PEX and Planning Ahead for Grey Water

Posted April 14, 2009 08:31 by Robert

Tags: pex, greywater, plumbing

As someone who has done a lot of renovation work, I was very familiar with traditional copper piping, which has dominated the supply side of water plumbing in the US for most of the century. I have never seen PEX before, but it is totally changing the world of pluming. PEX was developed in the 1960’s and has been in use in many European countries for plumbing and radiant heating since that time. It was introduced in the United States in the 1980s, but only recently has it begun to take off and is now the dominant material for larger projects. PEX is much easier to work due to its flexibility which also means fewer joints, which are connected with a simple compression fitting and tool. PEX is also non corrosive, very quiet (no more pipe clanging) and is very freeze- break resistant.  It’s also cheaper and easier to install.  

Another nice feature of PEX which you will notice from the pictures is that red pipe = hot and blue pipe = cold. This brings us to the third pipe in the picture which is clear. This is a supply line dedicated to the toilets, so that in the future, we have the opportunity to supply them with some sort of greywater, which could come from the town, rainwater collection or other sources. It is a small upfront investment to do this, but it’s the only way to offer the opportunity for greywater later on without opening walls. In other parts of the world, the notion of watering your garden or flushing your toilet with drinking water is unfathomable and they use different types of water for each.  As water becomes a more scarce resource here in the US, I think we will be on a similar trajectory.  We also explored the notion of trying to create a separate drain pipe for all the non-toilets so that we could potentially recycle non-toilet water onsite one day. However, the complexity, added costs and regulatory questions marks lead us to just stick with the extra supply lines for now.

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