What's the BEST Plumbing System

all right guys i got two 10-foot sections of open or pecks the blue pipe is three-quarter inch the red pipe is half inch i'm curious to see how much water these hold all right andrew you ready yep we're gonna go uh red pipe first let's go half inch first okay i got my thumb over it all right perfect so andrew's up there filling it up with some blue dyed water tell me when you're ready it's looking good all right i see one air bubble coming up to you other than that this pipe looks pretty full we got a little four cup measuring cup down here comment below on how many how many cups of water you think 10 feet a half inch pipe is let's see if you're right i don't see any bubbles it looks really full all right we're full okay you ready one two three go all right what do we got where'd that land we are let's see that is oh i'm on the wrong side that's the ounces side looks to me like we are two just shy of two cups i'm one and two thirds cups let's see if you can see it on the camera there there's one there's one and a half it's just shy of one and two-thirds about a cup and a half of water in the half-inch pipe let's reset and see what the three-quarter pipe will hold oh i lost them dang it all right take two y'all i let that go a little too uh i forgot that a 10-foot column of water has a fair amount of head on it fair amount of pressure on it so this time we'll see if i can keep that splash contained looking pretty good andrew you full up there brother almost let's see how we do here i'll tell you the point of this in a second but really we're talking about we are full man you're full all right guys let's see what i can do here i'm gonna try and not burst out of my thumb that's better i'm controlling it a little better this time perfect andrew i got it this time [Music] minus a splash or two not bad okay let's see where we're at here oh i can see it right now there's the three cup measurement right there it is basically double going from a half inch pipe to three quarter pipe double the water volume let's use that knowledge and let's walk inside and talk about hot water delivery how to bring it to your tap as fast as possible let's get going [Music] all right so where does this pipe size matter well it doesn't really matter on the cold water delivery side right who cares how long it takes to get cold water you don't really know where it matters is on hot water delivery and that size of pipe really makes a difference how many times have you been outside of the shower freezing cold and naked with your finger in the water waiting for that water to heat up in the meantime you're just dumping beautiful filtered gorgeous water down the drain because it's not the right temperature now water savings aside i'm frustrated by the weight i hate that weight 20 seconds 30 seconds a minute to get hot water but we also waste a lot of fresh water on the epa website it had something like 1.1 trillion gallons of water or wasted waiting for hot in american homes each year so now let's look at that pipe size and how we might deliver hot water quicker to our houses we basically learned that when we step up from a half inch pipe to a three-quarter pipe there's double the water volume the same is true if we had a three-eighths inch pipe here and we stepped from three-eighths to half and the same would be true if we went from three quarter to one the one inch pipe is about double the volume of the three quarter now let's look at some plumbing delivery systems and talk about how they could deliver hot water faster in my mind one of the ones that comes up right away as a fast hot water delivery i think is a manifold system now i did a full system tour in a manifold job not too long ago a year or two ago and when you think about a manifold system it's kind of like the way you wire a house there's a panel box in the basement this big tube this manifold that's usually a pretty thick diameter and then from that tube you've got all these little twigs that are usually half inch pecks running to each fixture location and you would think that because it's the smaller diameter pipe half inch pecks that you would have very quick hot water delivery but let's think about that if you had short runs let's say 50 pipe feet well that would only be seven and a half cups of water in that 50 feet of half inch pecks so when you turn on your faucet you've got to wait for seven and a half cups to go down the drain before it's hot that's not too bad most faucets in america today are about 2.2 gallons per minute which means we've got you know maybe 15 seconds or so before that water gets hot it's still a little long in my mind that's still a little bit annoying but what's really annoying about the manifold systems and why i really don't use them in my houses is the annoyance of i just turned my faucet on and now my wife comes into the bathroom five minutes later and i've been shaving or getting hot water out washing my hands now when she turns her faucet on just two feet from me she also has to dump seven and a half cups of water down the drain before it actually gets hot i know by the way that bullet that's down in the basement that manifold itself that's usually a pretty hunk and thick pipe so there's a fair amount of cold in there that needs to get expelled before we even get to that little tiny pipe now if we have longer runs too let's say we have a hundred pipe feet that means it gets twice as annoying to have hot water at this faucet and then go to turn on the shower and again i've got to dump another 