How to Remove a PEX-A Coupling **Includes Mistakes**

[Music] to take off a pex a coupling you will need a heat gun a utility knife and a pex pipe cutter you should also wear gloves and use pliers to protect your hands from the hot surfaces in this case copper brass and pex this opportunity shall we say to remove the coupling happened when we were replacing our water main through the front yard as you will see this was also our first removal of a propex coupling so i'm also showing you our mistakes so that you learn how to do this faster safer and therefore increase your chances at reusing the brass coupling if you have an engineered polymer coupling you can't reuse it it is a single use only deal fun fact this is one of those tasks that when you do it right the first time you save an exponential amount of time redoing it if you'd like to know specifically just how long it takes i covered it in last week's video it was an interesting breakdown to see just how slow the job went once we hit the snag because it wasn't just the time sink but the emotional hit when trying to get the water back onto the house math introduced i'm speeding up the rest of the heat process because no one wants to sit through six more minutes of heat gun action and it looks really neat to see the pecs turn clear in a hyper lapse one cut is enough this is where we should have used gloves to prevent burns you should also use pliers to peel the ring off once it's entirely cut through it's a little safer than using the utility knife i am not redoing a coupling for posterity this is reality and i'm willing to share our mistakes so that we can all do better at this this next part is what you should also not do do not use the utility knife on the pecs this way has a high risk of cutting the brass bark which we are trying to preserve so that we can keep using the copper whip coming off the water meter instead reheat the pecs with the heat gun then wearing gloves because everything will be extremely hot work the coupling out of the pecs by pulling it apart while moving it back and forth whether or not you nicked the pecks it is a good idea to cut off the piece that was on the coupling and have a fresh start the important thing to do is try to cut it as straight as possible in our case this plumbing is going underground and i do not ever want to see it again so cutting a little off and starting over is insurance in case either one of us accidentally did nick it and it just wasn't visible by the human eye and it causes a problem years down the road some things are just worth completely eliminating the risk to prevent future pain again a little fast forward here note i am holding the pex in place for an extremely long time while my first install took less than nine seconds to grip and hold just short of where i wanted it to go i just couldn't help but hold it in place just a little longer this is a prime example of learning the hard way and overcompensating the next time [Music] i don't really want to but yeah i'm pulling hard not going anywhere is it [Music] not this time not last time i hope this video helps you so that you don't make our same mistakes and your project goes faster than ours if you have any additional suggestions by all means please drop a comment because i'm obviously learning too then watch this video next because i will show you exactly what to do next time so that you do not make some of these mistakes putting the coupling back on with a new ring thanks for watching

Channel: No More Leaks

Views: 32,128

Keywords: remove PEX-A coupling, remove PEX-A fitting, remove PEX-A connection, cut PEX-A coupling, cut PEX-A, heat gun PEX-A, heat PEX-A, timelapse, time-lapse, utility knife PEX-A, PEX-A tube cutter, PEX tube cutter, heat gun PEX

Id: SqrG2H-wzGY

Length: 4min 28sec (268 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022