Snake for Pex?

m dewolfe

Ok jim go out and get a cheap wire feed welder handpiece and use it in the manual mode to force a small wire down thru the pex. You can push that wire a long way sometimes as much as 200 feet then see where she stops measure the length of the wire and cut away. I have used a tone generator and a tracer and found a crushed piece of pex in a concrete floor. Worked well for me but I think there was some luck involved too good luck

Jim Franklin_2

Argh!

Putting the 4 zones of pex (runners to baseboards) onto the new boiler piping today. A few of the cardbord zone identifiers had fallen off the pex so I blew into the supplies to find the returns and got a nasty surprise. One run is blocked and passing no air, from either end. I have no idea how this happened. Anyone who's worked with the stuff knows it's way too stiff to be wedged behind a piece of sheetrock. It's 3/4 so I would have felt a kink.

I'm going to try pumping it up a bit with the compressor, but I'm at a loss as to how I'm going to find the blockage. Any ideas that prevent me from hacking open walls and splitting runs in two would be greatly appreciated...

jim

Weezbo

how about 150' of....

1/4" plastic break hose, sharpened a bit on one end ,....slide that into 1/2" or whatever run some hot antifreeze through it,....then if it is and ice block,....it will melt its way through .

hook a hose connection to the other end of it lash it up to your Wayne pump....run the pex into the fill bucket.as a thought.....?

*~/:)

jeff_51

could try a fish tape?

Jim Franklin_2

Great ideas...

...well, except for the water one :-)

I managed to get a resonably tight seal on a manual air chuck and let 'er have about 40 PSI. POP! But the other line was still clogged. Now I'm picturing a coupler that never had it's center drilled out and I've just popped off one side, and other crazy stuff. Then I decide to stop being so stubborn and MAYBE the circuits don't go where they're labelled. Sure enough, I was wr-, wr-, mistaken, and popped the cap off the kitchen toe kick heater hose.

Guess I get to re-label all the zones now. That'll teach me to work after 5....

Thanks for the ideas, I'll file them away for the next guy ;-)

jim

Weezbo

what ? no likey idea?

sheesh. mighta been frozen Th...hen you likey idea.

Jim Franklin_2

Frozen?

It's a new install. There's nothing in it but air. If that's frozen, I have worse problems than clogged pex :-)

jim

Weezbo

if a guy in 23 below might have a momment to splain*~/:)

it is downright chilly around here if you take the caps off of pex that run between floors a convection current ensues,...if the temps are up while people are working and down when they leave this causes condensation within the lines, now i know thats a strech buh trust me. it could happen