by B. Leslie Baird

Created on: April 10, 2009

First of all please note that this is being written by a 46 year old female electrician. I am NOT a plumber. With that in mind if I was able to complete this project you probably can too. I purchased my home ten years ago and one of the few annoyances was the fact that there was almost no water pressure. The house was built in the 50's and still had the original galvanized plumbing. On my "to do" list for years has been to replace the mess. I was also afraid of the expense of copper and the difficulty. With a new all copper system I knew I would have to do a lot of soldering and there would be considerable room for mistakes.......... as in flooding the house. Having been working in the residential construction area I began to notice new homes being built using the PEX plumbing system and decided to learn more about it. Long story short I completed my new system at the end of May 2007 and am thrilled with it.

PEX or cross-linked polyethylene is a flexible tubing. It is light in weight and much more resistant to freezing than copper piping. It is connected by crimping the tubing to the various size and type connectors as compared to sweating with a torch. This is a big plus when working in tight spaces or if, like me, you are prone to aiming the torch at your hand rather than the copper. You may still need to make some sweat connections but very few, leaving less area for potential leaks. The benefits over galvanized are even better. You don't need huge pipe wrenches and massive strength to loosen or tighten connections. The flexibility of pex allows for fewer connections overall and makes for much faster installation.

Pex sizes. Standard use Pex comes in 3/8", 1/2", 3/4" and 1" sizes. ( I.D.) This is for both the tubing and connectors. For my applications I only used 1/2" and 3/4". I used 3/4" from the water main to the manifolds and 1/2" out to each fixture. This provides more than enough pressure - flow in an average home. If you have a home that is in the mansion category you might want to start with 1" pex and work from there. I only needed one 1/2" to 3/8" connector for one fixture hook up. Pex also comes in white, red, and blue tube colors. Red being used for hot water and blue for cold. There is no difference in the actual tubing and you can just as easily use all red or all blue. It is really to make identifying the water lines easier.

Pex connectors. I tried both the "crimp" clamps and the "cinch" type clamps. Both require separate types of tools to

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