**Introduction to PEX Pipe**

I'm here today to talk about PEX pipe, a type of flexible tubing used in plumbing systems. As I showed you earlier, it's easy to work with and can be used for a variety of projects. One of the benefits of PEX pipe is that it's a continuous system, meaning that it's continually trying to contract back to its original size. This makes it ideal for DIY enthusiasts who want to avoid dealing with complex plumbing systems.

**Using PEX Pipe**

I demonstrated how to put PEX pipe on this fitting earlier. You can see how easily it slips onto the pipe and stays there. The fittings come in different styles, including solid brass ones and plastic ones with crimp rings or colored rings. These rings are handy because they allow you to designate whether a particular section of pipe is hot or cold water. Not all areas have these, but they're getting harder to find. You can also get plain white PEX pipes that come without the colored rings.

**Working with PEX Pipe**

One thing to keep in mind when working with PEX pipe is that you shouldn't use metal straps or clips to attach it to anything. Instead, you can use these little clips that clip onto the pipe and hold it in place. These clips also help to prevent kinking in the pipe. If you need to make a 90-degree bend, you can use one of these clips to support the pipe and keep it from kinking.

**Push Fit Fittings**

Another option for connections is push fit fittings. These fittings have a specific distance that they're supposed to expand into when pushed onto the pipe. To mark this distance, you can use a handy little tool that marks your pipe accordingly. Once the fitting is in place, simply give it a little wiggle and push it home. You'll know it's on because of the mark left behind.

**Limitations of PEX Pipe**

One potential limitation of PEX pipe is its performance in cold climates. In extremely cold temperatures, the pipe can be prone to kinking or cracking. This is because PEX pipe has a lot of give and stretches easily when warm. However, it's worth noting that even if the pipe does crack, it will not break apart like copper would. Instead, it will simply freeze and then thaw without causing any further damage.

**Conclusion**

Overall, I think PEX pipe is a great option for DIY enthusiasts who want to avoid complex plumbing systems. It's easy to work with, flexible, and can withstand freezing temperatures. With the right fittings and connections, you can create a seamless system that gets the job done. Whether you're working on a small project or a large installation, PEX pipe is definitely worth considering.

