Best Of

you have to heat pe to use barb fittings, not sure that flaring it that way would be much different other than overtightening could shear the flare off.

I've seen the water company here use poly with a flare joint that was made for copper. The guy used a torch and a normal hammer flare tool and slowly flared the plastic.

I couldn't believe it but he did it and it worked.

I took it as another one of those "you're not supposed to but it works". You could tell it wasn't his first time doing it either, looked like he's done it hundreds or thousands of times.

a fusion welded socket fitting is probably the only thing that would be as strong as the pipe. a long brass barb fitting that has to be installed with heat is unlikely to fail catastrophically but may seep.

yes, the 'shear' would be a little easier to get out of jail it seems. The 'pop' is what rattles me.

Looks like the bigger issue is someone sliding something across the floor and not paying attention shearing the pe right off flush with the floor. You could shear copper off too but it would be a lot more difficult.

Hard to tell from the pic, it could be the Ford Grip Joint fitting. The nut looks similar to a flare nut. It has a bronze gripper ring inside. That would be more common than a plastic flare, which requires the flare tool shown above.,

For plastic I prefer the fitting with the extra "gripper" collar on the outside, bottom of the pages.

My home has a black PE plastic water line with a regular copper crimp ring!

It sure looks like a flare fitting.

You can flare some PE tube. Often that service water piping is the thicker wall 160 psi version in a CTS (copper tube size) OD.

The yellow PE gas piping takes a flare fitting also.