During the STAR-4 Women program at the YWCA we had the opportunity to meet with various tradespeople. One of them was a plumber. She taught us how to work with two different types of PEX fittings:
- Crimp fittings
- Expansion fittings
It was pretty interesting trying it out. We performed the following tasks:
- Cut 2″ ABS pipe
- Cut PEX pipes
- For one of the PEX pipes, we used a Milwaukee PEX expander (which I’m learning is a very expensive tool) to expand the pipe in order to set the pipe into the fitting sleeve
- For the other piece of the PEX pipe, we used a manual crimping tool to crimp and join an elbow piece
PEX is only one of the materials that we use for our drinking water pipes. Another material that is commonly used is copper. PEX is surprisingly easy to work with. Copper, on the other hand, is more complicated to work with, requiring stronger tools for cutting as well as needing to know how to solder. We didn’t get a chance to play around with copper but it was a pretty fun lightning quick overview of what plumbers do.