PEX vs COPPER vs CPVC plumbing pipes

on the build show today plumbing 101 we're gonna be reviewing the three major piping systems we're gonna be talking about copper pecs and CPVC we're gonna talk about how long they've been in the market how durable they are how much do they cost and which one might you choose for your next new build or remodel let's get going [Music] if you're building or remodeling one of the major decisions you're gonna have is which plumbing system to put in your house on today's video I'm gonna show you the pros and the cons of all three of the major plumbing systems that you might use on an American house let's start with copper though and my hope is that on each one of these I'm gonna be objective about the pros and the cons I've used all three of these in houses that I built or remodeled over the last 25 years so I've got first-hand experience with these so first let's talk copper time and market when we talk about copper this is the oldest of all these piping systems it's been around for ages and so that's one of the reasons why MERS love copper in fact builders love copper because it has that longevity of time we know that this is not a new system that it's untested or untried for generations this has worked well with very few failures we'll get into that in a minute next let's talk cost now copper is the most expensive remember copper is a commodity and so if you feel that little short section of pipe there that's pretty heavy there's a lot of copper in that pipe and so the prices on the materials are gonna fluctuate but also it's probably the most expensive in terms of install because it's the most labor-intensive so when for instance if you're bidding a new construction house you often are bidding that early in the design phase or probably before you even get a permit but you're not gonna have the plumber on site for many months to do the top out ploy meaning the plumbing pipes inside the house so six months down the line the price of copper may have fluctuated greatly you're either gonna get a plumber who's gonna put a big padding in his bid to make sure that he's accounted for that fluctuation in price or you might get a change order at that stage saying hey we had to buy our copper pipe and it was much more expensive today than it was six months ago when I bid that so be cautious about copper for using them another thing you want to know is they're two different types of copper there's type L and there's type M type L is thicker that's what this one is it's a little thicker wall so if you've got places where you're gonna be using let's say underground or in a basement where you're worried about other things happening in the mechanical room there where there could be even let's say abrasion or corrosive things around you want to use the thicker type L now type em works just as well and in fact you could use this throughout your house but I wouldn't bury this in the ground and be a little more cautious on the slightly thinner wall but either grade will work just fine in terms of piping for your house okay next lifespan how long is that copper going to last it's hard to say for sure but you're gonna get at least seventy-five maybe a hundred years from copper the reasons why you see some failures in copper are typically related to some pinhole leaks that can develop over time now I've never actually experienced that but I watched a great episode of this old house on YouTube and I link to that below yesterday and they were talking about some pinhole leaks a tip that a client was having in their basement specifically on their hot water lines well it turned out what was happening was the anode rod on the water heater it was gone had basically was eaten away and so the water heater was rusting this was a you know 10 15 year-old water heater and as a result the rust flakes were coming into the copper piping and when someone turned on their water rusted coming to the pipe they turn off their plumbing the rust would fall down and it would lay in the horizontal pipes which would corrode the inside of the pipe and in time it actually made pinhole leaks on any horizontal surface on their copper system because of that so this is not a usual failure but it can't happen there are some things that will degrade copper over time water hammer that's one issue that copper houses its Achilles heel because it's so rigid you know this is gonna come in 20 or 10 foot lengths you got to put fittings everywhere you're not gonna bend this when someone shuts off a fixture suddenly or the washing machine stops filling all the sudden there's gonna be some movement potentially in the pipes and this can hammer against the studs or the straps in your system so you have to be really cautious about water hammer and a copper system and last let's talk about fittings you know copper is probably the most involved when it comes to fittings we need a fair amount of tools and we're doing a copper job first of all you're gonna need a tubing cutter and then that little points on there that's your reamer after you cut it you need to make sure you ream it and get the barbs off and needs to be nice and smooth on the inside then your plumber is going to use some sandpaper to see in the outside and then you're gonna have to apply some flux on there that's this paste right here and then you're gonna use some lead-free solder when you actually put that connection together and then lastly you're gonna have to put some heat on it so you're gonna have to use one of these and you have to be really cautious when using heat inside a house to make sure we don't catch our wood framing on fire so there's a fair amount of Labor that goes into the fittings on a copper system okay so next up CPVC you know I've actually used see PVC on a remodel on my own house about 15 years ago where I got to be the plumbers assistant on a CPVC repipe job and this is