Uponor Pipe System Review & Comparison

on the build show today we're talking plumbing i'm going to be reviewing the flavors of pex piping we're going to be talking about open or peck's pecks b and peck c kind of all the other flavors we're going to review three reasons why i think open or is the winner and actually why i've used it to plumb my personal house now i'm no plumber but in my 25 years of home building i put a lot of plumbing systems in and i've spent a lot of time thinking about this so i've got three reasons for you today why i think open or is the winner today's video is sponsored by open art let's get going [Music] all right guys so we're talking pecs specifically today i put a lot of pecs in my houses and in fact probably in the last 20 plus years i've used pecs almost exclusively on my houses and there's really two main uh kind of flavors of pecs pecs a and pex b now pec stands for cross-linked polyethylene and there's really two different ways to manufacture it open or is really the dominant player in pex a i'm actually not sure if any other manufacturers make apex a and then pex b there's multiple manufacturers this one i actually just picked up at the local home center and this is kind of a generic brand but there are lots of big players in the pecs b market that you would recognize now first off there's three things that are different about these and three reasons why i think specifically opennor which is my three quarter red right here is a little better than the pex b flavors out there and the first thing is flexibility this is a three quarter pipe which is naturally a little stiffer than half inch pipe and here's actually some open or half inch look how easily that pipe moves and bends it's a really flexible pipe on the other hand pex b you can definitely bend it but you're using a lot more effort to get a bend out of it and here's a great example right behind me we're in my master kitchen right here and this happens to be the ice maker line and if you were to look in the ceiling where that line comes from there's a t in the ceiling and there's a fitting there and then that pipe which happens to be insulated here this is a half inch opener pipe is snaking all the way through the wall until we get to the shut off valve at the bottom here now doesn't that remind you a little bit of your wiring in the house your wiring kind of snakes around but if this would have been pex b and certainly if it would have been copper or cpvc i would have had a joint here and i would have had a joint here before i got there which means i would have probably had at least double the fittings on that run that i have right now i just have one fitting in the ceiling and one fitting at the end and that flexibility is what i really like about opennor's pecs now i did this throughout my house and several times i remember thinking the plumbers man they are really snaking that through some places and that's one of the things that i really tasked my plumbers with on this house was i wanted to go as long as possible to take advantage of that flexibility of the pipe and have as few fittings as possible now in full disclosure i've used a lot of pex b over the years and i've had very few fitting failures but the least number of fittings i can have means the least potential for failure and that flexibility i think is a really big deal and the last thing about flexibility especially from a plumber's perspective that means there's going to be a little less labor on the job you know if i can think about a long run where i can snake a pipe and get it all the way through there in one long run that means i've got less fittings and each time i put a fitting in that's real dollars these fittings are not inexpensive a lot cheaper to run straight pipe and not put fittings on it plus every time i got to put a fitting on i'm taking a break i'm cutting pipe i'm using these crimpers all these things take time and take money so if i can snake that flexible open or pipe through there and not have fittings i think it's a total win-win okay next up freeze protection it's not totally freeze proof but pex a open or pex definitely has the ability to expand and contract because that pipe is flexible and so this can be much more freeze resistant than most other flavors out there including pex b now i did a bunch of videos about this in the past go go check those out where i put sections of pipe in the freezer i was never once able to cause a leak in the open or because of that expansion ability so i think that it's not a hundred percent you definitely still want to protect it you want to use frost proof hose bibs you want to put insulation on it but if there's going to be an issue that's unforeseen you're going to be in much better shape with openor than all the other flavors out there and number three this is the big one fittings let's talk about this for a minute when open or fittings are made this is an expansion system let me actually show you how how we make one i'm going to cut a little section that's three-quarter pipe and we'll show you the difference in fittings between oopenor and kind of a generic pex b system so there's a little section there so when you make a fitting with open or you've got an expansion collar and that expansion collar is going to slip over the end of the pipe and there's some nubs on the end which stop it once you do that then you're going to grab your fitting and let's use this actually i'll put it on the other side of this one since i've already got one here you're going to notice in this fitting there's some wings that stick out eventually this is going to fit into here as deep as the wings but here's what i like about the system this is an expansion fitting let me show you how to do it with my little milwaukee tool here all i'm doing is throwing in the pipe and making sure that those wings are sunk all the way in and it's it's probably hard to see there but it's just slowly kind of contracting back to its original size and on these fittings you're going to notice there's a bit of a barb on there which is helping to grab on the pipe and that's making a watertight seal but what i like about these fittings is not just the expansion but i think that let's see if i can actually show it let me show you a uh here we go this is an open or fitting and this is a pex b fitting a little hard to see but if you were actually to peer through both of these you would notice that the open or fitting because it's an expansion is a wider fitting they call this a full port fitting now with that being said let me show you how the pex b fittings work a couple sections three quarter here okay so this happens to be a brass fitting and what you're going to notice is this fitting is sliding on with the pipe cold there's no expansion going on and then what we're going to do is we're going to use a crimp tool and we're actually going to crimp it on there so this crimp tool will work with both