PEX Piping: Speeding Installation PATH Case Study

Click here to visit the PATH website. Owner/Builder: Keith Peterson West Pasco, Wash. Keith Peterson is a certified sustainable building advisor and a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He has more than 11 years experience in deploying green building technologies. He acted as the general contractor for the construction of his own home through the help of UBuildIt, an owner-builder consultant group. The Technology: PEX water supply piping The Project: Peterson's 2,480 square-foot home built with insulating concrete forms features PEX water supply piping and radiant floor heating. Why he used PEX piping: Keith Peterson didn't want to use copper for his plumbing because of the taste it can leave in the water. He selected cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) piping for its ease of installation and cost savings, and even tied a REHAU fire-suppression system into his cold water pipes. "PEX is quiet, it doesn't scale, and you don't get that copper taste. Installing PEX is like stringing electrical wire. It's that fast. I minimized installation time and got a superior product at the same time."" Peterson's story "Traditional copper piping is a good product, but it's not inert," says Keith Peterson. "When water sits in it for a while, you get sediment build-up and that copper taste. You avoid all that with PEX. There's also a smaller pressure drop than for copper piping, so the water pressure at different fixtures doesn't fluctuate so much. "Some earlier plastic piping products made from butyl gave plastic piping a bad rap. But PEX doesn't have the problems that butyl did. Neither does CPVC, but I had already chosen to use PEX for my radiant floor heating, and so saw its advantages — rapid and flexible installation and a more fail-safe, quality product — for supplying drinking water as well. "When I was installing PEX on my radiant heat system, I had to repair some kinks, which was really easy. You just use a heat gun to heat up the PEX until it turns clear, and then you let it cool and it's back to normal. You can't do that with any other piping.   1 | 2  NEXT RELATED ARTICLES: Home-run Plumbing: A Fast Hit with Builders and Homeowners Manifold Supply Plumbing Centralized Plumbing Offers Manifold Benefits