actually the most common repipe material on american homes this is about 50% of the repipe market and after doing that job myself and/or with the plumber I should say I can tell you it was very easy you know we really only needed one tool to work with it that's this a tube cutter right here super easy to cut it's pretty malleable we can cut right through there that's a three-quarter tube I cut and then there's really only one way to do fittings and that's this this is gonna be a solvent which you're gonna use a primer and then a solvent on there you're gonna wipe that primer on you're gonna put the solvent on and then you're gonna cold weld that joint together now this is an excellent joint you know it's never going to come apart however I'm not a huge fan of that purple primer or the solvent for that matter because if you've got any kind of finished floor below you need to be really cautious in fact when I was making a video on this a couple months ago I spilled some of this primer onto my desktop here and I still have the purple saying it is not going away anytime soon so whenever you're using this they need to be really cautious if you're talking about a remodel situation be sure there's paper down on the floor and you're not getting any of this on because they didn't ain't coming off later okay so time and market CPVC has actually been around a long time this started I believe in the early 1960s and I don't think there's more than one manufacturer at this point I think only flow guard gold is the manufacturer and this is different than PVC so the white pipes you see that are your drain pipes this is not the same thing this is different chemistry it's actually chlorinated polyvinyl chloride piping so it's got a little bit of flexibility it's also very resistant to chemistry in the water so if you've got some issues with well water or other things like that that might be eating pipes this is a great choice very resistant when we're talking cost of pipe this is actually probably the least cost pipe in our inventory here so you're gonna get a pretty cost-effective system by using C PVC you do have a little bit more labor maybe on this then pecks probably less labor than installing copper cuz it's pretty easy to make those cuts and make those solvent fittings so overall cost wise this is certainly gonna be less than copper maybe slightly more expensive than a pecks install lifespan I think that your lifespan on an install like this is probably between 50 and 75 years now this is a guest this is just based on what I've read and what I've seen I've seen some reports of this degrading over time I've not seen that myself but again I've only been in the business twenty five years so it's hard to know for sure but I would say that this is just a hair less than copper in terms of longevity UV and durability now you can't leave this exposed to UV rays so you can't run this let's say for an outdoor hose bib but when it comes to durability this is a pretty tough pipe it has a little bit of flexibility in a longer run you can see you can get a little bend out of it compared to copper let's say but I found it to be a pretty durable pipe it's a its abrasion resistant and because it's got that thick wall I'm not exactly sure how the chemistry works but I've heard that it actually has a little bit of an insulated value compared to a copper pipe and lastly water hammer in fact this is probably gonna be the best pipe in the bunch when it comes to water hammer because of that malleability flexibility this pipe is gonna be able to take that water hammer shock better than copper and not move nearly as much inside your wall so this should be a very quiet pipe system in your house okay and rounding out the bunch is PEX now I've actually used PEX probably the most in my houses over the last 15 years there's three different varieties of pecs there texe a b and c that's not a grade that's just a manufacturing process but the two most common that i see in the marketplace is pecs a and in fact i'm doing a job right now with this one this is open or pecs there are a couple of their brand names of pecs a and then there's pecs b and pecs b has several brands but this happens to be Vega pecs which I've used a lot over the years and and two of the differences between pecs a and pecs b pecs a is a little more flexible you're going to be able to move it around and the wall system a little easier pecs b is a little stiffer although this is still a flexible pipe so you're gonna go much much longer before you're gonna need a fitting with pecs compared to either copper or CPVC time and market now pecs is the newest of this bunch 1972 is when pecs was invented the year of my birth so it's been around for 45 years and it was used in Europe for a solid 20 years before it started getting adopted in America and I would say it was really the 90s in the early 2000s that text has taken off and in my market place where I am in Austin Texas for new construction text is the dominant player almost never see either of the other two piping systems in Austin pecs is by far the biggest system out there and one big reason is cost you know the tubing itself is on par with flow guard gold or with the CPVC but it's really installing the labor that ends up being a time saver because you can go really long distances you can buy it in big coils like this you can go a long ways without a fitting and the fitting systems are pretty quick as well you know you've got two different types of fittings on pecs a you can do an expansion fitting that's where you're gonna put a barbed expansion in here and it's gonna expand this and then contractor on your fitting or you can do a crimped fitting like this pecs B has where you're gonna put a fitting in there and crimp around it stay tuned for a future video where I'm gonna really go in-depth on the different types and brands of pecs but for today's purposes