My house is due for some plumbing work and I have decided to go with copper pipe for said work. The thing is I am garbage at soft soldering copper. I never do it so I'm awful at judging the temp and I hate dealing with flux. On the other hand I'm a refrigeration mechanic so brazing copper pipe is my bread and butter. I could practically make a good leak free braze joint with my eyes closed. Also, considering most of the plumbing will be copper to copper connections, I could just use silphos filler rod and not have to worry about flux for most of it. I know brazed joints are not standard for water pipe but I already have the tools, the skill set, and I don't see any way it could be worse than soft solder. Sure it's overkill but is there any other reason I shouldn't just braze my water pipes?
I don't do it myself, but I have heard everywhere that compression fittings are used for copper pipes nowadays.
When they made some new pipes in my house recently, they used pipes of plastic coated aluminum, very modern, lightweight and they were superfast with handling them.
Yep there are crimp fittings but they cost more and the seal in those fittings is only rated to last so long. Of course that is a very long time (50 years I think) but I still prefer sweat fit copper that lasts for the life of the pipe.
When the hammer is your only tool, then the rest of the world consists only of nails :)
PEX
Genuinely one of the best developments in construction of the past few decades and people (stupidly) turn their nose up at it because "i want the metal pipes (that are worse in every measurable way)"
Copper won’t be chewed by rodents that unexpectedly gain access to the attic or crawl space, and it doesn’t degrade in sunlight.
I just looked it up, there are videos with rodent-chewed pex, I had no idea it's possible.
Copper pipes don't leach microplastics into my drinking water, are 100% recyclable, and are more durable.