Underground Pex choice

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MrEd

Feeling the Heat
May 9, 2008
426
Rural New England
Found this on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/1-1-4-Insulated...20598QQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1742.m153.l1262

100' of 1 1/4 pex, insulated, comes in at under $5/foot plus seller will sell customer lengths.

But also, found this stuff:

http://www.pexsupply.com/Categories.asp?cID=1053&brandid;=

Which to my untrained eye, looks better BUT at $28+ a foot (over 500% more than the stuff above).

Question is, will both of these work OK? At 5X the cost you start to wonder how much better it could possibly be? Especially if I went down 4-5 feet in the trench...

Opinions?
 
Just be sure whatever pex you use has an oxygen difusion barrier beacuse if you're running a closed looped system your boiler & any metal parts in your heating system will be a bucket of rusted out bolts in as little as 5 years.
 
I have been very happy with Thermopex that I got through a Central Boiler dealer. No noticeable loss over a hundred feet of travel at 18" burial depth.

Pete
 
When I ordered alumapex pipe I ordered 1 1/4 and found upon its arrival the dimensions are external diameter ASK QUESTIONS so you know what you are getting as opposed to what you expect to see!!
 
Just save your money and do what I did.......

Regular old oxygen barrier pex, buried in trench and sprayed with Corbond... I had 250' of trench and insulated a ton of lines (two to one location, 4 to another, and 6 to the last location) with insulation barrier between all hot and cold lines and 4 inches minimum between any line and the surrounding dirt...... $1600 for the corbond, installed...... (R6.6 to the inch)

So.. that figures out to be $6.40/foot.... So, unless that rhinopex stuff has pex lines made out of gold, it's a rip-off......
 
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