PEX is great. I highly recommend keeping some shark bites and spare pieces of PEX around, as it's easy to do repairs on your own if you have an issue.

I live in an area where the plumbing is soldered copper and the wiring is all in steel conduit. PEX, ProPress, Sharkbites, Romex... it's all just a little scary to me.

I seriously can't recommend this guy enough for general repair/building work...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnorhjQR4zJkT7AVNhu395Q/vid...

Friendly, super knowledgable, takes the fear out of the DIY.

For electrical, I do a lot myself, but when it came to running a 50amp line + breaker panel inside my place (which also required outdoor ladder work) to replace the steel conduit indoors, I just hired a professional even though it was very expensive.

It's not the DIY aspect^, it's the idea of ProPress joint sitting pressurized behind a wall for a decade.

^ I'm knowledgeable enough to do my own wiring and plumbing, but pay for licensed/bonded contractors instead. I sleep better at night and my insurance company probably does as well.

Up to you, but it honestly really isn't that much of an issue and I'd trust a simple properly crimped joint (which is easily visually inspected with a simple tool) a heck of a lot more than a welded one that is impossible to see what the inside looks like... um, did I put the right amount of flux on? did I know to use the 1/2 of solder to 1/2 of pipe trick?

As far as insurance companies... I bought an old place... I'm finding all sorts of stuff that isn't up to code (hidden electrical boxes, in the floor!, with wire nuts and not even twisted together wire and not even grounded properly)... I'm bringing it up to code, with modern products... in a court of law, it is going to be hard for them to argue against me.

Depends on what you're doing. I've done quite a bit of DIY, and much of it is probably better than if I hired someone for the simple fact I care, and I'm not trying to do it as fast as possible.

From what I understand, while it is up to code, pro's don't put sharkbites in walls.

I've gone with ss crimps instead of copper rings too. Mostly cause I live near the ocean and the ss crimps just seem easier to use.

200' of blue/red sharkbite brand pex b tubing is only about $70 on amazon right now, amazing.

If the walls are open, they shouldn’t. They should be using the minimum number of connections/joins because that’s always going to be a higher point of failure. However, When you/they need to patch something and don’t want to open up the whole room/house, then that’s the correct use case for these devices.

I should have been more clear. I wouldn't use a sharkbite for a permanent fix, but being able to patch something until you can either do a permanent fix or get a plumber out is a big win. I even keep PVC glue and some collars/caps for the same reason.

Shark bite is awesome for capping a broken pipe until you can get around to a proper fix. Love those shark-bite caps. IMO every home owner should have pipe cutters for the pipes in their house (whatever materials those may be), and a set of those caps ready to apply for every size of pipe they've got. Ought to be as common as having a screwdriver and hammer. They're absolute life-savers when a leak or pipe burst happens at odd hours and you just want to get the leak stopped and the water back on and go back to bed or get back to work or whatever. Cut the pipe, steel wool the end clean, slap the shark bite cap on, get on with life until you have the time to properly fix it. Turns something very inconvenient into something merely a little inconvenient. Beats the hell out of having to break out the solder or pipe glue at 2AM.

If you've got a significant leak in a supply pipe, there should be a valve on the branch that will allow you to shut off just that branch rather than the whole house. You might need to shut off the whole house first while you figure out where that valve is, but you probably won't have to do ad-hoc plumbing to get most of the house back on.

But yes, in general I'm always for people becoming familiar with tools and DIY.

My place has no master valves in the bathroom branch for the cold water feed. I can shut off the hot water though since that comes from an on demand unit that I installed. I have to shut off the entire condo building (14 units) to do any work in there. You can be sure that I'm going to add a master valve to that branch...

Owned a half-dozen US houses built between 1907 and 2015 and have never actually seen such a thing. If you're lucky someone's done some work on a branch at some point and was courteous enough to install a shut-off, though usually off somewhere weird where there was already damage or whatever, not where you'd normally look for it.

[EDIT] Actually, my parents' very-new house has that... but because it's all-PEX, so it's super-easy to install it that way, with a central panel full of shut-offs for various parts.

Hah. I hadn't realized I was taking that for granted (over multiple houses myself), and just figured they were required by code (even though it makes the chrome sink shutoffs kind of redundant). Score 1 for DIYers doing more maintainable work than professionals.

FWIW a SharkBite valve or NPT adapter would seem to be a handier thing to have around than a pure cap. For one, you can attach a valve without shutting the water off.

Hell, maybe it is required by code in some places. I've only really looked at the plumbing of houses in a three-state cluster in the Midwest, maybe elsewhere more-conveniently-designed plumbing is normal.

I had the main irrigation feed burst over Christmas and it's just a branch off the main line into the house with no valve! Had to turn the water off at the street, and couldn't fix it until the day after Christmas.

How did that setup pass a code inspection?!

Maybe they're not in an area where it freezes, so the main shutoff doesn't need to be inside the house, and there's no need to shut off and drain the silcock in the winter?