15 or 30 seconds of coal down the drain so i've stayed away from manifold systems i think they're frustrating to people and they end up wasting more water than you think even though you're using these lines now i'm not saying that manifolds aren't good systems i like that there's less fittings that you can turn each individual branch off there's lots of reasons why you might use it and in a smaller house it could work really well but i find them really frustrating next up let's talk about trunk and branch system that's probably the majority of the way most houses in america are plumbed i would say 90 percent of them that's where you have usually something like this a three quarter line or maybe even a one-inch line plumbers are always worried about pressure call backs running through the house and then you have a bunch of twigs that's your branch and that's your or pardon me that's your trunk and that's your branch or maybe even a twig which is a smaller pipe off of that and those houses now have if you don't have a recirc line anyways all kinds of pipe in the way before i actually get to that fixture i might have one inch pipe three quarter inch pipe a lot of it before i actually get there so now instead of seven and a half cups i might have it's not unusual at a lot of houses to wait for an entire minute outside the shower or longer before you actually get to that hot water remember showers are usually 2.5 gallons per minute so now we've got even more cups down the drain at 2.2 gallons at your faucet that's 35 cups per minute down the drain of your faucet and i'd be willing to bet a lot of you watching this are waiting a full minute for that faucet to work however the beauty of the trunk and branch is once it's charged once you've turned on this faucet usually the faucet next door the shower in the same bathroom they're all from that same trunk that now is charged it's actually hot inside there so now once i've got this fixture hot that fixture that fixture the bathroom next door those are usually hot as well and that's the beauty of a trunk and branch system the other nice thing about these is they can be retrofitted even if you don't have a dedicated recirc line they can be retrofitted to add one in fact that's what i did to my house 15 years ago when i remodeled i put a metlin demand pump i'll put a link to those guys where i basically moved the water from the hotline dumped it into the cold line so that my furthest fixture would be hot so you can kind of retrofit those but in my mind the system that i think makes the most sense and how i actually plumbed my house under construction is the opener logic system now my friend gary klein who's a master at hot water delivery he's written all kinds of articles i'll link to some of them below has a really good layout that basically is the open our logic system which says that if we do a race track of three quarter through the house and then it really could be any type of pipe but let's think about this a three quarter line a race track and then every fixture that's off of that race track is going to be a twig of half inch or maybe even 3 8 pipe so once that race track is hot with a dedicated recirc loop all we've got to do is branch out with a smaller pipe diameter and then if we're hot here and we tee off that to get to a fixture we can actually pipe a house so that you might lose one and a half cups or less of water down the drain before it's hot at any location in the house and that's how i plumb this house now guys stay tuned for a future video on this i'm going to make a full system tour of my house and how we plumbed it and some of the benefits of openor in particular but the same type of plumbing could be used with copper could be used with other flavors of pecs cbvc whatever i'm really talking about the concept not the actual brands here i'm going to link to a bunch of gary klein articles below but ultimately let's answer the question which the video poses what is the best and conversely what's the worst system the worst system is the one that you don't think about that you just plumb the house without any thought for hot water delivery you're worried only about pressure drop or call backs because of pressure and you wait and wait and wait and dump and dump and dump water down the drain until it gets hot that's the worst system the best system is the one that you think about ahead of time and ideally in my mind the one that's going to dump less than a cup and a half of water down the drain before it gets hot at any fixture in the house hey guys big thanks to my friend gary klein i talked to gary several times before i started piping this house about the layout and how i was going to do it and in fact open or did an engineered system on this house and i'm going to get into that on my next video but i'll put a link below if you're interested in having them engineer your house but ultimately think about this ahead of time and i think you can design for your house with a little bit of forethought a system that's not going to waste water that's going to be plumbed really well without any problems and you're going to get really hot delivery to all those fixtures to your house without wasting water and again it's not just about the water savings it's about that frustration of waiting guys if you're not currently a subscriber 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: 409,430

Rating: 4.9137588 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build

Id: 1b8XaEygtKs

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021