A lesson about basic PEX plumbing materials - Intro to Plumbing Systems

hello and welcome back to our plumbing course i'm joe carswell and this lesson is going to cover a very special plumbing material we call pecs p-e-x it's one of my favorites so let's get right into it welcome to our channel by now we've loaded almost 100 videos onto youtube so that anyone can have access to structured trades training resources we are really trying to grow this channel and the best way for that to happen is for you the viewer to subscribe also if you learned something from these videos don't forget to click like so thanks for your support let's get back into the lesson pecs p-e-x stands for cross-linked polyethylene pipe p pe polyethylene x for cross linked this is a very special plastic pipe that is flexible it can stretch and we can work with it very easy uh plumbing system to work with there's a lot of parts here that are specialized to it we'll get into it let's start with our pipe though this pipe comes in three colors you have a red a blue and a white and if you're running a hot water line you can use a red so you can identify it keep it under control and organized you can use a blue line for a cold water supply and if if you need a neutral line or if it's not for hot or cold you can use white and that does not specify one of the other if you're going to cpex uh some in some places some people prefer the white color it also comes in different sizes you're looking at the two most common sizes right here i've got three quarter inch and i have half inch you will also see a one inch pipe it also goes smaller you can have a 3 8 or a quarter inch line but these two three quarter and half inch are definitely your most popular there are two types of pex pipe you have pex a and pex b and pex a will stretch more than pex b this means that if you freeze the pipes they won't burst as easy also we have a process we can use with pex a where we stretch the end of the pipe and we can push the fitting in and the pipe will shrink around it and seal it up that's called cold expansion pex b is a whole different system and that would be a crimping system so we'll take the pipe and we'll put the fittings in and then we'll crimp a band or ring around it to make it seal pex type b is less flexible than pex type a and that's why we use it for our crimping process with a lot of plumbing materials they're going to share certain outside dimensions inside dimensions or specs our pecs outside diameter is going to share the same dimension as say other materials like copper these two half inch pipes are exactly the same size on the outside another material that would share the same od or outside diameter would be cpvc it's another plastic pipe that we'll talk about later like other plumbing systems we can use fittings to change directions with our pipes we need to run them through a building they need to carry a very complicated path and different fittings will get us there to start with let's talk about an end plug if you're talking about a fitting that goes inside of a pipe we're going to call it a plug if it goes on the outside we call it a cap and this plug will fit inside of this pipe and now this line can be capped off and the water will be sealed it won't travel any further a peck's coupler will take two pipes and connect them in a straight line i've got two couplers here one is plastic and one is brass they both do the same thing and if we take a close look at this brass one you'll see some raised ribs on this fitting these are called barbs and the barbs are what will come in contact with the pipe and when we crimp a band on it later that's what's going to seal this fitting up so we'll have two pipes that'll come in one on this side and then one on this other side and then with our rings on here we'll crimp it and now we have a connection a straight connection that's a coupler the same thing happens with our plastic coupler and it fits in here inside of the pipe and then the other one comes in like this and if you notice there's these funny legs on this fitting those are for our rings to space them off of the end a specific distance it's really critical that these uh are spaced in a specific place to meet those barbs on the inside when it gets crimped down so let's take a closer look at these crimp rings so these are copper rings and they are blackened so that you can understand that they're four pecks and i'll show you one that's not black and we'll get into a little backstory on this whole process this is a half inch crimp ring i also have a three quarter crimp ring so this fits over a three-quarter pipe i also have what's called a pro crimp ring it has a plastic red plastic stop on it this will work similar to our stops on our plastic fittings but it does a good job with brass so this fitting fits inside of this pipe fairly tight but not tight enough if we were to pressurize this pipe with water it would leak like a sieve if we add a crimp ring to this and then we take our tool which is a crimping tool we can clamp down on this and it'll become a little smaller it's going to create pressure on this pipe and clamp it very tightly onto this fitting that's what gives us that watertight seal it's a very easy tool to use we're not adding heat we're not doing anything really strange or crazy it's a quick and inexpensive operation that happens with hand tools so if you notice with these pro crimp rings we've got this red plastic part it's working as a spacer and what it's doing is it's positioning