Let's assume all that is true. Still, shit breaks, and all branches off the main have to be valved separately. With the current setup, contamination (e.g. by sewage) of a branch couldn't be isolated from the house. That is not acceptable.

I was the one who started the thread thinking that shutoffs on branches were the norm, and apparently that's just not the case everywhere.

Also I don't know what you mean about sewage contamination? Sewage contamination of potable water lines would indicate a hugely weird problem.

AFAIK backflow preventers (fancy check valves), which prevent water in the house from going back into the municipal distribution, are standard on new installs. But I think that requirement is recent as of the past few decades, so most houses aren't going to have them.

I suppose that depends on the typical age of houses in your area? Just as supply lines inside houses might get contaminated, supply lines outside houses might get contaminated. Perhaps from sewage, perhaps from runoff, or whatever. Outside lines are more likely to be broken by sloppy excavation, for example. Simple isolation valves are sensible even in situations that don't require backflow preventers, such as on a private well.

I still don't really understand what you're saying.

Yes, I agree isolation valves are good. But as far as what code requires? It seems that if isolation valves aren't required on branches, then the only isolation valve that is required is the main house valve that can isolate it from the street water main.

So I can't figure out what else you think would have been required to pass inspection in the comment you originally responded to.

> there should be a valve on the branch that will allow you to shut off just that branch rather than the whole house

Haha...should is doing a lot of work here. Shut off valves like you mention are great, but even newer houses often don't have them.

Sharkbites are a recipe for disaster when their O-rings fail.

As I mentioned above, I should have been more clear about using it for emergency repairs and not necessarily permanent fixes. I also keep pvc pipe glue and some collars/caps around for the same reason.

>PEX is great.

PEX is very very not-great. It's constantly leeching carcinogens and endocrine disruptors into your sitting water. Your modern home's recirculation system is making that even worse, cycling hot water and concentrating leeched petrochemical products in your hot water line. Some of them even boil before water which means they'll make it through a distiller.

Plumbers like it because it's easy/saves them time, and they'll love charging you big $$$ to rip it out in 20 years when it's banned.

The big builders like DR Horton and Lennar target build times of 100 days per home that meets minimum code requirements, which is pretty good productivity. A community of 100 homes can be up and running in 2 years.

And that 100 days target is mainly for achieving optimal efficiency. If you want to optimize for time it's totally possible to go from an empty lot to a finished house in under a week, provided that all the workers, inspectors, and materials are available.

Requires a ton of overhead at the planning / pre-construction phases. That’s only amortized out if you built a ton of volume which these do. It’s also why you may only have a choice of 8 floor plans even though it’s a neighborhood of 500 homes.

Copper is superior. I specifically went out of my way to find a house with large swaths of the plumbing done with copper. Pretty neat to have anti-microbial properties built in.

Copper inferior for productivity, which is what we are talking about here.

My pipes are all copper, and the hot water contains a non trivial amount of lead (from the solder used to join the pipes). I had it tested - around 20 ppb.

We don't drink or cook with the hot water, but in theory if the plumbing was PEX we could.

What year was your house built? I really hope this is not a risk on things built after 2000 (or 1980?)

Lead flux went away like 45 years ago. But sometimes galvanized pipe has some amount of lead in the zinc coating, and a mixed cooper/galvanized installation can accelerate corrosion.

Post-Flint, lead is the new asbestos. Because the standard is zero tolerance, there’s alot of noise on the topic.

PEX is great, but I’d personally always go for cooper if I could afford it. We tend to learn new things about plastic and risks over time.

From 1986-2011 the EPA/congress defined "lead free" pipes as containing no more than 8% lead.

In 1996, they banned plumbing that is not "lead free" from being sold.

In 2011, the "lead free" definition was strengthened to a weighted average of 0.25%.

For new construction the ideal is solderless copper. You use pure copper pipes + ProPress. It's fast and the cleanest you can get outside of exotic glass plumbing.

Better keep that copper out of exterior walls. It doesn't stretch and rebound like PEX when the water freezes. Those who care about homeopathy can run their drinking water through a loop of copper.

Ideally there wouldn't be water lines in exterior walls. But not everything is ideal.

For sure; better design would move most supply lines to interior walls. However, most owners of standalone homes want to be able to look out a window situated above their kitchen sink. It's possible to have supply lines sticking out of the floor, but that complicates inspection and cabinet installation and also it sucks to have to search for one's undersink supplies behind those pipes.

Another factor, in concrete slab construction, is that we want drain lines to be as short as possible, because even though it's possible to get those correct before the pour it doesn't always happen. Concentrating fixtures in one corner of the house tends to force supply lines into exterior walls.

Maybe I should hire better plumbers, and maybe I should live where it doesn't get cold, but until then maybe I should just use PEX.

copper does have pretty well documented anti bacterial properties. there's a reason that lots of iuds are made of copper.

