PVC Fittings--Making a non-standard bend neatly--Any ideas

[JohnT]

I'm trying to plumb my solar panels, and with the outlet plumbing I'd like to follow the pitch of my roof down the side of the building to the corner. It's 1.5" PVC. Easy enough to do, but turning the corner to come down vertically is a little tricky. I can do it with 22.5 or 45 degree elbows and a little twisting, but this point is fairly visible, and I don't want it to look like some kind of franken-plumbing mess.

A couple of questions: Is there a neat solution to this? Do any of the major home-improvement chains carry 11 degree elbows?

Lowe's, Menard's and Home Depot are all about the same distance for me, but HD is 45 minutes one direction and Lowe's and Menard's 45 minutes another way. The website for HD has a problem and only returns two items in plumbing, Lowe's doesn't show things I know they carry (like 1-1/2" 90 degree elbows), and Menard's doesn't list anything but water heaters.

 

[duraleigh]

Hi, John,

If you can wait, this is a good website with lot's of PVC fittings....including 11 degree elbows.

http://www.flexpvc.com/cart/picserve.cg ... eelbow.png

 

[JohnT]

Hi, John,

If you can wait, this is a good website with lot's of PVC fittings....including 11 degree elbows.

http://www.flexpvc.com/cart/picserve.cg ... eelbow.png

Yeah, but waiting is so hard Dave! That site has some really odd stuff, and is a great resource. Just hoping I can get done this week. I might have to deal with a little more ugly than I want to.

 

[guitbusy]

Home Depot should have some flexible PVC. You can create what ever angle you want with some of that...

 

[sevver]

Using two 45 degree bends you can do anything. Just roll them. Plumbers do this all the time, it is called a rolling offset. 11's are sort of hard to come by, I know they make them in watermain fittings, and in cast iron fittings, can't say that I have ever come across one in PVC though, and I have worked for plumbing companies for about 8 years before I decided to change my career to "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up..."

What do you need to do, like a 45 and an 11? I say just roll it. Or, if you are daring, there is a thing called a heat box. Not sure if it is rentable or not, but essentially you would take a rod, bend it in the shape you want for a template. Then plug both ends of a pipe, put it in the box, heat it up, and it will be VERY flexible, and just bend it to the shape of the rod. Cut it to fit and voila. Maybe you could do this with a torch. You have to plug both ends though, the air inside has to heat up. Maybe a grill.... Get that sucka up to about 600 degrees, and put the pipe in there until it is soft. If you do that though, you just have to post a pic of the finished product.

 

[JohnT]

Using two 45 degree bends you can do anything. Just roll them. Plumbers do this all the time, it is called a rolling offset.

Yeah, it's just that this is going to be just above eye level on a prominent corner, so I was hoping to make it lay as close to flat to the building as I could get. It's just one of those things where I was hoping that there was a simple solution that I didn't know about.

We do the heat trick with PVC at work sometimes, but we don't care about appearance. We have an end cap that has a bolt through it, and we chuck it in a drill and spin the pipe and heat it with a torch with a rosebud on the end. We use it to make antenna stands for testing.

 

[Molson]

try filling the pipe full of sand and heating it, then bend to fit. The sand will prevent kinking.