this ring which will get clamped down on our barbs in exactly the right place it's spacing it about an eighth of an inch off of the end of the pipe this is really critical we don't want this ring too far this way or we don't get a good clamp and if it's too far towards the end of the pipe it doesn't seal as well either and this is a similar situation but it works in a different way with our plastic parts now we're using these pieces as stops so when we push this ring on and get ready to crimp it it is spaced properly by this piece of plastic off of the end of the pipe say about an eighth of an inch and that's the best place for that to be to get a good reliable continuous seal another style of band that we can crimp pex with is called a pinch crimp band this one requires a different tool than our other one but it will do the same thing it will be compressed and it will tighten up around that fitting we can use this spacer the same way and we get that water tight seal when we're running pipe we need 90 degree angles we would use an elbow to make a right angle turn in peck's pipe i have here a plastic and a brass one just like our couplers and these two guys work exactly the same way we'll have our pipe that comes in on one side here we will crimp that with a band just like our other one and we can bring in another pipe here and that's our 90 degree turn with our pecks the cool thing about pecks is if you need to make a 90 degree turn you don't always need a fitting and when we're talking about plumbing the less fittings we have the less chance we have of leaks so another way that we can make a 90 degree turn with a pex pipe is just bending it so as you see here this pipe is flexible it will take this bend and we have special tools we can use this is a bend support this is a plastic one they also come in metal and we can put our pipe in here and it will hold a 90 degree bend on this pipe we also have a place where we can put a fastener in so we're not only creating and keeping this 90 degree bend on this pex pipe we're also providing a place we can attach it somewhere and securing our pipe is just as important as the rest of the plumbing process sometimes when we're plumbing we have one line and we need to run another one off of it we would use a t to do that i've got two pex t's here one is plastic one is brass and these work like the other ones we just have three connections now so we can take a pipe run it off this guy one off this side and then another one off of this side and now we have a branch connection say we have a main line we have one coming off of it or you might have this as your feet and you have two lines coming off so this offers us options often when we're plumbing we need to make transitions from pipe sizes pipe styles pipe connections we would do this with what is often called an adapter and an adapter will take our pecs which we're working with and it allows us to transition to another pipe so one transition to show you would be a pex to a threaded connection so as you see here we have our pex barb on this end half inch pex barb and on this end i have threads these are half inch npt threads and that's a standard thread that we can use a lot in plumbing we can attach our pecs here and now we can screw these threads into a number of different materials valves fittings other things that are going on this type of fitting offers us a lot of options when we're plumbing so this is a male version of a pex to a threaded adapter we also have a female version which has those same threads on the inside it has our pex barb on this side and now we can install this one and now we need a male thread that we can connect to this and we can make a watertight seal that way another style of adapter for a different material would be a pex to a sweat connection this is a brass fitting that has our pex barb on this side and on this side it fits a copper pipe we would sweat this onto our copper pipe and then fit it onto our pecs so it would turn out looking something like that so here's another version of an adapter this is called a drop ear elbow if you notice it has a pex on this side and it turns a 90 degree and it has threads on the inside here female threads you will find these uh very commonly in a shower this would be where your shower head would come out of the wall if you ever wondered what that went into it's probably one of these so our pex pipe goes in on this side and then we would thread that shower head arm into this adapter right here so we've talked about fittings that help us change direction we've talked about fittings that cap ends we've talked about fittings that change connection styles there's another type of adapter that you might use that would be a reducer and i have one of those here that will transition from pecks on this side to half inch pecks on this side so now we're changing size in a sort of a coupler configuration so my half inch would go on this side and i could put a three-quarter inch pex on this side and now we have a size reduction from this pipe to this pipe in a simple fitting you might see a reduction in size in another type of fitting i have a t fitting over here and this one has a three quarter on this side a three quarter hex on this side and then a half inch pex on this side this allows us to reduce the the branch connection here from our three quarter to a smaller half inch so we've been through our pipes and our fittings now we have to talk about valves valves when we're talking about supply lines are really important