get it going if you are working on a pipe that you've cut for some reason maybe you had a hole in it you've got to fix it or you're putting a tee in or something like that but it's an existing pipe that has water in it you want to drain as much water as you can out you know if you're working down in the basement and this pipe is up in the ceiling make your cut on your pipe get a bucket or something under there have somebody hold a bucket go upstairs and open a couple taps different sinks that'll let a bit of air into the line which will help flush out any excess water that's in there because when you're using a small torch like this you know you're barely getting the heat you need to heat the pipe but if there's water in that pipe that water is taking all that heat away and it takes forever to to heat it up enough so you really want your pipe to be basically water free I've seen people I've never done this myself but I've seen and heard people saying well you know if you got you know sometimes you get a bit of water that just continued wants to drip through that pipe as you're trying to solder and they'll actually take a break off piece of bread stuff it into the pipe so it works kind of like a cork at least for a short time and then what they say is the water will eventually dissolve that Brad and it just basically dissolves and it's gone I've never tried it I always try to just drain the water and and be done with it and not have to worry about the bread but I have heard that works so I'm going to light the torch usually what I do is all come and kind of preheat the front face just for a few seconds and then I'm going to come around and do the rest of the heating from this back side from from the way the cameras looking and I'm going to get right down here as well because I want to be heating this up and you're going to see I'm going to touch the copper basically rate rate to the pipe and the fitting right into that corner and you'll kind of see as you get it hot enough you're going to see that it's starting to leave a mark leak like a bit of solder is actually melting off and going there once it's hot enough it'll actually pool and draw that solder rate up inside and rate around okay so I'm going to do that then I'm going to move up like I said to the top joint and then as soon as I basically got that done what I want to do is take my damp rag and wipe all the way around there what that does it wipes off the excess paste it kind of smoothes that solder out and it keeps it from getting a real buildup of corrosion over time so so a damp rag on your joints after is a really good idea just and it makes it look better too so I'm going to go ahead and fire up here we've got our fire extinguisher right here in this case I'm hopefully we don't need it but you never hope so I'm going to fire up this one has an igniter on it okay like I said I'm going to preheat this backside just a little bit so then I'm going to come around to the back here or the side and work from there and it takes a depending on your torch it's going to take a few seconds you'll see you'll notice that the paste kind of heats up and starts to drip even a little bit and already my solder is good and you can see it sucking right around as we go so this side is good we got a bit of smoke coming out that isn't a big deal and you want to try to rub your solder opposite of where the torch is because then you know you got the pipe hard enough on both sides and I'm not sure if you can even see that on the on the film or not how it just melted and instantly wanted to suck into that joint this pipe is hot so you definitely don't want to grab it with your hand but you can see how I just kind of cleaned that up with a bit of a bit of a damp rag it gets away that bit of charred residual on there gets it off there and I've got a bit of an ugly solder on the bottom I really actually put a little bit too much solder on there you can see I was talking and not paying attention you don't want your solder to be hanging off the bottom like that that's I probably got twice as much solder there as I really needed to just wasn't paying close enough attention as I was talking now if I move this in by the camera and if the camera zooms in I'm going to use this just as a pointer you can see how the solder this is where I would have touched the solder on there and it you can just see it perfectly sucked in all nice there's no gaps in that joint around the pipe or anything it's it's really tough to see I'm sure I don't know if the camera guy can get in there and really see it but you'll you'll see once you do it you know do a couple practices on something you'll grab some scraps or whatever and do a couple practices where you can see what what you're doing and that way you get a bit of a feel for it before you get in the house and working on it yourself and it gives you an idea of the feel of using the torch and stuff too and not burn yourself okay so you know that's that's the basics of it if if you were doing this sort of thing maybe you're prepping up some pieces you could definitely just have a tub of water here and dip it in there to cool it off after the fact after you've wiped it but in most cases you're going to be working on existing plumbing in your house likely so so that's that's really all I think I can tell you the basics of soldering a copper joint in some pipe copper pipe and hopefully you found it informative and maybe useful and we do have the web site as well house improvements comm so you can go and check the website out there is a video link there and other tabs to articles the video link will take you to another link which gets you to our YouTube channel where we've got numerous videos on all kinds of do-it-yourself or type things we've also got a forum from the website you can go into the forum you can ask questions you can look around in there see what everybody else is doing and make any comments you want in there and I'll get back to you for sure within a couple days so thanks a lot for watchinghi I'm Shannon from host improvements comm and I want to show you a demonstration on how to solder copper pipe so typically this would be for running your water in your house or that sort of thing the few things that we need obviously is some copper pipe I'm just using a couple