Drain and vent

This is where all the drains come together and leave the house, headed for the septic tank

These are our water supply lines

On Saturday Paul and I pretty much wrapped up the PVC drain/vent plumbing throughout the house.

Next up is running the water supply lines. In the old days, these were the copper pipes that ran through the floors and walls supplying hot and cold water to the house fixtures such as a tub, toilet or sink. These days its much more common to use PEX pipe, which is a flexible plastic tubing. The advantages being cost, ease of installation, material flexibility, high performance, and simplicity when it comes to making connections. In the old days you had to sweat (solder) each joint of copper, these days you just make your connection and crimp it with a special tool that cinches a compression ring.

I've installed the mounting board in the basement where all the hot and cold lines will terminate and tomorrow afternoon Paul and I are going to start running the lines.

Pex, and a pressure test

The various loops of pex tubing all return to a central location where they are then fed into a manifold. The manifold is an impressive cast brass unit that mounts on the wall. What happens after the manifold is something I'll be able to report on once I get there. For now, it all just hangs out.

After hooking up the pex loops in sequence, I then attached a small valve and pressure dial. This allows me to pressurize the tubing system to check for leaks before the concrete is poured when the pex will no longer be accessible. The fitting on the valve receives a bike pump air connection, so, in honor of all things bicycle I decided it was only fitting to pump up the system by bike pump. Roughly 480 strokes later (whew!) the system was up to the required 60 psi. Seeing as it was dark and late and it all looked good, I went to bed and made a note to come back and check it in the morning.

Lo and behold this morning I checked it and it was down to maybe 5 pounds of pressure. Darn. Knowing that the most likely candidate was a leaky connection on the manifold, so I got some soapy water and daubed the various connections and sure enough found a leak. I recconected that fitting and the system has held steady at 60 psi since this morning. I must admit, I used an air compressor to fill the system the second time around.

Insulation and radiant tubing

Today was Joe's first day on the job and it went great. We were getting ready for the concrete slab being poured sometime in the next few days. We had to build a retaining perimeter around the root cellar area and a thermal break at the doorway up to the bulkhead. We also laid down the plastic sheeting, then installed 2" rigid insulation. Once that was done we installed the pex tubing, by which we'll have radiant heat eventually running through the slab. It all went really well, but took way longer then I would have imagined. Hats off to Joe for sticking it out on a long day!