Quote:
Originally Posted by oil pan 4
Is that BVC or BPVC or something to that effect?
The plastic piping that gave all plastic piping a bad name.
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It's polybutylene, aka poly-b or PB pipe. The main problem with this type is that the chlorine or chloramine the utilities use to disinfect the water attacks the plastic. It becomes brittle and weakens from the inside out and can fail without warning. To make matters worse, lots of plumbers used acrylic fittings with the poly-b pipe, which suffers the same degradation.
The trailer was originally purchased by me to live in for a few years while I built a house next to it. When I moved into it, I had no clue that my wife hated the property and the trailer from day one. I about got a divorce over that one. We ended up moving out, and my parents assumed the mortgage. Twenty years later, the trailer is still where I put it, and the house never got built. They are charging three times the mortgage payment in rent now.
The piping by the inlet froze a few times before I figured out how to insulate it sufficiently. Both hot and cold supply lines have manifold rigs directly under the water heater, which froze and leaked also. This is why I highly recommend shark-bite fittings. Everything else I used replacing manifold components ended up leaking eventually. Both of the manifolds are now PEX pipe and shark-bite fittings, and have held up for a decade without incident. When the water heater was replaced this summer, it got PEX and shark-bite fittings all the way to the manifolds.
The poly-b pipe is actually pretty stout when it's new. It held it's own and didn't burst during freezing events. It did deform a bit, though. The stuff blows up like a balloon. I couldn't fit a lot of it into the new fittings, so it got replaced with PEX pipe. A good portion of the rest of the place still has gray pipe in it.