**Additional Resources**

If you're interested in learning more about PEX pipe and other plumbing topics, be sure to check out my other videos. I've got plenty of tutorials and guides to help you get started with your next project. And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more content!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso do you have any plumbing projects coming up where you want to use some pex plumbing to complete them well in this video today i'm going to show you how to use pex a type plumbing pipe i'm shannon from houseimprovements.com we have tons of other videos on plumbing and just about any other diy project you can think of so go check my channel out when you get a chance pex a piping basically there's two different kinds pex apex b we're talking about pex a today so pex a uses an expansion ring to hold the plumbing onto any fittings you need a tool to expand it and get it big enough to slide onto the fitting and then the memory of the pipe itself basically shrinks back down because it's trying to get to its original size and that just holds the pressure on your fitting basically forever so it's a very uh nice system to use i use this system all the time the pipe's pretty flexible you know to a point if you get a kink in it something like that you can use a heat gun to get that kink out and fix it i've got a video on that so you can go check that out individually simple tool for the cutting any pex pipe you can cut with these and this is the type of tool you should use not a you know not a uh aviation snip or a knife or something like that so it's just kind of a basically a guillotine it makes nice clean sharp cuts and square okay so you're going to need that uh the bits and pieces that we have is we have fitting sorry we have fittings so this is an elbow you can get t's butt joints plugs um like in this case we're rejoined pecs to copper there's a nipple in there that you can get that you solder onto copper so you've got all your fittings then you've got your pipe and you've got these compression rings so basically what happens is you stick your compression ring onto the pipe get it nice and flush you've made sure that your pipe is cut square to start with and then you can use one of the many tools there is to do it but they they all kind of do the same thing i'm going to use the power expander just because it's easier to operate with one hand to do this video so you're going to insert the the tool into the pipe and you can see it doesn't quite go in all the way at first because this needs to get to there eventually but what's going to happen is as i cycle this tool expands the pipe the tool will go in a little bit further expands it again further until you get right in right up to that shoulder there you generally want to expand your pipe all four to five times will usually do the trick one thing to consider is when you're expanding the pipe a tool like this and a tool like this when they pump this head rotates i don't know which one which way this one does i think it goes this way and that's pretty key you you want that head to rotate on every expansion so you don't get machine marks inside the pipe that can cause leaks this older style tool this one was made by wurzbo this is the original tool i ever had it still expands but the head doesn't turn on its own with this one you have to actually manually remember to make a little bit of an incremental turn every time these two tools here did away with that and they automatically will rotate a little bit every time so you don't have to think about that anymore so going back to the handheld electric i'm going to make a joint onto this elbow and you're going to see just how easy it is stick the fitting on till the little there's little ears on there right there you need the fitting to get right up or the uh ring to get right up to the to the shoulder there okay now that's on there that's not coming off like i said this is this pipe is continually and the ring continually trying to contract to get back to its original size okay so it's really easy system like i said i do like the power tool just because it's more of a one-handed setup where with this you know either of those other tools you need to have kind of the pipe up there somewhere where you can have it hanging so you can get your hand on the tool and use both hands so i like this just for that fact but that being said uh there's a range of you know like from a couple hundred dollars for those hand-held units to like six hundred dollars for this so for the average diy-er this is probably out of your price range for just doing a project now and again and the other ones work great you just need to have both hands available to use them okay so we talked about the pipe i showed you how to put it on there these fittings here this one's i don't know what these really are they're they're probably not plastic but they're some type of plastic and you can get just solid brass ones too so you got two different styles there um we've got the crimp rings in my area i can find the colored rings which is handy because i like to use this uh kind of white or clear pipe all the time but i can put the colored rings on my lines to designate at a glance what's hot or cold not everywhere has these and these are getting a little tougher to find i think but you can also have just the white rings which a lot of people seem to be able to find i think you can get pecs a in colored pipe red and blue and this white but i just always buy it in this this white color and i use the colored rings if i need to so that's that the other thing you're going to have you can't really shouldn't use a metal strap or anything on this so when you need to staple this or attach it to some blocking or whatever you've got these uh these little clips that clip on you can nail the stud home the nail hole i mean so you've got those you've got these which help support bends so if you want to need to make a 90 degree bend basically you can put that in there it just helps keep the pipe from kinking for one thing and holds it in place and you can actually mount it with a screw if need be so you've got those what else can i tell you something else you can use with with any pecs is these push fit fittings so with push fits you wanna you want them to your pipe to go in a specific distance depending on the size of the pipe so there's a there's a handy little tool you can use that marks that get your mark on your pipe so you know how far that pipe's got to go in push fit fitting give it a little wiggle push it in there's my mark i think you can see it there and again you've got a connection there okay so you could could use push fits for your connections or you can use the compression rings for your connections so really the only disadvantage i see for pexe is when you're working in a cold climate uh it you kind of want to have this stuff somewhat warm i mean you can imagine trying to expand this stuff at 30 below what's gonna happen i don't i just don't trust that so uh they say you can do it but i i wouldn't so you you kind of need to be uh you know have your stuff somewhere warm or have a hot box or something that you can keep it in if you're working in an unheated space okay once it's all connected and everything this stuff's great as far as freezability and stuff because the the pex pipes they will expand they've got a lot of give to them you can they're gonna this will not break in a freezing situation this will break this copper will split open like a hot dog bun it's it that's not going to stand up in a freeze this will freeze thaw many times without any issues because it can it can stretch as you've seen we stretched it to fit down here right uh you very seldom will see these this pex pipe fail in a freeze situation so i think that's the main stuff i can talk about uh i know i covered a lot of things i'm kind of jumping around but i think i think i've got all the information there that you you need so again this was pex a not pex b it's a pex a pipe and uh