No Stupid Questions
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!
Plumbing Apprentice here. Garden hoses wear out in 5-10 years, and ideally the water and drainage pipes will be there for decades.
Do they wear out because they’re exposed to the elements and movement, or because of their material? I read that as “what if you were to put a hose in the wall?” Would its rate of degradation be the same as say a pvc pipe?
Over time the rubber of the hose dries and cracks, and the elements/movement can expidite that process. I guess a hose inside of a wall could last much longer depending on the material. If they were made in the same way Fernco fittings are made, they could last a just as long (Fernco claim the fittings can last 50 years, but the company has only been around for ~50 years so the claim can't really be tested).
Pvc is designed to last 50 years but some people claim that its useful lifespan is 75-100 years, but Pvc hasn't been around long enough to test the 100 year claim.
That’s what I wonder. I definitely see how cpvc and pex are a lot more convenient, much lower labor costs to instal, but my house is 80 years old, and I have not had to replace any plumbing in the 20 years I’ve been here. It’s mostly copper, which I assume is not original (several decades ago, my area had major assistance programs to remove leaded pipes), but there’s cast iron and galvanized where I have no idea how old it might be.
I have seen some houses with hoses inside pipes. By doing it this way, they can just pull the hose and replace it with a new one. Even if it’s leaks it will leak inside the pipe not inside the wall.
Labor is the most expensive part: isn’t that just doubling the labor cost? Or is it that when a house is converted, they just thread through the existing leaky plumbing?
Labor where I live is not expensive.
To clarify, it’s done for clean water only.
They install a 4 inch pvc pipe and thread a 1/2 inch hose inside. So when the hose breaks, the water wouldn’t damage the building. Itll just leak inside the pvc pipe.
The one ive seen was done while being built.
TIL …
@ALostInquirer As others have pointed out it is largely a matter of price and durability. My background is in industrial equipment so keep that in mind. It is worth noting what differentiates pipe from hosing at least in my industry, pipe is a tube made of a single solid material of a certain thickness, tubing is a single material tube of a thinner wall thickness, and hose typically consists of multiple layers or materials to maintain flexibility while still being durable. Some industries like medical may call a flexible tube of a single material a hose, but this is usually colloquial and not the official terminology found in standards and regulation.
Because hoses are made of multiple materials and typically laminated or woven and adhered together they are much more complex to manufacture, and so more expensive, often at minimum 5x as expensive. When you look at hoses meant to last for decades this can go up a lot, 10-20x, this is because flexible materials in general degrade over time and become brittle and/or porous, prone to springing a leak. The methods used to prevent this require expensive chemicals, or patented processes which keep prices high.
PEX is growing in popularity because it is flexible and durable but relatively inexpensive, only 1.5-3x as expensive in cost of materials as CPVC typically. PEX is a type of pipe/tubing made of Cross-linked Polyethylene, which is a singly polymer, Polyethylene, that has been either treated with a chemical such as a peroxide or silane, or irradiated with an electron beam, to induce cross-linking of the long-chain polymers. This Cross-linking makes the material much more durable and elastic, while requiring only a single treatment and no lamination or weaving. As such PEX can be manufactured more cost effectively than hose, making it a good middle ground between rigid pipe like cPVC or copper for potable water applications.
Thanks for the detailed reply! My suspicions were that it may have been related to the complexity of manufacturing (including the materials development that's enabled it within the past several decades), but the costs alongside that had slipped my mind given the scientific reasons that would have been more of a hard block in the past.
Also across the various replies here, TIL a bunch more about what's up with PEX, which I'd not gotten around to researching. Sounds like some wicked stuff all things considering!
@ALostInquirer Yes, Pex is pretty good for a lot of things, though it does have it's weaknesses. For instance it is UV sensative and will break down and crack of left in the sun. Also, the fact that it is often joined with compression fittings like the proprietary Sharkbite connectors does make assembly faster, but the failure rate of those components is higher than an adhesive bonded sleeve fitment. Being flexible also has its downside, for while it is nice to be able to bend the pipe to conform to angles, you do have to bend it to each and every stud penetration individually rather than being able to thread a hard pipe through all in one motion.
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.
Polybutylene. Yeah bad times if you’ve plumbing made out of it the US.
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.
some experimental flexible hose material from the late 80s
I got you beat there. My house had cardboard sewer pipe. Orangburg pipe.
Yikes! That' can't have been easy to replace.
Ya, it was pretty terrible. Just cost money though!
Isn't a pipe just a stronger hose?
Pass me that blunt
I work in construction and will give you the common viewpoint (non-US).
We use PVC pipes to drain used water and PPRC pipes to supply fresh water to flats in an apartment. These are all installed to be practically permanent. The concrete is put in place on top of these pipes.
I imagine hoses can be used for the same purpose, but the price would be simply higher and no investor would prefer hoses over pipes for this reason. If there is a type of hose that is as effective as these pipes and as affordable, it's not available in my region
After doing plumbing professionally for 10 years I've come to the conclusion that the main reason is difficulty of insulating PEX once it's installed. Plumbers don't generally do insulating in commercial jobs. There's inherently no such differences in quality that would make PEX unsuitable for most applications. Still we seem to prefer either composite pipe for water or steel for heating. PEX mainly when it's installed somewhere you can't check for leaks later bexause with PEX you can do it with minimal to no joints. Underfloor heating for example.
The standard PEX is somewhere in the middle- a stiff hose.
While I’m not a plumber there is something to consider as well.
I think this is why something like Pex works well since it’s flexible while not being so flexible that you’d have to worry about long term abrasion and wearing away from a hose bouncing back and forth from it.
But water hammer is an understood, fixable problem. It’s mostly that modern appliances have solenoid valves that switch too quickly for older piping found main most peoples homes. Even then, a water hammer arrestor will usually cover it
Pex is also resistant to bursting in the event of freezing. I used pex in my van build and the few times the pipes have frozen haven't resulted in any issues other than having to wait for the pipes to thaw.
Hoses are much more useful if they can bend and be coiled up. Pipes usually are quite hard to bend.
I would call most plumbing as hoses as they are using flexible plastics in most installations. Pipes are generally referred to as rigid items. But that is selective even. Hoses under some definitions are pipes with multiple layers. Ie. Rubber and a metal mesh grid for strength.
Think the definitions are quite interchangeable. We simply use the cheapest most dependable option available that adheres to code.