At the end of my prior dishwasher fiasco work, I was left with a bum dishwasher line and a leaking shutoff valve. The leaking valve is the one of the right:
No matter how tightly I cranked it shut, it the line would not stop dripping. Today, I rebuilt that valve with a Brasscraft shutoff valve rebuild kit. Somehow, I made the leak worse with that rebuild! That means this old shutoff valve needs replacement. I don’t think it’s more than 20 years old, so that surprised me.
To make matters worse, the line supplying my hot water valve on my kitchen sink started leaking on one of its fittings. You can see water collecting on it in this picture:
It may be correctable by simply tightening it up. However, since I want to replace the valves below anyway, and since the flexible line is of unknown age, I went ahead and replaced it, too.
I ended up getting a 3 way, quarter turn ball valve:
The brass cap on the right is where a dishwasher line will later feed into it the water supply when I get this new dishwasher.
Notice that the fitting on the bottom is not soldered. This compression fitting seemed scary, but they are apparently the de facto fitting for new installations where the lines don’t move much. If the lines are subject to a lot of movement, especially twisting motion, you still need to use an old-fashioned solder valve.
So far this contraption is holding up fine.
By the way, an experienced professional told me that the universal dishwasher line is usually fine. It could be that I had a defective line or a defective fitting. Either way, I am returning the $15 universal line back to Home Depot and picking up a more reasonably-priced $10 line from Lowe’s.