We need to replumb the entire house

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TMB9862

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I like copper, and would love to use nothing but copper. However the cost is out of control and pex is here to stay because of the pricing. It has been around for a while, and the problems with it are isolated. Yes a lot of homes were affected but the problem was isolated to one system. It is possible that twenty years down the road it could all start failing, their is no way to know for sure. Truth is no one knew how any piping system would do in the long run.

I'm sure when we started going from galvanized to copper guys looked down on it because the walls were thinner, how easially it bent, how it took less skill to install it (no threading, easy to cut, easier to make fitting in tight spaces, etc).

When we started to use plastics such as CPVC and polybutylene lots of people screamed about how plastic couldn't possible compare with copper. No one could have predicted the relative success of CPVC and the failure of polybutylene.

Now we are going from coper and CPVC to pex. No one can say what will happen. The pex systems could last longer then copper, or they could fail twenty years from now. We can make all the predictions we want but really we are just pulling them out of nowhere.

The same thing happend with PVC. When it first came out no one trusted it and "real plumbing" was still done with galvanized, cast iron, and later copper. The same happened with dual tights and no hub, "real plumbers" poured lead joints. PVC is still no allowed in commercial buildings even though it has proven itself.

Their have been plenty of incidents with copper failing on a large scale because of water conditions, lousy installations, and I'm sure bad batches of fittings have went out. I've gotten bags of 1/2in fittings that you couldn't get a 1/2in pipe in if your life depended on it. Their will be some problems with any system, nothing is ever going to be perfect.

Like I said though I prefer copper because it is time tested where pex is not.
 
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