yeah go check out my other videos smash that uh like button down there yep that's the thumbs up button subscribe like i mentioned before and go check out our stuff on our channelso do you have any plumbing projects coming up where you want to use some pex plumbing to complete them well in this video today i'm going to show you how to use pex a type plumbing pipe i'm shannon from houseimprovements.com we have tons of other videos on plumbing and just about any other diy project you can think of so go check my channel out when you get a chance pex a piping basically there's two different kinds pex apex b we're talking about pex a today so pex a uses an expansion ring to hold the plumbing onto any fittings you need a tool to expand it and get it big enough to slide onto the fitting and then the memory of the pipe itself basically shrinks back down because it's trying to get to its original size and that just holds the pressure on your fitting basically forever so it's a very uh nice system to use i use this system all the time the pipe's pretty flexible you know to a point if you get a kink in it something like that you can use a heat gun to get that kink out and fix it i've got a video on that so you can go check that out individually simple tool for the cutting any pex pipe you can cut with these and this is the type of tool you should use not a you know not a uh aviation snip or a knife or something like that so it's just kind of a basically a guillotine it makes nice clean sharp cuts and square okay so you're going to need that uh the bits and pieces that we have is we have fitting sorry we have fittings so this is an elbow you can get t's butt joints plugs um like in this case we're rejoined pecs to copper there's a nipple in there that you can get that you solder onto copper so you've got all your fittings then you've got your pipe and you've got these compression rings so basically what happens is you stick your compression ring onto the pipe get it nice and flush you've made sure that your pipe is cut square to start with and then you can use one of the many tools there is to do it but they they all kind of do the same thing i'm going to use the power expander just because it's easier to operate with one hand to do this video so you're going to insert the the tool into the pipe and you can see it doesn't quite go in all the way at first because this needs to get to there eventually but what's going to happen is as i cycle this tool expands the pipe the tool will go in a little bit further expands it again further until you get right in right up to that shoulder there you generally want to expand your pipe all four to five times will usually do the trick one thing to consider is when you're expanding the pipe a tool like this and a tool like this when they pump this head rotates i don't know which one which way this one does i think it goes this way and that's pretty key you you want that head to rotate on every expansion so you don't get machine marks inside the pipe that can cause leaks this older style tool this one was made by wurzbo this is the original tool i ever had it still expands but the head doesn't turn on its own with this one you have to actually manually remember to make a little bit of an incremental turn every time these two tools here did away with that and they automatically will rotate a little bit every time so you don't have to think about that anymore so going back to the handheld electric i'm going to make a joint onto this elbow and you're going to see just how easy it is stick the fitting on till the little there's little ears on there right there you need the fitting to get right up or the uh ring to get right up to the to the shoulder there okay now that's on there that's not coming off like i said this is this pipe is continually and the ring continually trying to contract to get back to its original size okay so it's really easy system like i said i do like the power tool just because it's more of a one-handed setup where with this you know either of those other tools you need to have kind of the pipe up there somewhere where you can have it hanging so you can get your hand on the tool and use both hands so i like this just for that fact but that being said uh there's a range of you know like from a couple hundred dollars for those hand-held units to like six hundred dollars for this so for the average diy-er this is probably out of your price range for just doing a project now and again and the other ones work great you just need to have both hands available to use them okay so we talked about the pipe i showed you how to put it on there these fittings here this one's i don't know what these really are they're they're probably not plastic but they're some type of plastic and you can get just solid brass ones too so you got two different styles there um we've got the crimp rings in my area i can find the colored rings which is handy because i like to use this uh kind of white or clear pipe all the time but i can put the colored rings on my lines to designate at a glance what's hot or cold not everywhere has these and these are getting a little tougher to find i think but you can also have just the white rings which a lot of people seem to be able to find i think you can get pecs a in colored pipe red and blue and this white but i just always buy it in this this white color and i use the colored rings if i need to so that's that the other thing you're going to have you can't really shouldn't use a metal strap or anything on this so when you need to staple this or attach it to some blocking or whatever you've got these uh these little clips that clip on you can nail the stud home the nail hole i mean so you've got those you've got these which help support bends so if you want to need to make a 90 degree bend basically you can put that in there it just helps keep the pipe from kinking for one thing and holds it in place and you can actually mount it with a screw if need be so you've got those what else can i tell you something else you can use with with any pecs is these push fit fittings so with push fits you wanna you want them to your pipe to go in a specific distance depending on the size of the pipe so there's a there's a handy little tool you can use that marks that get your mark on your pipe so you know how far that pipe's got to go in push fit fitting give it a little wiggle push it in there's my mark i think you can see it there and again you've got a connection there okay so you could could use push fits for your connections or you can use the compression rings for your connections so really the only disadvantage i see for pexe is when you're working in a cold climate uh it you kind of want to have this stuff somewhat warm i mean you can imagine trying to expand this stuff at 30 below what's gonna happen i don't i just don't trust that so uh they say you can do it but i i wouldn't so you you kind of need to be uh you know have your stuff somewhere warm or have a hot box or something that you can keep it in if you're working in an unheated space okay once it's all connected and everything this stuff's great as far as freezability and stuff because the the pex pipes they will expand they've got a lot of give to them you can they're gonna this will not break in a freezing situation this will break this copper will split open like a hot dog bun it's it that's not going to stand up in a freeze this will freeze thaw many times without any issues because it can it can stretch as you've seen we stretched it to fit down here right uh you very seldom will see these this pex pipe fail in a freeze situation so i think that's the main stuff i can talk about uh i know i covered a lot of things i'm kind of jumping around but i think i think i've got all the information there that you you need so again this was pex a not pex b it's a pex a pipe and uh yeah go check out my other videos smash that uh like button down there yep that's the thumbs up button subscribe like i mentioned before and go check out our stuff on our channel\n"