I was doing some work on the plumbing - I'm switching the entire house from copper to PEX.

At about the mid-point, when I had most of the pipes cut, I had to de-sweat a pipe. The water in the house was off, but I'd pulled out a 7 gallon water jug that we keep full all the time.

My son, not knowing I was in the basement torching a pipe, grabbed the same pipe whilst upstairs. He howled in pain, and we used our emergency water supply to cool the burn. He was not seriously hurt, but I was glad to have the water on hand.

I'd be interested to know how you like the PEX. Hope your son doesn't have too many blisters!

I'll move this to around the campfire....

PEX is the most amazing thing ever. I've hated plumbing of all kinds, forever. Sweating a pipe makes me feel like a total moron. I just plain don't get along with drains, sinks, fittings of all kinds...

But the PEX stuff...it's amazing, because it's so much like electrical work (which I like and do very, very well) and the tools are simple, effective and cheap.

All in all, we'll have the whole house over to PEX this year.

Can't use it where exposed to sunlight, though.

why would you convert? Change things as needed (and besides, I learned to sweat pipe when I was a single digit midget)

We have the predecessor to PEX... I can;t think of its acronym right now. There have been lawsuits and the makers and builders have had to completely refurbish homes by replacing all the lines with PEX. Our home has the old stuff, and thank god I don;t have any leaks.

I'm a big fan of copper too, like kc2ixe. In a former life, I was a carpenter. Being in the trade for ten years, I learned how to sweat pipes from plumbers. There's nothing like it! Give me a hot water heater to install, and if there's copper to be sweated, I'm there...Mapp gas and solder in hand.

I suppose though, if and when I have to do it, I'll replace out stuff with PEX just because of its flexibility and ease of installation.

Keeping water on hand while plumbing work is in progress is also good just in case the work doesn't get done TODAY.

I still remember the day my father was doing some kind of plumbing, and we didn't have use of a toilet or running water for two days.

Sue

Heh, now a days its probably profitable to convert if you sell the old copper lines

Is PEX the stuff thats amde from PVC, I can't recall whats what anymore.

I only have one of those little propane torches, takes forever to get a copper joint warm enough to solder. Once we move I'm upgrading to a better torch.

I work in IT and with enterprise class servers which have redundant power supplies, hot plug hardware, etc and was telling co workers that when I was redoing my kitchen I was tempted to run redundant load balanced pipes to everything so I could work on one part while the rest was still in use so I could have 99.99999% uptime of all my plumbing.

Sounds like your plumbing system is Microsoft based, then.

In that case, I would wait for PEX v 2.0 before making the changes, they should have it debugged by then. Also make sure you get the right size for the desired throughput. PEX lite might be okay for household work.

It is also good to have water around in case your plumbing torchwork lights a FIRE.

About 10 years ago my father was working on a pipe at my house, he set the torch down to work on the fitting and when he looked back a dresser was on fire! He put the fire out with some wet towels he had been using to soak up the water from the pipe.

A fire extinguisher at hand is a good idea.

Mike

PEX Facts


BTW, redundant plumbing would work better with redundant water supplies.


JimJr

MICROSOFT PLUMBING???

What a twisted mind!


Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!

Sue, running from the room screaming

Push Start to turn the water off...

If by "little propane torches" Eugene, you mean the torch that screws on a propane bottle about, oh 10 or 12" tall by about 3" in diameter, that's all I have and that's all you need. If you have one of those, instead of Propane, buy Mapp gas. It burns hotter and will speed up your work. It costs a little more though. A good investment is a hose connector for those tight spots. You can lay the bottle down and have a "detached" torch.

If its the stuff I'm thinking of & IIRC, the problems were with the product from a company that was infringing the patent on the original mfg. It was a gray color similar to the 18% cards used by photographers.

That's the stuff. But I don;t think the problem was fake stuff, because builders aren;t allowed to use that material in any residential home regardless of manufacturer. It just degrades over time and can;t handle normal household water pressures.

Polybutylene is the name of the grey pipe,

http://www.pbpsa.com/eng/intro-plum.asp

The stuff is still used across the pond. From what i remember the pipe itself wasn't the big problem, it was the fittings. The plastic used in the fittings was not well suited to be used in water systems here and would fracture without warning.

Then the uptime would only be 50% and you would have to apply monthly security patches.

Eugene,

Tsk Tsk...only 5 nines of reliability, oh the shame

I won't claim total redundancy, although I did add extra shut off valves and petcocks on my new hot water heater when I installed in a couple of years back. And, yes, it's copper.

Sidenote, actually 5 nines is nothing to sneeze at.

Comanche7

That's the stuff.