Pex pipe

dlane

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Anybody familiar with pex plumbing pipe ? Thinking of repiping the house . It has galvanized rusty water pipe in it now and it sprung a small leek that was squirting the underside of the floor "not good" had to cut a hole in the floor to patch it , I'm sure other holes are on the way eventually , it is a double wide mobile
Just wondering if any one has experience with it the do's and don'ts , I'll be hiring a plumber for the job
Thanks
 
Pretty easy stuff to use. A handyman dream, a cutter and crimper are all you need to be a professional. I've got about 3000 feet of it with oxygen barrier in the floors of the shop and house for radiant heat. Used the leftovers to plumb the domestic water.
Only tricks are watch your bend radius and don't bury a fitting in the wall, but to be honest I've never had one leak.

Greg
 
I'm an old timer and still look at pex with concern. I love good old copper with solder connections. My son in law just replaced his whole house plumbing with pex and loves it. Easy to rout, cut, and connect. I've done my house and a rental property in copper in the last 2 years and must admit that pex would have been a lot easier but as I said, I'm an old timer. I've never seen problems with any pex system though.

CHuck the Grumpy old guy
 
My well gives us "hard" water, Any horizontal runs of copper will be eaten up in a few years. So we went to PEX and even S-40 PVC.

I like copper when we lived in the city. But over here on the well. Plastic is the way to go.
 
I installed some "temporary" pex hot and cold plumbing in the basement when we did a kitchen remodel over eleven years ago. It's still in place and we never had any problems with it. As a DIY project, it is by far the simplest way to go. For any major job, go with the crimped connections rather than the quick connect. Far cheaper in the long run. I didn't because I had only eight connections to make and the cost of the crimping tool wasn't justified at the time.

If you're hiring the job out, it will save you money in both materials and labor. I haven't seen any down side.
 
I have built at least 1500homes using pex. The only leaks I’ve had are from screws or fittings that were installed incorrectly.
 
Built our home in 1998 using PEX overhead, never had a single issue. The heavy Swiss made fittings where a little pricey but overall an excellent product.
 
I recently re-piped quite a lot of our house with PEX when building a spa room.

I didn't do enough research (or didn't think through what I did find) and replaced 3/4" copper with 3/4" PEX (routing it through the floor joists rather than on the surface so I could eventually drywall the basement ceiling.

If I had to do it again I would have done individual 'home runs' of much smaller pex (3/8" maybe?) directly from the water heater to the places that needed hot water. The PEX is much smoother inside so there's less friction - and the smaller pipe means the hot water gets to the tap much faster because you don't have a big slug of cold water in the 3/4" supply line to move before the hot water can arrive.

The 'home runs' are recommended for PEX and now I know why. Probably cheaper in the long run just for not wasting hot water. Besides that, the smaller piping would have been much easier to snake through the joists.

Stu

Bath Theorem: When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.
 
The plastic pipe also does not suck heat out of the hot water like copper does. "Low specific heat."
 
I had doubts about using it but after the experience I would have to say it's a pretty good system. The biggest drawback I see is you have to convert over to NPT eventually and that interface is not fully developed in my opinion.
 
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