I am plumbing in a kitchen and I'm working on water lines with pex. I bought a bunch of Pex A. I have friends who can lend me Pex B tools which work with Pex A, but I hear that leads to flow restriction.
For people who have used both, is there any reason for me to spend 50 bucks on buying my own used expansion tool as opposed to borrowing a friend's Pex B tools?
I only have experience with Pex B flow restrictors. Yeah, I lose water pressure when someone else is using another appliance but who doesnt? When working with pex B tools I also made the connection but built the whole shower plumbing tree out of copper soldered joints that just hook into my pex system in hopes not creating too many turbulent zones where it crashes into pex B connections. Water pressure is fine everywhere unless someone is using water. Since its just me and my GF its not an issue. But Im sure if there's 6 people battling for water in your house you can call the plumber and he can charge you out the ass to fix nothing.
Do whatever youre going to do man. Its not a big issue unless youre a fricking fairy.
mmm phalates
good thing polyethylene doesn't have phthalates in it.
>polyethylene
the full name is polyethylene terephthalate
why don't you leave the plastics to the chemists and the copper to the plumbers
That’s PET, the water lines are PEX. Phthalate leakage from PEX is extremely low: https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/reference_id/3859182
Take your own advice moron
PEX is a form of PET.
Lmao, it’s not even the same repeat group you dumbass
pex is polyethylene. polyethylene crosslinked. hence the X.
it's the same sort of polyethylene as used in high-density polyethylene (HDPE) milk jugs.
for example, if you took a milk jug and irradiated it, you'd crosslink the polyethylene and have a PEX milk jug. the otherwise straight chains connect between each other.
contrast with PET, polyethylene terephthalate, water bottles. different plastic. you could crosslink PET but that's not what PEX is.
the difference is the terephthalate group. if you could theoretically delete the terephthalate and just link the chains back together, you'd have polyethylene.
as the other anon said, it doesn't matter unless a 5% difference in flow will trigger your autism.
Start cutting and pulling all that shit out, replace with copper or stainless steel, live your life without fear of clamped plastic ruining anything
>replace with copper or stainless steel
I replaced all the pipeage in my house with stainless steel and have never regerted it.
Bro's house probably looks like this.
honestly though what country do you live in where you have stainless pipes in your house. Ive never heard of that.
>t. lives in a 900 sqft single-story 1-bath house with crawlspace
I want to do this for the sink lines. Stainless propress fittings are spendy though.
I just did (and re-did the original that came with the house) a bunch of pex-a expansion.
I thought pex-a was the best thing in the world. Now I’m not so sure.
If your fittings have scratches on them, they leak.
The expansion tool fricks up the inside of the pipe, so generally about 10% of those will leak. I can see where the original plumbers fixed leaking joints… the cut the pipe off by a foot so it comes down from the ceiling out from the wall by a foot instead of against the wall.
I bought the manual propex expansion tool, ½ is no problem, but the ¾ is a PITA, I have to physically recover after doing one, especially in a tight space. I can’t envision myself doing a 1".
I used ¾" whereever I could, and made all the assemblies as big as I could on the workbench before installing them.
Picrel is a gate valve (which are shit) so I replaced it with a ball valve while I was in there. Note the the leak through the top two seals leaving only the last one. And corrosion.
Use the plastic fittings ones whenever you can, at least they don’t corrode… i re-used them no problem, they were in mint condition.
The home depot sells these chinese sharkbite pex-a conectors, but made in china. Not good. Get the uponor if you can (they guys I went to don’t like selling to non-contractors and charged me up the ass)
…here’s my fix for a leaky joint.
pex-a is great for things that might freeze, it gets -40 around here, but I think I’d do more with copper from now on.
Close-up of the corrosion on another gate valve pex-a connector. These are 20 years old. You can see where it’s gonna come thru that main seal soon enough.
I applied some megaloc pipe dope to one of the when I was installing it in the hopes it would fill in any scratches. Maybe that should be a standard thing/product but I couldn’t find any advice on that.
Kind of looks like galvanic corrosion
>any reason
yeah
you're gone a be replumbing everything in a about twenty years
assuming you can work at all with your tiny dick, new breasts, and brittle bones
My pex-a is over 20 years old. It turned a little yelow, but it seems pretty sound. I cut the old and re-expanded it to attach it to the new work and didn’t have any splitting or leak issues.
I have no doubt it will last another 20.
I will report back here at that time, in this thread so keep this tab open.
be sure to post photos of the leaks that occur in the next five years
Will do
Kalispell montana, i think it’s around 15 g/g sometimes, it varies.
Where do you live? What kind of water do you have?
Pretty much this. Water isn't kind to plastics. Or plastics need to be a bit thicker, I don't know.
Where PEX shines is electrical insulation. You get thermal resistivity and flexibility of teflon for much less money. In cable world it is called XPLE and usually it is irradiated, not peroxide bond or whatever.
I did Pex B for cold water only and ran a size big.
Problem solved.