let's talk about how pecs compares to copper and CPVC so when it comes to the lifespan it's a little bit more unknown how long pecs is gonna last at a minimum 50 years but I think it's probably on par with CPVC and maybe slightly less than copper so I think you're easily gonna get 75 or hundred years out of a pecs install at a minimum I'm hoping that they'll actually go longer than that UV and durability now UV exposure is no bueno for pecs you do not want this expose of the Sun in fact you need to make sure that the plumber is not storing this in their yard because if this is outdoors for longer than 30 days it's gonna start to degrade so all of your pecs has to be totally encapsulated no UV light on the pecs of whatsoever it's gonna be fine in your basement in your crawlspace but be cautious you don't want to store your leftover pecs in the job or other type of boneyard things out in the Sun because that will degrade and you're gonna cause a future leak if you're installing that old pipe water hammer now pecs is gonna be pretty similar to CPVC it does pretty well on water hammer but you do need to be cautious about when you're strapping in and adding hammer arresting devices as well in your system so it's going to be much much less than copper but a little bit more let's say than CPVC and lastly let's talk about fittings you know I did a video not too long ago where I talked about this fitting type right here this is a sharkbite fitting or I'd push-to-connect PTC there's actually several different manufacturers of these sharkbite happens to be the Kleenex kind of brand-name these are invented about 15 years ago and they've really started to come on in the market and as we talk about pecs I think what we're gonna start seeing is more and more people starting to use push-to-connect or sharp bite connectors with their pecs you know I've used these in a lot of emergency situations a cap like this super handy I keep both a half-inch and a three-quarter on my truck at all times for emergency purposes but I'm starting to see whole houses plumbed with this and in fact the sharkbite people have an Evo pecs system that's a PEX piping that's designed for their pecs fittings that the entire house could be pushed to fit I think the big benefit there is certainly going to be a time saver there also could be a big benefit in that the trades could be less experienced but get an excellent pipe install with a push to connect type system so it's yet to see how much market share that we'll get but be aware that there is a push to connect system utilizing really any of these pipes but primarily pecs where the entire house would have its fittings as sharkbite okay guys let's wrap this video up we talked about three different plumbing systems out there you know it's hard to say what is the right plumbing system for your house but let me give you a couple scenarios if your repiping an old house let's say you live in a 40s 50s 60s 70s house in the repiping it's a good chance for plumbers gonna want to use CPVC and this is a good pipe system I've actually used this to repipe one of my houses I liked it a lot if you're building new construction and you're hoping to build a house that's gonna last for many generations copper's a great choice you know coppers been around forever if we have an apocalypse you're still gonna buy that 1/2 inch type L pipe at the local mom-and-pop shop in the middle of nowhere Ville USA so copper I think is still around for a long long time but get ready to pay for that performance and that longevity this is definitely the most costly piping system and when it comes to PEX there's a lot of different flavors a lot of firm manufacturers in the marketplace a lot of builders like me have opted to go with pecs on new construction and in retrofit I've had really good service with pecs and probably the last 15 years that I've used a couple different varieties of pecs I can only think of two times where I've had a fitting leak and they were fairly easily recognizable they could be fixed without a whole lot of damage so any one of these piping systems if you've got it in your house they're good choices but they have some pros and cons and you want to talk to your plumber your builder the local guys the distributors and find out things like is there any concern with water quality is there corrosive water do I have well water versus city water where's the pipe going to go is it getting buried in the ground in my slab on grade foundation let's say or is it going in a basement because you're gonna choose a slightly different pipe depending on those things and you also want to make sure that your plumber is familiar with that system so for instance if you got a plumber that's only using copper you're probably not going to get them to make the switch to pecs similarly if you've got a repipe contractor that's using CPVC on all their jobs if you want them to bid copper they're gonna bid it really high because they're not used to it I hope this video is useful for you guys be sure to hit that subscribe button below we've got new content every Tuesday and every Friday and by the way a big thanks to my friends at products magazine that's a magazine I get for free because I'm a builder so if you're a remodeler builder or architect look for the products magazine subscription link in the description below I get it every month and that's a lot of ways that I learn about cool and new products in our building industry follow us on Twitter Instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music]

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 1,224,076

Rating: 4.8727145 out of 5

Keywords: plumbing, sharkbite, pvc, cpvc, copper plumbing, which plumbing system to use, plumbing pros and cons, best piping, plumbing for remodeling, pex piping, uponor, plumber

Id: ywtnOq1ExqQ

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 13 2018