In which I replace a compression coupling

After being nearly frightened out of replacing an old "dresser coupling" by my plumber, I decided to just deal with this.

The water coming into my house from the meter is plumbed in galvanized steel, and quite a while back I'd ripped out all the old (out of service) galvanized pipe from the basement. So I knew it was in terrible shape, and my plumber scared me into thinking perhaps even looking at the supply line coming into the house wrong would cause it to explode, and then cost me lots of money to re-run new pipe to my meter (under the sidewalk, all the way at the curb).

But then I decided to poke at the old compression coupling, and realized it was not that difficult to remove, so I pulled it off. The galvanized coming up (you can see it in the top of the picture at the right) didn't look to be in terrible condition -- the pipe wall was still fairly thick at least -- and so I cleaned up the stub as best I could and picked up a new compression coupling at Home Depot.

Yeah, I bought a galvanized coupling. Sue me. The brass ones were like 20 bucks and I think the rubber inside this thing will go before it does. The brass stub cost me about 9 bucks anyway.

This doesn't leak, and seems to be quite sound. I've got it uncovered and have been looking at it occasionally to see if there's any leakage, and there has not been any since it was installed (I backdated this post to 11/14, but it's now about 3 weeks later). Case closed. Soon I will bury it a bit to immobilize it -- apparently pipe motion is bad for these couplings, which makes sense.

I don't look forward to the day when the supply line from the meter does spring a leak. I'll probably be too OCD to replace it with PVC, and will insist on copper, just like I did for the house plumbing (instead of choosing PEX).