Seeking to Understand

In addition to the utility sink installation, we wanted to hook up some outdoor water faucets. We found one faucet on the side of the house - but after some investigation we discovered that it was actually disconnected. In fact, the faucet was just stuck out the side of the house. There was no evidence of a pipe even feeding it from the inside! I’m guessing it had been disconnected for many, many years judging by the rust level… Silly.

Since we had run a bunch of CPVC for the new washer position and the sink, it was a snap to run an additional pipe branch off of the cold water line to feed an outdoor faucet or two. So we had done that and put a valve on the end of it, but we didn’t actually run the pipes to the outside walls right away because it was considerably more important to fix the washer issues.

Thursday or Friday I went to hang out with Jer for a bit and told him of my plumbing woes. After some discussion he told me about Pex which is far easier to work with (no glue!) than CPVC and is flexible, too - yay for fewer elbows! So I did some investigating and found that it’s been in use for something like 40 years (mostly in Europe and mobile homes) and only recently (in the 90s, mostly) has become commonplace in new construction and renovation in the USA. That explains why my dad went with CPVC - it’s what he knows.

After some time on the Internet learning about plumbing and Pex and such, Melody and I went to the home store and bought a roll of 1/2″ Pex tubing along with some fittings, crimp rings, and the cheapest Pex crimp tool we could find. (I’m pretty sure the prices on the Pex tools are a total scam… but the plus side is that you don’t need to install near the number of fittings as you do with CPVC so a cheap, hard to use tool isn’t a total killer for a small project.)

Pex is awesome. I made two runs to each side of the house from the source cold water valve and CPVC tee dad and I had left in place for use on the outdoor faucets and I only had to install four fittings total (one on each end of the two runs of tubing). Pex is flexible, but not like a rubber hose - however it was just flexible enough to easily route around some of the stupid braces and other things that are in the way in our 82 year old house. Doing this same run with CPVC would have involved a ton of joints (all with potential to leak or be glued wrong). It was easy and took very little time. It would have taken even less time if I had a higher-end crimping tool - but unless I end up re-plumbing the entire house, $100+ for a little hand tool is way overkill.

I think even dad was impressed when he stopped back a day or so later and I had run all the Pex by myself (not too hard, really) and got it all ready for the outdoor faucets. He mentioned that if he had to redo the plumbing in an old place, he’d probably pick Pex the next time around after he saw how easy it was to use. So that’s pretty cool… who’d have thought that I could ever show him something about home improvement that he didn’t know already? Course, I had help from Jer… but that’s beside the point.

After reading about Pex and manifolds and home-run systems in use in new homes (where you run a single Pex tube from the water source manifold all the way to the destination fixture rather than doing a branch network which is the traditional approach), I’m reminded of it every single time I take a shower and the water pressure or temperature drops because Melody started the dishwasher or something like that. If it wasn’t for money, I’d totally redo the plumbing… Plus Pex comes in three colors: neutral, blue, and red. How cool would it be to have hot water tubes be red and cold water be blue? Oh totally!

Another bonus of Pex is that it is freeze resistant. Since the material can stretch, if water freezes inside it is more likely to flex and expand rather than break - that makes it even better for using it to run to outside faucets than CPVC would be. At least, that’s the theory. We really don’t need any more water in the basement…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.