lord only knows why I didn’t try this sooner.
My dad suspects it is 1/2″ inlet though – so we’ll find out tonight… stay tuned…
At lunch today I was sitting there eating my “American Chicken Sandwich“, never feeling more patriotic (or was it idiotic?) in my life and I was thinking about how I had already known the valves were weird on Thursday night.
Then I remembered that at some point as a child my dad had asked me (or maybe my brother and I was watching this or vice versa) to go turn off the water valve in the basement of our house. I’d never done it before and didn’t know how to do it (stupid I know, but I was a kid) – and somehow I screwed up and my dad got all wet or something. I just remember there was a water connection in the basement involved, and either myself or my brother did something wrong with it… But after that I knew what a regular valve looked like and what to do with it (which is something that Lowes employees with salt and pepper hair apparently do not).
That compression end sounds like a good guess too. I have never worked with 5/8″ tube—maybe they mean actual O.D. of the tube—but again–California.
Let me try this again—pipe sizes are different from copper tube sizes and both are called out as nominal sizes: 1/2″ called (nominal) tube has an actual measured outside diameter of 5/8″ but is still called in the trade 1/2″. Compression fittings use a copper ring on the O.D. of the tube that is swaged down to form a tight mechanical seal at the joint.