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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world ALostInquirer @lemm.ee

Why are pipes used in plumbing more than hoses?

I have some decent ideas as to why, I'm asking mainly as a hopefully fun contribution here, and to maybe learn some interesting plumbing info!

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  • Huge disclaimer that I'm not a plumber or even close to a plumber, but I did have a house and think about houses:

    Isn't the current "standard" plumbing PEX plumbing, which is basically just a bunch of hoses?

    Like I think you're on to something but the industry beat you to the punch 😉

    • Even now in some places repairs are done with cpvc. Op may be wondering why they didn’t choose hoses in the first place.

      • Oh, good point! Yeah, in our old house (copper plumbing) plumbers usually did repairs with cpvc, not sure why.

        • Copper piping costs about double the cost of cove piping.

          If you want to repair copper, you need to use a torc and solder. That’s not usually possible if the repairs are in difficult to reach places.

          Cpvc usually requires only a crimp coupling.

          • If you want to repair copper, you need to use a torc and solder. That’s not usually possible if the repairs are in difficult to reach places.

            As a homeowner, I find copper to be pretty easy and approachable. Not only are torches cheap, they're also good for a lot of things other than plumbing, so it's totally worth owning one. Soldering really doesn't take as much skill as people think it does, and has the advantage that it can be desoldered and re-soldered if it's wrong. Also, all plumbing types are subject to the "difficult to reach places" issue; copper only stands out in the risk of setting something near the pipe on fire while soldering, and if you've got the minimum smarts necessary to put a wet rag behind it then it's no big deal.

            In comparison, PVC also requires few tools but has the disadvantage that, if you screw up gluing it, you've got to cut it out, throw it away and buy more pieces to start over. PEX seems like it'd be easy to work with (I haven't actually tried this one yet), but depending on which proprietary connection style you go with, you need to buy weird specialized tools to stretch the end of the pipe and such.

            Side note: some people might be inclined to use 'sharkbite' fittings to repair copper because they're intimidated by soldering. Don't! It's not even really about the small risk of o-ring failure causing a leak in the future or the fact that sharkbite fittings cost more than soldered copper ones; it's just that soldering is so downright easy that the difference in difficulty is trivial.

            What sharkbite fittings are good for is temporarily capping off the end of a pipe when you want to be able to turn the water back on before you're finished doing whatever you're doing to it.

    • I recently had to have my 1980s house's water main connection replaced because they used some experimental flexible hose material from the late 80s and it's all starting to embrittle and fail now. Wouldn't have happened with PEX...

      I've been reading about PEX now and it sounds like it only became commercially viable to produce in large volumes in the 1990s, even thought it's existed as a form of polyethylene since the 1930s. It's just now becoming cheap enough to be used everywhere because it's obviously better and we have lots of material performance data on it.

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