What's this stuff called? It's grey, kind-of flexible, and uses little copper crimp clamps to clamp it, no soddering, but use copper fittings with crimps. Any body every encountered this stuff, and how did you connect into it for the mainline? Alex
Pex. It is very fast to install, but like plastic solder, once you connect it you can't take the band off and reuse (you can reuse the fitting sometimes). All you need is a cutter, and crimper tool. They come in a couple sizes. You'll have to go to a local plumbing supply house to get what you need. This is not the "old style" piping that was recalled. Hope this helps.
It is the pipe that plumbers used before PEX. PEX pipe replaced that gray pipe. In NC we called it POLY pipe. They had some serious problems with the pipe and fittings leaking real bad. Plus to top it off there was a huge lawsuit going on with it as well. I heard if you had that in your home you could get some money to have your house repiped. If you are going to use the poly pipe the crimp rings are different from pex pipe so make sure that you get the right kind of rings. The good thing is that you can still use the same crimper for both kinds of pipe.
Can you use a compression tee on this stuff? This is the first time I have encountered this pipe, and the crimper tool here is about 80.00. I would think that a compression tee would work for it because it reads on the pipe that it is 3/4 copper tubing size outside diameter. Will this work???
I think that you can use compression fittings. You should be able to rent the crimpers from some supply house. Or ya might try to ask a plumber. You might run into a prolem where you can't find the poly pipe fittings just the crimp rings.
If that's polybutylene you may want to replace it. I have heard of whole houses being destroyed from poly failures. There are people that have installed compression tees (if it's what I'm thinking of) to use as a safety device. What this did is when there was a catastrophic drop in pressure, the tee shut off the water supply.