scrap pieces here and I'm going to solder an elbow in so I've got that we need some Emery cloth we need a wire brush for cleaning the inside of the fitting we need some solder paste and a brush to apply it we've got some lead-free solder we're just going to use a small handheld torch like a lot of you maybe already own already I've got a clamp just for holding things together here just because this is a demonstration and we've got our fire extinguisher just in case something else that you want to have is maybe a bit of water and a damp rag and I'll explain all that once we get to it but first of all what we're going to do is you need to properly clean and prepare the ends of the tube the copper tubing that you're going to solder together so to do that you want to take your Emery cloth or flying sandpaper and you want to shine up the end of your copper give it a few twists like that and go back about an inch or so something like that something else I should actually maybe show you is actually cutting the copper pipe so we've got a tube cutter okay I'll just cut cut a piece off of here basically this has a little wheel cutting wheel here and some guides and it just simply adjust by a threaded adjustment there until it snugs the wheel up against the copper simply turn it around a couple times give the wheel another little bit of tightening to go a little deeper just keep continuing on doing that until your piece comes off okay anytime you've done that most of these will also have a deburring file on the end because what happens when you cut with these is you get a real burr on the inside of that pipe now so this simply goes in the end give it a few turns like this you can see some little pieces falling out of there and it just gets that burr off of there that can cause water restrictions okay so we're going to deburr the two ends of the pipe where I use like so we're going to shine things up once we've done that want to try to avoid touching that area again or getting it dirty so we're going to try to leave it standing up like that and to take my other pipe that I'm going to attach to shine it up just like that you can see how shiny and clean and fresh looking that is we've just taken off the tarnish on that so the solder sticks properly okay so we've got that one prepared now the fitting you're going to use you can have street but fittings we've got nine B's there's some of their off angles that sort of thing anything you're going to solder the pipe itself for this instance the pipe goes inside of the end of this so we need this little round wire brush to go inside here and basically shine these up because they're tarnished and everything too so we want to get that nice and shined up because that's the surface on the inside of the fitting that's going to bond with the solder and the outside of the pipe so we'll shine those all up safety wise like I said I've got the fire extinguisher here just that's just in case you just you never know you're dealing with fire you're dealing with the torch here in order to heat this up enough to melt the solder and make the connection so you know you might be working right in a corner in the framing or whatever so there's other things around you that can ignite that you don't even realize you know you can be using the torch to heat this up not really realizing that you know six or eight inches over here there's something flammable that you've heated up to the point where it starts to smoke or smolder so you need to be very cautious about what's what's around you not just what you're working on so just a word of advice there so I keep a fire extinguisher bit of water just in case and always be vigilant about what's around you so we've cleaned the the pipe the copper pipe and the fitting okay so we've got that all prepared we can set these to the side now what we need is some soldering paste basically this just helps the solder to flow in the joint that you're making and make sure that you get a nice nice joint so I use a brush I try to not use your hand that you're the oils and stuff on your hand can contaminate the paste and the joint so we want to use the paste we want to basically just brush it on you can kind of see maybe this fitting goes on by a good 5/8 of an inch I would say you can almost see a little bit of a bump here so it gives you an idea about how far that's going which is basically the width of my brush so I'm just going to brush this on just a little wider than the full width of the brush you don't need big gobs of it on there but you need it to be nicely covered so we've got that one done we're going to do both pipes so both ends and just brush it on like so just get a nice uniform amount on there we've got that on both ends you don't need to put it inside the fitting you can if you want but really is no need if you have a good good coating on that on those pipes that's all you need there for that so now what we're going to do again we're not grabbing where we've cleaned it or put the paste we're going to grab this put the pieces together make sure it's bottom braid out or pushed on as far as it'll go here's the other piece we're going to do same thing make sure it goes right in there and it's bottomed out so we've got our our fit there I'm just going to use this clamp to hopefully hold it up while we're soldering so that it'll stand like so so you can kind of see now the idea with the solder with the torch and the solder is you need to heat up this getting to a point where when you touch the solder to it the solder will melt for one thing and then be drawn inside of that joint and the heat basically does that it draws that in and the paste helps so I always have my solder we're using lead-free solder right because we're we're also using presumably a water line here so we don't want lead in it so we got lead-free solder I leave it on the roll it usually comes on a roll like this I just extend out a a bit Bend it however I want so I can so I can work with it this torch has a swivel kind of end so I can kind of get my angles how I need what I'm going to do is light the torch and in this case on this elbow heat always rises so what I do is I usually solder my bottom joint first you know in this type of case because as I'm heating this bottom joint up that heats obviously going through all