Plumbing – How to use plumber’s tape on a pool float

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The auto-refill float broke off my pool filler recently. I bought a new unit and I was just going to switch out the float part but the guy at the shop said to unscrew it from the pipe and swap out the whole unit because the other part is also plastic and will fail at some point. Personally I think this was a mistake because then I discovered when I screwed in the new one that it was leaking water from the sides.

The image below shows the old broken unit. I thought that was some sort of caulking around the thread but I've been told that it's plumber's tape which I've just read-up about on wikipedia.

My plan: Get some plumber's tape from home depot and try wrapping that around the new thread and see if that works.

My questions:
I tried to take some of the white stuff (tape) from the old thread and add it to the new thread (I thought it was caulk) so the new thread already has some of this in its threads. How do I clean that out?

How many times should I wrap the tape around the thread?

Because the float has to be pointing down to cut off the water when it gets high enough there is only one position that this can end up in. How do I know when it's tight enough? i.e if I continue tightening past a certain point I have to do another 360 rotation to allow for the float.

This has to be installed under water. Any special techniques for this?

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Best Answer

  1. You can clean it with a wire brush.
  2. The number of wraps depends on the thickness of the teflon tape but should be between 3 and 6. Apply it tightly in the direction of the threads so that when you tighten it, the tape is not pushed in the opposite direction.
  3. As for aligning when screwing it in, it will depend on how much tape you have on it and what type of threads these are. I would go finger tight and then one complete turn and then continue until aligned. Take is easy as you don't want to break anything.
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