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I pulled the garbage disposals long ago and no longer include and free standing appliances.
Plumbing is still the problem child with the bulk of emergency calls... almost always tenant caused.
Simple things like kids cooking and dumping all the grease down the drain to what I ran into last week.
Several older homes had all the cast iron pipe under the house from the kitchen sink turned into Swiss Cheese from acid cleaners... I replaced it all with ABS... so far so good.
At the local Hospital all of the blockages are due to feminine products... in 26 years never a block toilet in the men's restroom or locker rooms... happens often on the female side.
This has to be the really early stuff that used the crimp bands instead of the brass sleeves. We called it the "crimpy bands" system. It was wildly unpopular because it was notorious for weeping.
My house is all copper on the pressure side, and that's fine with me. I can solder it as required... or use shark-bite fittings if I'm feeling lazy. I've only had to do a few repairs, and none were due to degradation of the copper- just seized valves and such.
But PEX is a perfectly good product and FAR more efficient. If I ever need to do any major re-work... it'll be PEX.
Matter of fact a couple years ago I dug a trench between my shed and my garage to connect an air line. This way I can run my air compressor in the shed... use air tools in the garage without all the noise. I used PEX. This compressor is cranked up to 150psi, and the PEX is holding just fine.
Yeah, yeah... not up to code. Don't care. It works fine
After watching that scene you understand how Cosmo Castorini got that nice big house in Brooklyn Heights, then and now a wealthy part of Brooklyn, NYC.
My house is all copper on the pressure side, and that's fine with me. I can solder it as required... or use shark-bite fittings if I'm feeling lazy. I've only had to do a few repairs, and none were due to degradation of the copper- just seized valves and such.
But PEX is a perfectly good product and FAR more efficient. If I ever need to do any major re-work... it'll be PEX.
Matter of fact a couple years ago I dug a trench between my shed and my garage to connect an air line. This way I can run my air compressor in the shed... use air tools in the garage without all the noise. I used PEX. This compressor is cranked up to 150psi, and the PEX is holding just fine.
Yeah, yeah... not up to code. Don't care. It works fine
Not up to code ..maybe , but for a private use air line owner installed it will do fine. 150 psi is a bit above what PEX was intended for, but it will hold that and more. I had an inspector require I run my air test on a PEX water system at that pressure once. He didn't like PEX and thought he could make it fail. It didn't. This particular inspector was a real pain. But try as he might he couldn't get a failure on a PEX system. Since your line is underground you should be fine. It's out of direct sunlight,(which it doesn't like) and if it did pop it's contained in the dirt.
One advantage of Copper - It looks a lot better. In our house we plumber with PEX but wherever the pipe is exposed, we switched to copper (or at least tried to - in some places the idiot plumber switched to copper for an inch then went back to PEX. "Well you said you wanted it switched to copper where it penetrates the floor or wall" - Remember the part where I said I wanted all exposed pipe to be copper?" "Oh. . . . uhhh. . . well I think it looks fine.. . . see ya."
I like copper plumbing. The big bad issue with copper plumbing is copper theft.
Nobody steals PEX out of a vacant house. PEX also has the huge advantage that it does not split when it freezes.
However, I will not give my final blessing to PEX until 45 years have passed. I've got 2 houses with polybutal plumbing that the the best thing ever, until 45 years later when it is crumbling to dust and getting constant pinholes. PEX is plastic and plastic degrades. So, time will tell.
I live in a neighborhood built in 1992. At that time, some builders used polybutalene for water pressure lines and some used copper. My house was built with copper pipes. I insisted on it because in a previous neighborhood, built in 1983, the houses built with plastic pipes had developed leaks.
Now and then I see plumbing trucks show up in the neighborhood doing re-piping on the polybutalene built houses. I think a re-piping costs about $12K.
My problem with PEX is that it hasn't been used long enough to prove its durability. No builder can or will grant a 50 year guarantee of no leaks.
My copper pipes have never leaked. Copper has been used for 70 years. Insist on it.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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