three quarter and half inch and i'm going to do this while i'm talking here we go so i'm putting it in there making sure it's in the right spot and then i'm going to crimp it and i've got to go until the tool hits and now that fitting is on there for good but we need to check to make sure that the fitting was put on correctly so we're going to use this check tool and because i can sink that in i know that that fitting's done that fitting is not coming off that is a tight fitting and as i said earlier i'm not super worried about leak failures but if you were to look down that shaft what are you going to notice you notice that that fitting fits inside the pipe so the pipe is actually necking down at the fittings and here's the part that really surprised me when i pulled my calipers out let's get nerdy for one second here i'm going to set my caliper to inches and i've got two different flavors of pex b fittings here these are crimp on fittings i've got one that's a plastic fitting and i've got one that's a brass fitting let's check the inside of the fitting let's see if i can do this on camera the inside of the plastic fitting remember this is a three quarter fitting is actually point four eight it's not even a half inch inside there now let's look at the brass one brass is a little bit stronger than plastic so they can thin up that wall this one's .56 nowhere near what you'd expect for a half inch pipe now the inside wall thickness of the pex b here is let me see if i can get it as accurately as possible 0.67 which means that when i slide that fitting in there i'm necking this three quarter down to almost a half inch fitting or a half inch pipe diameter when i go through there that's not great in my mind now on the other hand let's look at these jupiter fittings so here's a plastic three quarter openor fitting and let me flip my calipers around so you can see it point six one is the inside diameter there and then the three-quarter inside diameter is .68 the fitting in the inside are really close and in fact it's probably about 10 percent maybe as much as 15 percent more capacity through that fitting than the pex b flavors that's a really big deal for me and again it's because i can't shove this in here without expanding this i've got to expand the pipe to make it fit so these fittings here that's a full port fitting that's a really big deal and that's a big reason why i like the supernorm pipe and the other thing that means is there's no checking to do i don't need to use this check tool right here this check tool needs to be used when i'm using pex b fittings which are those crimp fittings there's no tool to use i can visually look at it and i know that this is correct i would have never been able to slide my pipe on back to those wings had this not been fully expanded so that fitting just with a visual check i'm good to go and the last thing i'm going to say about fittings real quick too is that openor makes these multi-port tees and i used a bunch of these at my house in various places i really like this when you're using a race track design which is the open or logic system basically at my house for a recirc line these come in handy i've got a three quarter line that's charged with hot and then i can pop off right here to go to various fixtures in my house with this half inch pex line that is a really cool deal i like these multi-port tees now there's there is three things for you but i actually have a bonus one for you as well one thing that can happen with pecks is it's possible to crimp the the end and and get a crimp in the pipe now this is pex b and believe it or not there's actually no way to fix that and get that crimp out i can't i can't do anything to it to do it that's always going to be there which means if i had that happen to me in the field i actually need to cut this out and put a coupling in there i would want to use a coupling like this to fix that on the other hand with pex a which is open or pex if i get a crimp which is actually pretty hard to do oh there we go i got one i can fix it and let me show you how to do it let me get that crimp in there real good all right look at that now if this was pex b i would actually have to toss this uh or put a fitting on there but we can use a heat gun to fix it i'm gonna keep my uh heat gun up here i'm gonna show you live how to do this okay so we can actually fix this right here all we're gonna do is turn our heat gun on and we're gonna turn this like a little rotisserie chicken here in a second here you're going to see that red pipe is going to go clear what's happening is from a chemical level from chemistry level we're actually kind of lining up the linkages on that cross-linked polyethylene you can actually see that pipe right now expanding back and we are just as strong as the original pipe after doing this we've not weakened the pipe in any way shape or form by doing this it's going to be a little hard to see on camera but you can see if you're right up on it like i am that pipe is going white where that kink was uh now that you can see it you're starting to see through the pipe it's becoming kind of translucent there's almost a little bit of kind of like a bubble forming right there but what it's doing is it's realigning all those molecules again and it's going to go back to its original shape okay that's it we're just going to let for wait for it to cool down and believe it or not that pipe is fixed and as i said earlier we are just as strong we have not weakened the pipe at all all right guys we're going to give that another minute or two and it's going to come back to its original color and shape but you can see that kink is gone it is totally fixed we cannot do that with pex b but with open or pex pex a good to go guys big thanks to openor for sponsoring today's video i'll be honest uh i use their competitor i use pex b for many many years and i liked it but i think there's several advantages that i mentioned today that have kind of tossed me over into the open or camp and if you've not used it i highly recommend it great great system and by the way i've got a video coming up on my house with this layout this is a set of plans from them from their engineer on how to do my house and as i mentioned earlier i love that i could reduce the amount of fittings to as minimal as possible on my house stay tuned for that video i'm going to give you a full tour over here if you're not currently a subscriber guys hit that subscribe button below we've got new content every tuesday and every friday follow me on twitter instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music] you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 134,570

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build, plumbing, uponor fittings, best plumbing fittings, best plumbing, how to plumb, sharkbite fittings, what plumbing fittings to use

Id: mgu4f1VkjcM

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021