Sunday at Mother's, a water line sprang a leak.



That divot was put there by the installer in 1993. Wall and floor got soaked. Farmers Insurance and Servicemaster are on the water problem. But the plumbing involves this
Insurance wont cover the pipe repair.

Garbage manabloc header. Is there a coupling splice/adapter for the grey tube to fit in a piece of pex or something. The wall will be refinished, closing in the splice.

On top of this the shut off valves on the manabloc are leaky.
I could replace the header. Either madeup or built with a lot of SS tees and little ball valves. But I do not know a thing about adapting to the grey tubes nor do I like the idea of replacing them with wersbo/pex or ......

And Mother's budget has no room for such things.

Looks like poly butyl(spelling) they used it in the 90s and it was supposed to be what PEX is today.

I remember my dad doing tests with it when it first came out and after freezing it twice it broke. So he never used it. But it’s in a LOTTTT of houses.

Bad news ahead.

It won’t get better. They don’t make it anymore, and she’ll need to replace all the plumbing.

In the mean time the only thing you can do is patch it (think flex seal) temporarily.


Here’s a quick tutorial on it… https://www.redsealplumbing.co...what-to-do-about-it/

They make poly to pex couplers 3/8, 1/2, 3/4, etc.

Sharkbite has them in the push to connect (gray ring for poly, tan ring for pex).
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Shark...ALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Or there are several companies who make the poly to pex in the crimp style or expanding.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Shark...ALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ap...ALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Simply search 'poly to pex couplers' or 'quest to pex couplers'.

Or you can buy Zurn (used to be called Quest) compression fittings.
https://www.acehardware.com/de...ALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Are you 100% sure mice did not do that?
I have seen mice chew into PB and Pex to get water.
They get used to getting water from condensate on cold water pipes when the weather conditions are right to make the pipes condensate and then when the pipes are dry on the outside they start chewing on them until a very small pin hole developes and a nice drinking fountain for the critters.

If that is polybutylene pipe, there were lawsuits over that stuff in the 80s. Over time, oxidation and exposure to chlorine in the water causes them to swell, crack and leak. They are prone to causing flood damage throughout houses.

My daughter has a house that had that stuff and one place got repaired and a couple of months later another place started leaking. after the 3rd time, she had it all replaced with PEX.

That looks like polybutylene from what I can see. My house used some of that crap. After 15 years it started failing. I absolutely hate that stuff. Eventually had to replace all of it over a two year period. They even made single lug water shut off valves out of it. The lug would shear off and do bad things.

quote:

one place got repaired and a couple of months later another place started leaking

That is the way it worked for me also.

There were 2 class-action lawsuits over polybutylene piping. An oxygen molecule was left out of the plastics formula. Shell Oil and Celanese Fortrell (sp?) developed it so the attorneys mined the deep pockets for a billion in each class-action settlement.
After a poly repair, I would give the customer the contact info for the insurance company. The insurer would re pipe the house and repair all drywall and reimburse any repair charges paid out. Customers were grateful for the unexpected relief.