the pipe - it's going to warm everything up but it's if anything that's rising up here and preheating this one a little bit so I'll start down here get that one all soldered then I'll move up to the top one which will already be preheated and it won't take as much to get it to get it going if you are working on a pipe that you've cut for some reason maybe you had a hole in it you've got to fix it or you're putting a tee in or something like that but it's an existing pipe that has water in it you want to drain as much water as you can out you know if you're working down in the basement and this pipe is up in the ceiling make your cut on your pipe get a bucket or something under there have somebody hold a bucket go upstairs and open a couple taps different sinks that'll let a bit of air into the line which will help flush out any excess water that's in there because when you're using a small torch like this you know you're barely getting the heat you need to heat the pipe but if there's water in that pipe that water is taking all that heat away and it takes forever to to heat it up enough so you really want your pipe to be basically water free I've seen people I've never done this myself but I've seen and heard people saying well you know if you got you know sometimes you get a bit of water that just continued wants to drip through that pipe as you're trying to solder and they'll actually take a break off piece of bread stuff it into the pipe so it works kind of like a cork at least for a short time and then what they say is the water will eventually dissolve that Brad and it just basically dissolves and it's gone I've never tried it I always try to just drain the water and and be done with it and not have to worry about the bread but I have heard that works so I'm going to light the torch usually what I do is all come and kind of preheat the front face just for a few seconds and then I'm going to come around and do the rest of the heating from this back side from from the way the cameras looking and I'm going to get right down here as well because I want to be heating this up and you're going to see I'm going to touch the copper basically rate rate to the pipe and the fitting right into that corner and you'll kind of see as you get it hot enough you're going to see that it's starting to leave a mark leak like a bit of solder is actually melting off and going there once it's hot enough it'll actually pool and draw that solder rate up inside and rate around okay so I'm going to do that then I'm going to move up like I said to the top joint and then as soon as I basically got that done what I want to do is take my damp rag and wipe all the way around there what that does it wipes off the excess paste it kind of smoothes that solder out and it keeps it from getting a real buildup of corrosion over time so so a damp rag on your joints after is a really good idea just and it makes it look better too so I'm going to go ahead and fire up here we've got our fire extinguisher right here in this case I'm hopefully we don't need it but you never hope so I'm going to fire up this one has an igniter on it okay like I said I'm going to preheat this backside just a little bit so then I'm going to come around to the back here or the side and work from there and it takes a depending on your torch it's going to take a few seconds you'll see you'll notice that the paste kind of heats up and starts to drip even a little bit and already my solder is good and you can see it sucking right around as we go so this side is good we got a bit of smoke coming out that isn't a big deal and you want to try to rub your solder opposite of where the torch is because then you know you got the pipe hard enough on both sides and I'm not sure if you can even see that on the on the film or not how it just melted and instantly wanted to suck into that joint this pipe is hot so you definitely don't want to grab it with your hand but you can see how I just kind of cleaned that up with a bit of a bit of a damp rag it gets away that bit of charred residual on there gets it off there and I've got a bit of an ugly solder on the bottom I really actually put a little bit too much solder on there you can see I was talking and not paying attention you don't want your solder to be hanging off the bottom like that that's I probably got twice as much solder there as I really needed to just wasn't paying close enough attention as I was talking now if I move this in by the camera and if the camera zooms in I'm going to use this just as a pointer you can see how the solder this is where I would have touched the solder on there and it you can just see it perfectly sucked in all nice there's no gaps in that joint around the pipe or anything it's it's really tough to see I'm sure I don't know if the camera guy can get in there and really see it but you'll you'll see once you do it you know do a couple practices on something you'll grab some scraps or whatever and do a couple practices where you can see what what you're doing and that way you get a bit of a feel for it before you get in the house and working on it yourself and it gives you an idea of the feel of using the torch and stuff too and not burn yourself okay so you know that's that's the basics of it if if you were doing this sort of thing maybe you're prepping up some pieces you could definitely just have a tub of water here and dip it in there to cool it off after the fact after you've wiped it but in most cases you're going to be working on existing plumbing in your house likely so so that's that's really all I think I can tell you the basics of soldering a copper joint in some pipe copper pipe and hopefully you found it informative and maybe useful and we do have the web site as well house improvements comm so you can go and check the website out there is a video link there and other tabs to articles the video link will take you to another link which gets you to our YouTube channel where we've got numerous videos on all kinds of do-it-yourself or type things we've also got a forum from the website you can go into the forum you can ask questions you can look around in there see what everybody else is doing and make any comments you want in there and I'll get back to you for sure within a couple days so thanks a lot for watching\n"