With the exterior complete, aside from painting and a few smaller projects, it’s time to focus indoors. First up is the start of my plumbing infrastructure. Until now, I had things like a working toilet, but with garden hoses, not proper plumbing. This was the week to change all that!
After doing a lot of research, I am opting for PEX plumbing because it’s relatively inexpensive and VERY easy to do on my own. PEX is super forgiving because it’s flexible, has easy connections, and has a good freeze tolerance since it can expand before cracking. So I bought the needed tool for Pro Crimps, a bunch of materials, and headed off to the house to get started.
The first thing I needed to do was connect a 3/4″ PEX “mainline” from the pressure tank in the crawl space. This was the hardest step because I had to remove an old adapter that was rusted onto the pressure tank and I needed to be careful not to break anything in the process. Below is the result of this effort. The white pipe is the new mainline and the garden hose is simply on the tank pressure release valve.
The mainline is piped into the house where there is a manifold (more on that in a moment) but from under the house it is also split into a couple of other sections to feed garden hose spigots outside the house. One is already installed, and two others will be added later, so I simply added a branch with a (closed) valve on it for now.
There’s one branch to the left of the coil of blue (cold water) PEX and another just to the right. Then, at the far right, there are two lines feeding into the house. The one on the right is entering the manifold to feed all the cold water lines and the one on the left will go to the new tankless hot water heater which will be installed soon.
Let’s talk about this manifold for a moment:
This is really where the magic happens, and a huge advantage of PEX. Basically, the right side is cold water, the left will be hot, and each valve leads to a “home run” water line. Home Runs are lines that go from the manifold directly to their final fixtures. Because PEX is cheap, and in my case the longest home run is like 15-ft, you can do more of these and it makes managing the system really easy. This manifold is mounted in the mudroom behind an exterior door so there’s super easy access to turn on/off any line at any time.
The white line on the left ends at a valve for now, but will go to the tankless hot water heater, also mounted behind that door. The one blue line on the right is a 1/2″ home run for the toilets (one for now, one to be added later.) Connecting this first toilet was the second hardest task because the crawl space under there is really small and I had to shimmy in the dirt to get access. Here are the toilet line and home run before I made the connection:
That photo doesn’t quite convey how tight it was to work in there, but it was tight! I got it done, though – and after forgetting to take a photo said there was no way I was shimmying back under there just for a photo!
Here’s the toilet connection inside the house:
The blue line might be offensive, but it’s hidden behind the toilet and this photo is from the next room since there are no walls right now. LOL