I did that to clear out the water beyond the section I'm trying to put a coupling in and that cleared the water on that side. The problem is the other side where the water comes in the house. There are two shutoff valves at the meter, one before the meter and one after. I closed both of them but there is still a trickle of water making it past them, enough to make it impossible to solder properly. Our house is 59 years old and the valves look like they are the original ones so I'm sure that explains the water getting through. Anyway, I did buy a Sharkbite shutoff valve that I am going to put between the original valve by the meter and the section I'm trying to repair. This whole fiasco is a result of the city I live in sending inspectors out to make sure nobody had any water connections that could allow dirty water to back up into the system. They didn't like the water powered back-up sump pump I had in place for the last 25 years so they wanted me to install a $200 valve that would prevent water from backing up through the line that powered the pump. Since the water sump pump never gets used I decided I would just take it out and cap the T where it connected to the incoming water line. This is where all the problems started. Due to that dribble of water getting in the pipe I couldn't cap the tee. So I cut out the t-connection and tried to solder in a straight connector. That wouldn't take either. So I cut that coupling out and bought another longer one and tried cramming bread into the pipes. It bought me enough time to get some solder in but not enough to completely seal the connection so now it still has a slight drip. So, my next step is to install the Sharkbite valve and try to resolder the coupling and if that doesn't work, I'll splice in a Sharkbite coupling in place of the copper one. What a PITA.