PEX Plumbing for home system

[Ashful]

It will be fine. I tore out a bunch of 30 yr old copper with leaky shutoffs and lots of internal corrosion.

... and you’re DRINKING the water that did that to your plumbing?!?

 

[bholler]

... and you’re DRINKING the water that did that to your plumbing?!?

Yes and I had it tested it is a little hard and it is high in iron and manganese. Both of which are removed mostly with the treatment system. The copper in our last house was in similar condition. It was fine as long as you didn't have to use a shutoff or do anything to it as soon as you did you spent a week chasing leaks in the old stuff.

 

[Hogwildz]

Yes and I had it tested it is a little hard and it is high in iron and manganese. Both of which are removed mostly with the treatment system. The copper in our last house was in similar condition. It was fine as long as you didn't have to use a shutoff or do anything to it as soon as you did you spent a week chasing leaks in the old stuff.

Remember those days well. In my last place, the minute I touched on of those old spin valves, I knew it would drip or worse. Had to replace a few, and was not much fun. PVC in this place, until I swap to Pex.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

I remember fixing a leak in the galvanized plumbing in my Grandfather's house with my father one late, Sunday night. Every joint we touched opened a new leak further up the line. We were worried Lowe's would close before we took care of all the leaks. I think we got it fixed in time, but barely.

 

[Don2222]

Hi
I used blue & red Pexies with sharkies out in the open and they will last a long time. We put in an ECO Smartie On Demand DHW Electric Panel and it works well!
The On Demand Panel can pull the water from the street or the Indirect Tank on the boiler.
Or we can go back to the oil boiler if we wish

 

[zrock]

Only place I had one fail is a ball valve we buried. Frost pulled the connection.. washed it out and put the same valve on and been good for the last few years..

Sent from my SM-G950W using Tapatalk

 

[Ashful]

All this criticism of brass valves, and every PEX system pictured so far has had brass body valves. [emoji3]

 

[maple1]

Where is the brass valve criticism?

I think I saw some, of older valves that might happen to be made of brass. Which I think I also have some of around our house & also all around our cottage - I hate having to touch them, chances are they will start leaking out the stem & they won't stop. Look like little gate valves. Yuck. But that's the type of valve, not necessarily what they are made of.

Ball valves or bust.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

You can repack valves. IME it works half the times I've tried it.

 

[Ashful]

Where is the brass valve criticism?

Several posts above, the last was Hogz.

I really haven’t had any issues with ball valves or gate valves in any house I’ve owned, with the exception of moving into someone else’s house where they weren’t maintained. If a packing drips, snug it before you get mineral deposits building up on the shaft. If you’ve bottomed out the bonnet, close the valve and install a new packing. The beauty of a gate valve is that it can be fully rebuilt without removing it from the line, and you can repack them without even shutting off anything upstream, unless some idiot installed it backwards. Most of the inline valves I installed in my own house are ball valves, but I still use gate valves as the drains, I don’t like the ball valve drains.

 

[Ashful]

You can repack valves. IME it works half the times I've tried it.

Works 100% of the time to fix a leaky bonnet, if the shaft isn’t chewed up or a mess with minerals. Also, you can replace the bib washer if the valve drips.

 

[peakbagger]

Ball valves have packing and can have stem leaks. I got big batch of ball valves from Pex Supply long ago for my storage project and they looked like good quality but everyone had a packing leak and the packing box travel is slim to none so repacking them are a chore. If I do need to repack I usually just use standard Teflon tape. I just twist it up until I get reasonable strand and wrap the stem after digging out the old stuff. When I worked at a papermill they had carts full of braided Teflon packing but it was always too big for home work. Packing a stuffing box on a pump is an art and getting the lantern ring in the right place is something some folks have a tough time with. No one wants to replace a shaft seal in the middle of the night so some of packing jobs would get quite creative to buy a few days or weeks until the seal could be swapped out. Household service is pretty easy compared to papermill pumps

It all comes down to how aggressive the water is and the quality of valve used. A plumber bids the job and unless someone tells him otherwise he is going to use the cheapest valve that he can get away with that wont lead to call backs in the short term. I think globe valves are usually the cheapest and have a reasonable chance of sealing, although the washers do get old and crunchy. I avoid globe valves as the pressure loss through them is high even when full open. Good for throttling but not so great for an isolation valve. Ball valves have more materials and more machining so they are going to be more expensive. Gate valves used to be used but they tended to leak a bit when closed and priced on par with ball valves. Of course the other big plus with ball valves is you know visually when they are open and they are easy to do lock out tag out if you get the sliding clips for the handles.

I grew up in Portland Maine and the water from Sebago Lake was so pure it would eat copper piping and fittings and lead packing in pipes. Hot water heaters did not last last long unless the anodes were changed routinely and most folks don't even know what an anode was. They started adding something to the water to cut down on the corrosiveness and the problems went away. I don't think lead was used extensively for piping but the water would leach the lead out of "leaded brass" fittings. Lead was added to the brass to make it easy to machine but definitely made it more prone to pitting. There was a lot of threaded galvanized used for house supplies and private roads. The galvanized would rot out from the inside and plug the pipe. I helped hand dig a couple of services to replace the galvanized long ago. The water utility got hard on cheap developers and they forced them to install cast or ductile iron lines in streets so the 2" galvanized water mains slowly went away. City water pressure down near the ocean was about 110 psi so leaks were easy to find.

I don't have any experience with hard water and PEX. Long ago I worked in the "paper valley" in Wisconsin and the local water was very hard. We had to routinely acid wash some systems to keep them from plugging.

 

[bholler]

All this criticism of brass valves, and every PEX system pictured so far has had brass body valves. [emoji3]

Yes of course if the valves were maintained properly they will work. But most are not and on most old systems i have worked on simply changing out a bad valve leads to multiple leaks in that line elswhere

 

[maple1]

I'm pretty sure most of the valves at our cottage don't have packing nuts. They are bottom of the line stuff, maybe around 20-25 year old construction (built by other family members). But I can't see there from here right now, will have to wait a couple months for another look...

 

[shoot-straight]

they did pex in my house when it was built 14 years ago. done by "the best" plumbing contractor in our area. unfortunately, they received a bad batch of brass 90s they used throughout my house and a few others. one failed while we were on vacation and flooded our downstairs. worst several months of my life.

now im scared of anything pretty much.