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Since Pex is plastic, you don’t need to worry about the galvanic issues that you would have mixing metals like copper and galvy. That said, removing all galvy is a good thing to do just to avoid rusting and pipe failure from any galvy you leave in the system.
At my place I ran 1″ pex buried 2 ft deep from the meter to the house. I transitioned to copper about 3 ft from the house for physical durability and because plastics don’t like sunlight. That copper comes up from the ground and goes into the garage. The pipe is protected with self regulating heat tape. I stuck with the copper in the garage for the physical strength.
That copper goes into the hot water tank and into the whole house cold water manifold. About 10 smaller PEX lines then run from there to the individual faucets. The hot water outlet goes into another manifold with hot water lines to each faucet.
I also have a spare outlet on the manifold that I can open up and put compressed air into if I want to blow the lines clear of water for freezing issues.
All plumbing (other than the manifold) is inside the heated building envelope to prevent freezing.
The first and most important thing you must do is remove all galvanized pipe. If you are taking the time to re-plumb portions of your place, do it right and do it all.
If you don’t, trust me you will regret it.Was there any issues in mixing Pex or transitioning from the Galvanized piping?
it looks like there are a few types of connections
removehttp://www.pexuniverse.com/content/types-of-pex-fittings
brass/plastic etc.
what should we use for low temperature?
thanksI used PEX when I built and I’m quite happy with it. I went with a layout that has a central manifold with a shutoff ball valve for each appliance in the garage and a dedicated tube from there to each end point. That means no fittings in the walls to deal with or develop leaks. Of course PEX hasn’t had the leak issues that PB did years ago, but I still think its better to avoid fittings if you can.
Pex will stretch quite a bit before bursting so that’s a big help as far a freeze damage.
Pex piping is ideal for the extremes in temperature that we experience in he Arnold area. I am a building contractor and actually just completely re-piped a commercial building I own in Arnold with Pex pipe. I removed all the existing coper pipe as we have had had several occasions where the pipes have blown due to cold weather and the pipes were in insulated walls. Pex is definitely the way to go and is far cheaper and much faster to install than any other type of pipes for potable water.
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