It should come as no surprise that houses is Massachusetts are OLD. Because of this, you often see plumbing with copper pipes that corrode over time. Not to mention they can freeze up and break in the winter time. So what’s the alternative? A magical material called Pex Piping.

This stuff is basically made out of plastic, it looks cheap and flimsy, but it’s actually much more durable than copper pipe. It’s easier to play with and manipulate, install in tight spaces, and use in conjunction with sharkbites.

I will circle back to the sharkbites in a moment. I am not a plumber by any means and this is not professional advice. I write this article because a couple days ago I had a leak in one of my copper pipes at home. Back in the day you would just get a plumber to solder the broken pipe back together, but now we have sharkbites. Sharkbites are essentially little metal device that join two ends of a copper pipe or valve. They are slip on devices that require no soldering and minimal effort.

Thinking I could rejoin my broken copper pipes together with a sharkbite, I took a crack at it myself, only to realize that I could not physically rejoin the two copper ends with the Sharkbite, as I could not manipulate either end of the copper pipes (they were connected to the wood in my ceiling. At this point, I was stumped, frustrated, and out of ideas, so I called for help. A good friend of mine who is very handy took one look at my ceiling pipe disaster and said one word, Pex.

The beautiful thing about Pex is it’s easy to bend and move, and it also can connect right into a Sharkbite, this once again removes the need for soldering. So what we essentially did is shut off the water, cut and remove all the copper pipe in my ceiling, and replaced it with Pex, joined together by Sharkbites. I think I had spent 5 hours trying to make this work with copper. We connected the Pex, sharkbites, and reopened the water within 15 minutes. Boom, problem solved just like that.

To be honest, I hate plumbing and I am definitely an extra novice at it. The Pex and Sharkbites we’re so ridiculously easy to use, it’s not even funny. This probably saved me north of 500 bucks trying to get a plumber in at my home, after hours. I would highly recommend taking a look at this material if you ever have a plumbing issue. Pex is the new gold standard in my opinion, and it’s mainly what you see used in new construction nowadays. You really can’t go wrong with this stuff.