I really like hardware stores.
As Maggie can attest, I can spend an hour or more in a hardware store when I am working on a project and looking for the right combination of tools and supplies. There is one project, however, that I dread going to the hardware store for, and that is a plumbing project. Specifically, I find the search for plumbing fittings to be exhausting.
As an example, my current project involves our rain barrel. Filling a bucket with the rain barrel is easy, as we just have to open the spigot. We would like to use the rain barrel to water our new fruit trees, which are some distance from the rain barrel. To do that, I am working on a pump to boost pressure.
The pump will be an article for another day. The chore here is to connect all of the components together, which include the rain barrel, a filter, a pump, and a garden hose. The rain barrel spigot accepts a component with 3/4-inch female hose threads (FHT), like a garden hose. However, the filter and pump get installed between the rain barrel and garden hose. The filter has 3/4-inch female pipe threads (FPT), which are not compatible with FHT, so I cannot simply screw the filter to the rain barrel spigot. The pump not only has male pipe threads (MPT), but the connection size is 1/2-inch. The garden hose is a 3/4-inch FHT connection. The challenge is to find a combination of adapters, bushings, and couplings to transition not only from 3/4-inch to 1/2-inch, and back from 1/2-inch to 3/4-inch to get water in and out of the pump, but to make transitions from hose threads to pipe threads, and male to female connections. Just mixing up a male and female connection is another trip to the hardware store.
Most of the time, a hardware store has all, but one, of the fittings you need. For this project, after spending an hour with my sketch finding the right pieces, I found an empty bin for the 1/2-inch FPT to 3/4-inch MPT bushing. At least this convinced me the fitting actually exists. This of course means trying my luck at another hardware store. Fortunately, I do like hardware stores.
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