AFAIK the effect is also significant enough that using copper on public high-touch surfaces (doorknobs or push plates, hand rails) can meaningfully decrease disease transmission rates.

I think there are also ways to help with that. Whole house filters (to get more than just microbes) as well as copper stubs from the walls.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/The-Plumber-s-Choice-8-in-x-3-4-...

I just paid $8000 to get my copper redone in PEX. After the tenth pin hole leak and lots of shark bite fixes, I am not fond of copper.

Good chance the original work was done with a bad batch of pipe, or worse, some contractor used Type M (thinwall) pipe.

Another interesting thing I learned about just yesterday! Type M vs. Type L.

Apparently it also depends on the ph of the water...

https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/copper-pipe-types/

Also your AHJ and plumber. I want to say in NY we were forbidden to use Type M for anything other than hydronic heating.

I would argue that a good plumber would recommend PEX over piping a house in Type M.

Well I hope you plan to move/sell, in my opinion PEX will be banned in 20 years and you'll have a hard time selling without remediation. PEX is absolutely loaded with carcinogenic compounds and endocrine disruptors that actively leech into your water, especially if you have a hot water recirculation system (standard/code on new homes)

>After the tenth pin hole leak and lots of shark bite fixes, I am not fond of copper.

It's my understanding that the vast majority of pinhole copper leaks are caused by poor solder jobs. Solder gets inside the pipe and causes a vortex that can eat through the copper.

The solution to this is to use solderless copper ProPress fittings for everything. Not only is this much more clean and faster to install, but the inside of the pipe is flush/smooth with the fitting.

> Phthalate exposure from drinking water via cPVC or PEX is low when compared to other dietary sources. Nonetheless, a shift from cPVC to PEX pipes in households would decrease potential exposure to phthalates.[1]

Almost everything I drink out of is lined with plastic. Milk or juice containers, water bottles, and most reusable on the go cups are made of plastics or have a plastic liner.

[1] https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/refere...

food packaging plastics are short lived (time from packaging to consumption is <2 years) and they are not exposed to sun nor heat. They are safe.

But long-term plastics in tubing are exposed continuously to heat (hot water) and will start falling apart and leech chemicals, because they are exposed over long-term

Those glue on walls seemed to be priced at “we know how much tiling costs”. £36m2 (cheapest I could find on a site similar to Home Depot) for some composite plastic seems crazy. They have some double that price too.

Yes, they know the value and have priced accordingly.

~$800usd vs. tile+labor.

Definitely a product that is ripe for disruption.

There aren't even many manufacturers.

> Definitely a product that is ripe for disruption. There aren't even many manufacturers.

These two statements may be related. It’s not worth deploying capital to compete if the additional competition drives profits margins to zero. Better to deploy that capital somewhere it gets better expected returns.

This anti-competitive logic seems very widespread these days with such centralized global supply chains and consolidated retail chains.

Not a lot of room for me to deploy a small amount of capital to create a small-medium sized manufacturing facility of this stuff to chip away at 10-50% of the demand around the edges of the marginal profits. Mainly because it would be difficult to get my products into Home Depot and Lowe’s if I can’t supply their whole national chain.

And that’s assuming Home Depot and Lowe’s haven’t agreed to any exclusivity with the current manufacturers which I’d need private equity money to beat.

You're right on all fronts, my only comment is that there is a lot of room for product improvement though.

$800+ for 3 sheets of plastic, and that is it, is absurd. They don't even interlock or have trim for the corners... example...

https://www.homedepot.com/p/WOODBRIDGE-Haydon-32-in-x-60-in-...

Of course adding those items would cost even more, so it is a bit of a race to zero. That said, if you can get a following by homebuilders and into every single new housing project, it might be worth it. I'm sure having some sort of inside track advantage there would be necessary too. None of which I personally have, but as an end user of this stuff, I'd be more than happy to support and provide feedback on.

The great thing about PEX is that they made an expensive* tool that makes joining pipes like 90% less skill-intensive.

I'd love to see something similar done for electric wiring. I'm picturing something like an electrical box that you can directly connect Romex that's been stripped with a special tool, and then a circuit-breaker-style snap-in for the actual receptacle. The parts/tools would cost more but might dramatically speed up the installation.

*relatively expensive, especially in the early days.

Hubbel already makes this. https://www.hubbell.com/wiringdevice-kellems/en/Products/Ele...

Neat but the speed up here just doesn't seem that extreme, I guess maybe if you're installing 10k of these a day. I feel like the time it takes to put the wires into the harness is just as much time as putting them straight into the receptacle and tightening the nut.

I did start using wago's though... those are handy for sure.

>Things like PEX tubing for plumbing

PEX is terrible, pretty much every commercial brand has been shown to leech petrochemicals into your water. This varies a lot based on your municipal water supply's characteristics. Unfortunately cleaner water leeches more.

PEX saves megabuilders $$$ and plumbers time, but it's not good for you.