I have some decent ideas as to why, I’m asking mainly as a hopefully fun contribution here, and to maybe learn some interesting plumbing info!
I have some decent ideas as to why, I’m asking mainly as a hopefully fun contribution here, and to maybe learn some interesting plumbing info!
Huge disclaimer that I’m not a plumber or even close to a plumber, but I did have a house and think about houses:
Isn’t the current “standard” plumbing PEX plumbing, which is basically just a bunch of hoses?
Like I think you’re on to something but the industry beat you to the punch 😉
Even now in some places repairs are done with cpvc. Op may be wondering why they didn’t choose hoses in the first place.
Oh, good point! Yeah, in our old house (copper plumbing) plumbers usually did repairs with cpvc, not sure why.
Copper piping costs about double the cost of cove piping.
If you want to repair copper, you need to use a torc and solder. That’s not usually possible if the repairs are in difficult to reach places.
Cpvc usually requires only a crimp coupling.
I recently had to have my 1980s house’s water main connection replaced because they used some experimental flexible hose material from the late 80s and it’s all starting to embrittle and fail now. Wouldn’t have happened with PEX…
I’ve been reading about PEX now and it sounds like it only became commercially viable to produce in large volumes in the 1990s, even thought it’s existed as a form of polyethylene since the 1930s. It’s just now becoming cheap enough to be used everywhere because it’s obviously better and we have lots of material performance data on it.
I got you beat there. My house had cardboard sewer pipe. Orangburg pipe.
Yikes! That’ can’t have been easy to replace.
Ya, it was pretty terrible. Just cost money though!