Thread: 3/4 or 1" PEX??
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nestork nestork is offline
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Instead of buying a bunch of sharkbite fittings, why not just buy yourself a PEX crimping tool, and that way you'll have the tool you need to do repairs on your PEX plumbing in future. You can buy them for under $100 nowadays.

If it wuz me, and it didn't cause any other problems, I would run 1 inch pex tubing through your house and branch off to the kitchen, bathroom and laundry rooms with 1 X 1 X 3/4 inch tees. Then branch off those 3/4 inch lines with 3/4 X 3/4 X 1/2 inch tees for the kitchen faucet hot and cold and dish washer hot lines. Ditto in the laundry room; branch off your 3/4 inch supply with 1/2 inch lines for both the washer hot and cold and the laundry room sink hot and cold supply lines.

They did the same thing in my building (21 suite apartment block) when they built it, but they started with 1 1/2 inch hot and cold water supply pipes. They did that so that every tenant can have full water pressure at their shower head when getting ready for work in the morning, and full water pressure in their kitchen sink when washing dishes in the evening. If it was all done with 1/2 inch copper pipe the way some cheap houses are built now, tenants would be fighting over water pressure.

The obvious advantage in doing that is that each 3/4 inch supply line can supply full flow to TWO fixtures, sinks or appliances at the same time, and so you don't have to be concerned about being scalded in the shower if someone flushes the toilet, or the dish washer not working having enough water pressure to pressure wash the food off the dishes because the washing machine was filling at the time, etc.

But, truth be told, even if you did it with 3/4 inch Pex and branched off with 1/2 inch supply lines, you'd seldom have a problem with water pressure because you seldom open any faucet wide open, and even if you do, the aerator on sink faucets, shower head or the resistance to flow through water mixing valves restricts the flow anyway. A wide open bathroom sink faucet with a water saver aerator on it will only have between 1 and 2 gallons of water coming out of it per minute. They don't have aerators on bathtub spouts cuz then you'd have the water running for an hour before you could have a bath.

Last edited by nestork : May 29th 13 at 08:52 PM