This is our first experience with PEX (polyethlyene) water lines, and I gotta say that I am hooked. While I associate copper with “quality” plumbing, the difference in labor and effort is massive. To run copper from our basement to the new upstairs bathroom would have been a monster project. Lots of joints in tight places for both the hot and cold lines. With the PEX, I was able to run both lines as single, continuous piece. With copper I would have inevitably ended up with a leak somewhere in the middle, forcing me to drain the line and repair it while trying not to set the house on fire. With this stuff I just uncoiled it and fed it through joists and up our closet chase and up into the bathroom.

PEX lines in new 1/2 bath, along with partially completed vent:

Drain line in closet and in basement:

Maze of pipes at mini water heater. I always vow to keep it simple, but my plumbing always ends up looking like this. I’m addicted to shutoff valves, since they make it so easy to work on future projects, such as the future basement bath remodel. Now I can just work on the new pipes without having to shut off water to anything else. That’s a big deal after you’ve spent entire days without a toilet or shower because the water had to be shut off. The 2nd picture shows one of the PEX lines connected to the copper. There are 2 varieties of PEX connectors, the “official” ones that’d be used by a plumber and require a $100 crimper (or $200 if you’re working with 2 sizes) and the “Joe Homeowner” ones I used. They are pricy (about $5/connector), but they’re really cool to use. You literally just plug the pipe into it. It’s that simple. And if you have to change something later, you can pull back a spring-loaded clip and pull the pipe back out. I can’t imagine anything easier than that!

Because we don’t like the idea of wasting a ton of water just to keep a steady stream running through the heater, we put a mini-tank (Ariston GL-4) under our sink about a year ago. It is fantastic! It provides a nice buffer for the tankless, and is seriously “instant” (hot water in a couple of seconds). Although it introduced a tank to our tankless system, these heaters are very well insulated and we noticed no change in our electricity usage.

So, after a year of getting used to the luxurious hot water at the kitchen sink, we began to wonder what it’d be like to have instant, buffered hot water in the bathroom. Although I had conditioned myself to a routine of shaving only after a shower and carefully using the residual hot water in the pipe to fill the sink and rinse my face, I thought it might be nice to be able to shave any time without wasting a lot of water waiting for the hot water to get all the way across the house or to wash our hands in actual warm water. The distance problem, of course, plagues any variety of water heater, not just a tankless. Anyway, since we are also in the process of adding a half bath on the 2nd floor, we decided to add a 6 gallon Ariston (GL-6) in the basement to feed the basement bath, the main bath, the new half bath and a potential future laundry room and wet bar (once we get the rest of the house done). I started the install last weekend…

The hardest part (emotionally) was tearing out all the plumbing I had worked so hard on in the past. Since I had not foreseen the additional bathroom when I laid it all out and had since changed some ideas about the basement bathroom (future remodel), I decided to start over. This always sounds like a good idea and feels like a bad one 9 hours into the replumbing when you still can’t flush a toilet! Copper takes such a long time that I am really warming up to the idea of PEX, which I’m going to try for the first time for upstairs. Getting rid of most of the connections sounds great! Here is the first stage of the carnage…

Here’s the cleared out ceiling. You can see the before picture here.

Heater and some of the plumbing installed:

Most of the pipes redone: