Fixing old butched plumbing

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I've joined a picture so ya'll can see what I'm talking about. I've inherited a house that was built in the 50s with a few expansions/additions in the late 60s/erly 70s. The plumbing is a mess. Water supply is all copper but is leaking in a few places due mostly to bad installations and butched extensions to the system. I've decided to simply change the whole system to pex with a manifold but there's one fixture that is puzzling me. Theres a large-ish pipe running from the basement to the garage about 200 feets away, the pipe seems to be some kind of rubber and the inner diameter of the pipe seems to be 1 inch (not sure what it is, but it is flexible). It is currently connected to 1/2 inch copper through a green garden hose, then a red garden hose, then some galvanized pipe and then some bigger galvanized pipe which is clamped inside the rubber hose going to the garage. It's not possible for me to replace the line going to the garage so I'm wondering how the hell do I go from pex to this black rubber pipe without the current leaking frankenstein-ish setup!

2014-06-02 20.30.32.jpg
 
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WJcandee

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I don't have an answer to your question, but I would observe that PEX isn't always a panacea. If you have a fair amount of good copper, couldn't you just fix the places where it's poorly-installed and preserve the benefits of an otherwise-functional copper system. If you are planning on significantly-upgrading by buying much-larger PEX and really gold-plating the system, Bravo! But if you are only buying slightly-larger (or, god forbid, same-size) PEX, than it's hard to see the benefits of doing so.

Just a thought. Good luck!!
 
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Buying much larger pex wouldn't help much afaik, supply to the house from municipal is 1/2 inches....I have no idea how this came to be, but it hasn't caused any problems since it's been built in regard to water pressure...in fact, I recently added a shower in the basement and the pressure over the half inch pex I've ran to the shower from half inch copper of the house older tubing is too high...the hand held showerhead felt like a pressure washer and my 8inch rainshower head blew out due to too much pressure! As for going overkill and replacing everything, well you can see it as a DIY project for me that is going to be practice for a future new house...total cost to replace everything is going to be 350-400 so it's not that huge of a deal and I'd rather change everything than save 50 bucks by re-using some of the old copper.
 

hj

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If your pressure it that high, you have an "extremely high" pressure problem and when THAT is cured, then you might have an undersized piping problem. As for the mystery pipe, the color of hoses is immaterial and since we do not know what is at the other end, in the garage, we cannot help you. Quite often, when you have "incompatible" materials, you DO wind up with a Frankenstein, or at least a Rube Goldberg, connection.
 
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The problem was mostly about not having a flow restrictor in the shower pannel and it having a showehead that was mostly plastic, but I've fixed that already. I was just trying to illustrate that the flow/pressure to all the fixtures in the house has always been excellent for the past 50 years and I don't feel it would be any different with pex plumbing than with copper. I understand that same-size pex doesn't allow as much flow as copper but it shouldn't be an issue at all.

In regard to the mystery pipe, why would it matter how it is connected like at the other side, because changing the pipe simply isnt an option at the moment. For the reccord, there is a similar setup in the garage than in the house. My guess is the black pipe is what my great-grandfather had on hand and decided to use it instead of laying copper all the way to the garage. I don't care very much if the final setup is still a Frankenstein, but what I wanna do is tidy it up so I can finish the area in the basement and keep it from leaking! I'm just asking advice on what kind of adapter/fittings I should look into to make the connection from half inch pipe (copper or pex) to 1 inch black rubber pipe?
 
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