this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
124 points (97.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35845 readers
1264 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] stoneparchment@possumpat.io 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 😉

[–] highwind84@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] stoneparchment@possumpat.io 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] pacology@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] Lev_Astov@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] mysoulishome@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Polybutylene. Yeah bad times if you’ve plumbing made out of it the US.

[–] Lev_Astov@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Yep, that's the stuff! They tried to fish the new PEX line through by pulling it with the old stuff, but it broke apart in several places when trying to pull it out.

[–] Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

some experimental flexible hose material from the late 80s

I got you beat there. My house had cardboard sewer pipe. Orangburg pipe.

[–] Lev_Astov@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yikes! That' can't have been easy to replace.

[–] Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Ya, it was pretty terrible. Just cost money though!