Plumbing work

As mentioned in an earlier post, I opted to replace all of the existing water lines with PEX.  On Saturday afternoon I mapped out the water lines and inventoried all of the existing connections.  The same evening I headed off to Lowes to pick up the flex-pipe and applicable Gator Bite fittings.

Quite an assortment...and a hefty price tag!

Naturally, after having collected the initial round of components, I realized I still did not have everything so it was back to Lowes on Sunday....some three more times!  Jeesh!

Finally, later Sunday, when I was sure I had everything (riiiiight....) and got everything in place, I turned off the water,  drained the lines, took yet another deep breath, lit up the torch and set about removing the first section of pipe.  There were a couple of places where I had to use the copper pipe cutter.  Overall it went well leaving me with a nice pile of copper pipes.....and no water.

The last piece to tackle was the water supply line that comes up through the floor.  

 The question is, which one is the source of water?  Once the joints were removed, I went out and turned the water on just long enough to see which pipe filled up.  The one on the right!

The Boss inspecting before work could begin

 With the Boss's approval, it got to be the ceremonial first to be fitted with a Gator Bite coupler fitting.

From there it was just a matter of slipping the white PEX tubing into the various fittings.  It's really very easy....so easy you start wondering if it wasn't going just a bit too easy!  Oh well, forge on!!

I could have gone with the colored PEX tubing, Blue for cold, Red for hot, but I worried I might come up short somewhere and would have to improvise sticking a blue where red should be or vice versa so I opted to go with just plain White.  Since the walls are all open, it will be easy to mark them later.  Right now I'm just using blue tape for cold and nada for hot.

When I got to the water heater I remembered I had some followup work to complete up in the cupola directly above that space, namely connecting the bathroom exhaust vent lines to the exterior exhaust port so I had to stop long enough to get that work completed.

What a pain that was having to work around the new AC ducts.  But, I got it done and out of the way and the other work was allowed to continue.

As always, the Boss looks on.....and passes judgement.

More on the next post!