Replacing original radiator pipes with pex


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Old 10-02-17, 09:07 AM
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Question Replacing original radiator pipes with pex

Greetings,

Anyone have a minute to talk pex? I'm about to replace some radiator pipes and want to make sure I'm not opening up a larger, nasty project at the same time.

We have a closed system, hot-water, gas-fired boiler, 7 rads, and a two-story house with an unfinished basement. The radiator pipes are exposed in the basement, and hang pretty low. We'd like to finish the basement, so that's reason #1 for the replacement. Reason #2 is that the living room and dining room both have visible pipes running to upstairs bedrooms.

My brilliant (?) idea is to cut out the pipes that run to four of the rads and replace with pex. The rads in the kitchen, upstairs bath and one upstairs bedroom have pipe runs that don't present any problems, so I'll leave those in place. I'll stuff the new pex lines up into the joists in the basement, and tuck them into the walls of the living room and dining room. Not planning to make zones or do anything else, just to keep it simple.

Questions: 1. Should I use orange pex or the grey pex-al-pex?
2. Is there any reason to avoid pex fittings along the way from the boiler to the rad? It would be simpler to run pex along the basement ceiling to the point where it needs to go up, install a 90 degree pex fitting, and then run more pex up to the rad, but is that asking for trouble later on in terms of leaks?
3. Planning to run the pex until I'm just under the floor or at the wall where the rad sits, then connect to black pipe for the last couple of feet to the radiator. Purely asthetic reasons as we don't want to have plastic hoses visible.

So, stupid idea? What am I forgetting?

Thanks for any advice.
 
 

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