Posted on 12/21/2002 9:22:38 AM PST by NormsRevenge
Edited on 04/12/2004 5:47:19 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Plastic pipe manufacturers Friday hailed a court ruling that could clear the way for their product to be used in homes statewide as a victory for consumers over politics.
The industry sued the state in September, alleging Gov. Gray Davis' administration forced new home buyers to spend millions of additional dollars on housing by restricting the use of a plastic water pipe known as PEX.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
LOL !...Some thing I just never expected to hear from "J Hoffa" :o)
Stay Safe !!
That was a very good, concise description of PEX. Well done!
Yes, you can freeze it without hurting the pipe. Since it swells, it takes some pressure off the fittings but I would still expect to see a frozen fitting crack at least sometimes. The worst is PVC. That stuff gets a spiral crack the whole length when it freezes.
I've got Wirsbo PEX for both my in-floor radiant heating and the potable water lines in the walls. Thousands of feet of the stuff in total. You have to use copper terminations for manifolds and where the pipe exits the walls for plumbing fixtures (for the rigidity of copper and to provide an interface to conventional plumbing fixtures) but otherwise it's all PEX.
The stuff is wonderful; it installs quickly, is VERY strong, rated to survive water temps over the boiling point and helps prevent water hammer due to its flexibility.
Three years after move-in, not a single problem with any of it. I think it's wonderful stuff.
PEX is not the same, or even close to, CPVC, PVC or any of the other rigid plastics. That stuff is for sprinkler systems IMHO, period.
Not so fast....
In the 70s, exactly the same argument was used to allow aluminum wiring.
The homeowners ended up spending 20 times the "savings" fixing the results after 10 or 20 years.
A story:
In the early 70's I worked in a union shop. My father, uncle, cousins, etc, worked
there also. One machine was well known for breaking down. When it broke down,
the operator would "get a break" while maintenance fixed it. My uncle was the
maintenance man who had to fix it. The secret was to not stop the machine to take out
the pieces after molding (not difficult). If you stopped it, the mold box would overheat,
leading to a breakdown. My supervisor always picked me to run it, as I kept it running.
I was moved to another job, because union reps thought I was being a friend of management
in this scenario.
Prologue: My uncle, a few years later, had his hand crushed, repairing that machine.
Think about it. Every day of the year, some tanker hauls into port carrying a load of crude oil for refining into PEX, gasoline, lubricating oil, synthetic fibers, etc. Oil coming from Venzuela, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iran, and Iraq ... funding their anti-American activities instead of employing Americans producing American oil and natural gas.
Yes, well new technologies are like that. Sometimes they're wonderful, sometimes they're almost wonderful, and sometimes they're, well, not.
My understanding is that the problem with aluminum wiring is that aluminum's thermal coefficient of expansion causes connections to work loose from thermal cycling. Long lengths of cable pose no problem, but connections both tend to get hotter than straight lengths of cable, and connectors are less able to deal with the such heating without failure.
If there had been an imperative to continue using aluminum wire, I suspect someone would have come up with a way to do so safely and economically. Aluminum wire's price advantage over copper, however, is sufficiently small that in most cases mitigation would have to be impossibly cheap to be worthwhile.
The aluminum wire analogy does differ from the PEX pipe situation in at least one key regard, though: whereas aluminum's primary advantage as a wiring material was that the material was cheap, PEX appears to be superior to copper in a number of ways. If a PEX pipe freezes without breaking, its final cost--even if it has to someday be ripped out and replaced with something else--will be no worse than would have been copper.
Thanks for the info.
I had not heard of this stuff before.
I think I'd prefer traditional copper myself, until the PEX proves out over the long haul.
My rule of thumb: Plastic is OK for drainage lines, but I'd prefer metal for pressurized supply, hot or cold.
I've just seen too many plastic hoses burst over the years and prefer hard plumbing.
Providing their house was still standing.
Sure, I don't see any reason why a person building their own house shouldn't be able to, say, run a garden hose from the gas meter, across the lawn, under their slab, then up the wall to their furnace if they want to.
Or why bother with PEX and those complicated fittings for your water, why not just run garden hose in your walls and attic for your water?...Some people would if they could.
The California Plumbing Code only applies to those areas where that code is adopted (except maybe) commercial. Most areas use/adopt the Uniform Plumbing Code (UPC) as well as the Uniform Building Code (UBC) written by the International Conference of Building Officials (ICBO)
And that won't change if they didn't adopt the state code.
The jist of the opinion piece was that PEX is here to stay. Many states are allowing it's use and more are capitulating yearly inspite of the union lobby.
According to this show the material is durable and flexable and represents a 50% reduction in labor costs for installation.
The application demostrated did terminate in copper at the wall via a rather simple nipple/pressed sleeve connector. The connector looked simple and permanent.
Appreciate it.
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