it helps us to control the flow of the water whether that's shutting it off for servicing or controlling the literal flow of the water we can restrict that water any way we need to with a valve and we can put a pex valve into the system this is a ball valve with pex connections on either side it's a quarter turn valve so what you see here is a handle that will turn this direction for off you even have a uh it's labeled with the direction and if you turn it uh parallel to the fitting or to the valve then that would be full on so anywhere in between would be less and less and perpendicular becomes completely a shut off situation and don't forget when we have our pipe on here pipe would go on either end like this we would have a ring that we would slide on here and we would crimp that down we would do the same on this other end and now we have a water tight continuous connection with a control valve in line for any pipe that we need so let's see if we can get a close-up of how a ball valve works right now you're looking at it in the camera it should be open you have a pass-through there is a ball in there that has a hole drilled in it with the handle in this direction that uh hole that's drilled in is in line with the pipe as i turn this valve it's going to close and that hole gets changed direction that holes this way now so we have no flow through this pipe so here's another valve style this is a gate valve and a gate valve works with a door in it it has a little door that drops and raises based on this knob being turned so as i turn this handle or knob that gate will open up it'll lift up or it will go down it requires several turns of the handle and when you get it all the way down it should shut the water off completely you will find these valves in line in a lot of plumbing but look at the connections here we've got a threaded connection so how do we connect our pex pipe to this specific valve we can use some of those adapters that we talked about before we've got our threaded connection here and we have our pex on this end we can thread this in this happens to be a half inch adapter this would require a three quarter version but of course in plumbing we have all different sizes available so one size up from this half inch would fit in on this end we'd have our pex connection here and then we do the same on the other side and we can put any type of valve in that system that we want another valve you might see with pex is an angle stop and an angle stop is a special kind of valve that will be very close to any fixture whether that's a sink or a toilet anything like that the pecs will come in on this side and then there's a right angle turn we call it an angle stop and then it'll come out in a smaller pipe here that will go to that fixture it also has a valve here or a knob at the top that will turn on and off a valve if we need to work on that fixture this is a great way to do it we can shut the water off here and then service that fixture and turn it back on without having to turn off the entire building supply so that's how the pex system works i have one other type of connection to show you and that is what's called a push to connect fitting as you see here this is an elbow a 90 degree elbow and we talked about the outside diameter of pipes this fitting will work on several different pipe materials it will work on our copper pipe it'll work on our cpvc pipe another plastic and it will also work on our pecs this is the simplest plumbing you can do all you do to make a watertight connection with a push to connect fitting is you push the the pipe into the fitting tightly and when it bottoms out that's it you're done this is a watertight seal here if i wanted to i could run a copper pipe out of the other side because the outside diameters are the same so now i have a push to connect fitting that's working as a transition from pex to copper we also have the ability with a push to connect fitting to reuse them and remove them this is very unusual for for plumbing most plumbing fittings it's a one shot deal once they're on they're done we need a special little tool here this is a removal tool we can slide this on the pipe and if we apply pressure here on this fitting the pipe will then slide right out i can reuse this fitting a number of different times and that is unheard of for plumbing so these are very modern too they work with as i mentioned several different materials and they come in a lot of different configurations i even have a valve here that works on pex this has a push to connect uh end on it it's this is what's called a straight stop instead of our angled stop this runs in a straight line and we can just push this right on our pipe and and that's it you're done so as you can see from all the stuff we've looked at today wipex is such a great system we can bend this stuff we can add fittings there are valves we can use we can put it together with hand tools and it just offers us a lot of options keep in mind we've only looked at some of the basics today there's a lot more to go with all of this a lot more parts features and process so thanks for watching i'll see you in the next lesson this video is a production of trade skills you all rights reserved

Channel: TEACH Construction Community Education

Views: 415,471

Keywords: construction, homebuilding, construction training, construction education, education resources, teach construction, tools, building, construction online

Id: UkRjjTbUy-w

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021