Upgrading Plumbing Lines and Connections on Your RV

Whether you're upgrading a system in your plumbing or adding new features to it, it's really easy to do with today's connections and PEX type plumbing. Now in the old days we had 3/8 inch, uh, it was pretty much mobile home type plumbing, lines and pretty much hard connections that were these little dinky little pink pinch rings. Now they're still using these because they're very easy. You'll see a lot of them in your RV where the where they will have a connection sometimes. They'll have a brass or even a copper, um, elbow, and then they'll pinch these to it, but there are some real neat products that are out in the market.

Let's first of all just go through what a pinch ring does. So let's say we want to add a faucet and it's got a inch. We can take, first of all, this is a PEX and it's got a 3/8, so if you have an old version, and you want to add a new faucet to it, this is an adapter. You can go from your 3/8 to a half inch to get to your new faucet, and this is just a compression fitting. It just slips in, but we're going to show you now with the new ones here we would simply add this to the inside of it.

Normally you would put this on way before. Now they do make a really fancy PEX pincher. Um, the inexpensive ones that I have found at most of your home improvement stores really are hard to get that pinch tight enough that it secures it. Um, I do it the old fashioned way. This happens to be an old ring puller, a fence ring, uh, that I got from my grandpa, and I've had it for years and years and years, and so all you do is just simply put it into that groove.

And now the really expensive ones would ratchet to the point where it tells you you can't even release it until it's ready to go, but if I need to fix a line, I simply cut off this. I can put in a connection. I add this to put on the faucet, and I will crimp that till it just gets to the hard part, and you can see where it's a nice tight crimp in there. Doesn't move. Same with this here, that one was crimped a little bit harder to it, so you will see this a lot in, um, your basic RVs today, because it's fast, it's easy for them to put it in.

It's inexpensive. Now this one is called Flare. It is a system that Winnebago used, and it's also compression. Very similar to what you just saw, where this is pushed on. But then this is clamped in, and as it tightens down it will add the compression to it.

You can still do some customizing now; they would take a C-channel and tighten this down even more, but that's an easy way to add any type of connection. You know what I like about the PEX is that it will expand to one and a half times its size. So if you do forget to winterize, you get into a cold situation, you freeze your line. I have frozen a unit solid with this PEX type system here and never had a line break. I don't recommend trying that, but it did work.

Um, some of the, you know, the weakest link will be whatever fitting that you have if it does freeze. Now we just, um, last year we did a trailer and we renovated it; we put it, uh, with new fixtures and everything inside. It had a 3/8 inch. Um, water line inside, so we cut that. And this is just a nice little piece; it gives you a nice even cut.

Rather than trying to use a razor knife or anything else, so we cut the line, we added a 3/8 adapter um to that and then a half inch to go up to our new fixtures inside, and we used the clamp-on fittings, but we also did several with a couple of other products. Now this is the flare-it system. Excuse me, this is the PEX, and it just slides in. You can feel once it bottoms out. Um, the thing I don't like about these is that I'm, I'm really not convinced they're going to work out in an RV application because remember a lot of times what works in the house does not work in an RV once it's bouncing down the road.

You see how easy this just slips out of there? So I'm not a big fan of using these inside an RV unless it's going to be stationary. Um, I would rather go with a SharkBite or a system similar to that. Now, there's two different versions here. Uh, this happens to be a SharkBite with a.

Half-inch going in and a compression fitting in here. I typically like this one here. We just did a complete bathroom renovation in our home and went with the PEX stuff; put a brand new shower in, all new sinks, all new fixtures and stuff, and used the SharkBites. We got them at the home improvement store, and it is just a compression fitting. So what it does is I put this in.

and it bottoms out; I feel it hit to this point here. Then I bring this out and it's got a little safety ring. So you notice when I clip that in there. That keeps this from pulling in, so you know, if this gets pushed in, I can easily pull that out. Now, with that ring in there, that can't happen.

So it's gonna stay nice and solid on the inside if I do need to take it out, I take the ring out. Get my finger in there. Then I push this back in. And you say you can bring it out, but once I have that ring in there, you know this is gonna stay nice and tight all the time, uh, while you're bouncing down the road. So again, the PEX system, it's easier to use because you can bend it around things.

You can get, you know, sometimes it's hard to line up the faucet with the water system line. If you wanna add an outside shower, if you wanna add a winterizing valve, or a water heater bypass, this stuff makes it really easy to do SharkBite or PEX again, I recommend using this or even the pinch. This is a lot cheaper. This is gonna be about $8 a connection. This is gonna be about $4 for a bag of 50 of them, so, uh, it is economical.

You do see it used a lot because it's faster and cheaper in the RV, so pretty easy to upgrade, to repair, or to put new fixtures in your RV using these types of connections and piping.