dt, Sound like you have good pressure for your purposes except when you mother in-law is doing laundry or watering her plants. check the flow rate by filling a 5-gal bucket and record the time to fill. You are splitting your flow rate from the street with her when you are both using water. If your mainline from the street is 5/8" which is common for subdivision (1" for upscale homes), I assume your house is 60 years old, so you have a reduced size of piping to about 1/2" diameter(from scaling). This size give you about 14 gpm. You can verify this by the filling bucket method. If you have a demand from a 3/4" pipe while gardening and you and your MIL uses water you may experience lower pressure. To establish what that pressure is use a pressure gauge(cheap at Hardware Store) on a hose bid to monitor the pressure. I would put a 1" pvc to the beds to reduce pressure loss and go from there. Each fitting and regulator you install saps pressure, but you should be okay. You can always irrigate one bed at a time if necessary. A little wordy but hope this helps. JMHO Aloha

Well...first you need to find out the worst case scenario. Add up the flow for your two body sprays, plus the flow of your shower head. That's the GPM that you need to carry to through your shower valve and to your diverter. You;ll need a valve that can pass through that volume of water. You can do what you want with an A/B/AB diverter. Coming out of the diverter is where you can run one 1/2" copper run to the shower head and a second 1/2" copper run to the body sprays. That's when using a separate on/off valve and a separate diverter. However, for your setup, you can run all three outlets from a 1/2" copper supply going into the valve and with 1/2" copper running from the valve to the fixtures. There are quite a few valves that can do what you want. One of the last houses I did I used Hansgrohe Thermobalance III valves in all of the bathrooms in the house. The TB III is an A/B/C/BC type of valve. It's also a 1/2" valve. I used it that way in a couple of the bathroms, in others the A and B outlets are looped together (let's call this new combined AB loop "D") so you now have a D/C/DC setup. "D" can be your shower head. "C" can be your body jets. "CD" can be your car wash with everything throwing water at you. In case that's confusing, think of it as the A/B/AB valve that I described in the beginning. It's an approved way to plumb the valve, and it with the TB III having ON/OFF, temp, and diverter all in one valve, you'll have an uncluttered wall. But again, besides the TB III there are other valves out there. So can you do it with a single control head? Yes. Can you do it with 1/2" copper into the valve and 1/2" copper coming out of the valve? Yes.

More than likely your plumber put in a rough in valve for the shower and either did not close one of the isolation valves, or it doesn't have any isolation valves and the valve is open with the shower head capped. This allows water to cross freely back and forth across the cold and the hot anytime water is used of either temp anywhere in the house, thus tempering your water throughout. Your water that is roughed in for the lavatory and toilet will not be warm as the water is not physically being used through those pipes and will not change the temperature of the lines themselves. Notify your plumber to check that this is what is going on to correct this and to also check and make sure it is not a physical cross- just as a precaution.

Hi Tom. I don't how to find the leak, but I do want to say that if you lay a new line you might consider sleeving it. That gives you the benefit of physical protection, plus you gain a little insulation if that's a factor. But the big plus is that should the new line develop a problem for any reason you can replace it without diggin up the whole durn thing! Or, I know many good workers would insist on a bed of sand or fine gravel for the pipe to lie in. It's a pretty simple matter to put 2" pvc in the trench and slide the 1" pipe through it. (I've also laid a short, accessible section this way and then filled the sleeve with expandable foam insulation injected via 1/4" holes. I thought this might help against freezing in a crawl space.) I doubt your rototilling had anything to do with it, and I'd be less surprised if the pear roots hurt it, but with tree roots you just never know. Perhaps, if the tree is large, they've grown under the line and put enough pressure on it to damage a joint. Big roots lift sidewalks, foundations, just about anything. Here's a thought- the pipe comes in 10 foot sections, so there's probably a joint every 10 feet. Dig around until you find the first joint, and see if it's leaking. If not, repeat 10 feet away, and so on. (And hope the guy laying it wasn't using up spare parts!) Good luck, M