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bmc0877 t1_j72d9yr wrote

Which type of fitting did you use? Sounds like the O ring didn't fail, is that correct?

All types of joints (including sweated joints) can fail. A big advantage of long runs of PEX is that there are fewer joints in the walls.

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Pabi_tx t1_j72va4h wrote

Anything can fail if the right (wrong?) forces are applied. We had a couple of straight copper pipe runs fail in a crawl space, between sweated joints. Plumber's guess was because of movement in the pier-and-beam foundation.

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InfiniteCurrency8 OP t1_j72h8o2 wrote

Seeing as the metal broke, I am guessing it was a flaw in the casting. I do not think it was the O-ring but also had a heck of a time getting the one end off the pipe. Rather than wreck or scar the pipe I ended up sawing off the fitting. Will be replacing with a sweat fitting as I have never had one of those leak.

I know a lot of folks love PEX, but I am not yet sold on it. So far, the fewer joints argument and the cost argument are strong but the fact that it is a petroleum based product and that it can not be recycled, except into lower graded products, leaves me on the fence about it. That said, I do have a couple PEX lines in our home and will keep an open mind about it for now.

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Kahoots113 t1_j72kwqy wrote

Aside from it being super easy to use the big advantage of PEX is that if it freezes it can get almost 3x its size and not burst, when it thaws it will return to its natural state. With copper, if it freezes it is likely to burst because the metal is rigid.

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Odd-Cartoonist-288 t1_j72jg5v wrote

My brother was looking into it and sent me a bunch of studies on chemicals leaching into your water lines and it seems pretty bad as well. The problem is PVC is much worse and that's often how it gets to your home.

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Disastrous-Nothing14 t1_j739e4s wrote

If you live in the US and your supply lines are PVC I've got some serious questions about the plumber who did the work.

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jobyone t1_j73ckdj wrote

One of my old coworkers lived in a whole neighborhood where the builders ran the main supply lines for every house under the living room slab, some sort of questionable plastic line (I don't remember what kind), and the whole neighborhood basically had all their main supply lines burst under their living rooms over about a two-year period.

My point is never underestimate the corners builders will cut to save like $50 or whatever even when they're building an entire house.

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sidusnare t1_j73jv5s wrote

My supply line was upgraded to PVC, it was PBT. The house is still PBT, but the supply line and about 6' inside the house is newer PVC.

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Odd-Cartoonist-288 t1_j7518eg wrote

Maybe I shouldn't have said often, but they used PVC for a bunch of the supply lines in my brothers neighborhood as they were building it. Honestly it's probably mostly old cast iron or something, but I don't know.

Got any links, because now I'm curious and the only thing I could find said PVC is used, but not how often. I've seen a few systems done in plants made from PVC so I figured it was used pretty often. Also, I wasn't even specifically talking about traditional PVC, just some sort of Polyvinyl Chloride because it's cheap ... or used to be.

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Disastrous-Nothing14 t1_j752dp2 wrote

Links? Ya I'm sure there's some Harvard study that pins it right down. No dude, just go in literally any house and there's a nearly 100% chance it's copper or pex, occasionally old cast/lead

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Odd-Cartoonist-288 t1_j7559kl wrote

I was talking about before the home. However, I've worked on a few homes and the majority are PVC with older homes being zinc plated steel. House I'm in now is 100% PVC and CPVC, and the house I was in before was the exact same as well. Just went and looked at a home the other day and it was probably 80% PVC and CPVC. This is in the Houston area as well.

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Disastrous-Nothing14 t1_j755rnr wrote

Huh, interesting. Must be regional thing, I'm up in northern new England and have basically never seen that. TIL

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Odd-Cartoonist-288 t1_j757d1m wrote

Probably has a lot to do with freezing if I had to guess. You should see all the homes down here during the freezes in the past few years. All the PVC in the house I'm renting busted in December.

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cardcomm t1_j72odq6 wrote

>All types of joints (including sweated joints) can fail

I've heard that, but having a soldered joint fail has got to be rare as hen's teeth!

How would that even happen?

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Rcarlyle t1_j72t79r wrote

Copper fails due to freezing, corrosion, or movement fatigue. To some extent you can control all these by using the right solder, cleaning off flux, insulating, strapping pipes properly at stub-outs, accommodating thermal expansion, damping water hammer, etc.

Most houses in the US are expected to be replaced after 70-100 years of use. And all in-wall utilities have a finite lifespan. So the critical question is how often they need to be replaced, and how much damage occurs during a failure. In my experience/opinion soldered copper is proven good for 50-100 years typical between repipes, and PEX is probably good for 30-50 years between repipes. Accelerated-aging studies using high temps show it should hold up better than older stuff like orangeburg or CPVC that have clear reliability problems. Unfortunately, modern connections like propress and sharkbite don’t truthfully have enough field service history to know if they’re 20 year fittings or 50 year fittings or 100 year fittings.

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ILikeLeadPaint t1_j72w4s3 wrote

Too much flux can cause a soldered joint to eventually fail too.

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Hagenaar t1_j72ss4d wrote

Sweated drain plumbing maybe. They're harder to get right, and harder to test.

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DukeofVermont t1_j72z8b6 wrote

I work in flood restoration and I see it pretty often, but it's usually on older pipes from the 1960s or older. The most interesting ones are when the water or minerals in the water have worn through the corner of the pipe.

The ones that I've seen pop off or separate are due to poor installation.

But also you have to think about how often the above occurs compared with how many joints exist. Something can be both incredibly rare and happen consistently. As in a failure rate of .05% is great , but .05% of 1,000,000 is still 500.

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cardcomm t1_j73iral wrote

>but it's usually on older pipes from the 1960s or older

so those are brass pipes though, not copper, right?

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cardcomm t1_j73iuc9 wrote

> .05% of 1,000,000

is rare as hen's teeth

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lusciouslucius t1_j73jkyu wrote

The big thing with sweat fittings are the pinhole leaks. They can occur from excessive flux, or from the fact that sweat fittings are just copper pipe stretched into a 90 or 45 or whatever. That means the material is not only weaker but exposed to more wear and tear from the water, as it has to more actively direct it. In cases with high water velocity, that means that the backside of 90s can be eaten away much quicker than the rest of the pipe. It's most common on the fitting immediately after pump.

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metalgod55 t1_j7383nk wrote

Usually corrosion from dissimilar metals. I’ve seen a few failed joints in my tine. One, a few weeks ago.

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