Plumbing – PEX Manifold with existing piping

pexplumbing

Our home has a large addition on it and i'm thinking of running newer lines throughout our original house that has copper. There are many bends at various points and some are starting leak (probably 40+ years old). The original part of the house would need 6 hot and 9 cold runs setup whereas the addition would need an additional 6 hot and 8 cold. There's two 3/4" main lines (one hot, one cold) that feeds the addition of CPVC. I'm curious if I switch over to use a home run PEX manifold setup just for our original house if that would cause a pressure drop on the addition side or pose any other problems. Additionally here's a rough diagram (excuse the resemblance to pre-school art) of what i'm looking to accomplish.

I realize too switching out the copper for PEX may pose an issue with the grounding of our house so that will be verified by an electrician unless anyone has any tips on confirming this.

plumbing diagram http://www.yukoncreative.com/remedy/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/plumb-diagram.png

Best Answer

That looks perfectly suitable. One additional thing you should be aware of, though - if your existing plumbing contains any yellow brass fittings, they really need to come out because of a chemical quirk of PEX; the zinc gets leached out of yellow brass, leaving behind only soft copper, and the fittings may either leak or plug solid. You can use RED brass, just not YELLOW brass.

The manifold should be one size larger than the pipe supplying it.

If there's any question at all about grounding, a solid ground rod can be driven... with the result of giving you a better ground than you ever had by grounding through copper pipe.

Like copper, PEX requires a 1/4" drop per foot (never install it level or wavy), and requires a drain at every low point so the house can be winterized if necessary.

Is there any particular reason for going with PEX instead of tending to leaky fittings as you find them? I suspect that those fittings were always leaky because they were never sweated together correctly in the first place. I ask this question because replumbing the entire house in PEX is really a large, expensive job... while replacing (or resweating) one fitting at a time is relatively cheap.