Fellas, I'm starting to wonder about something ... many moons ago I replaced all the plumbing in my house because the original owner who did not skimp on much material wise decided to do the polybutylene piping. Apparently he thought that it was the thing (most-modern) at the time. Anyways, after several small leaks I replaced everything with wonderful "old-fashioned" copper and then wrapped the pipes in my walls and in my crawlspace with Armacell polyethylene foam tubes - you know, those things that look like swimming tube-toys. Well the other day while browsing through the local home center I noticed that they are now carrying both the Armacell polyethylene foam and the Armacell rubberized foam with the self-sealing strip stuff. On the boxes they both advertised the same things (prevents condensation, helps prevent freezing, etc) but only the rubberized version had the critical words "meets all national codes" on it. I asked the person managing plumbing about that and he told me that only the rubberized version gives good R value to prevent freezing pipes!!! He softly suggested that I get the old tubes off and replace them with the rubberized self-sealing versions!
So, my decision/dilemma is that the stuff in the crawlspace is super easy to replace but the stuff in the walls will of course require me to cut the walls again and patch them again! Arrggh. Can anyone at all tell me if I got good advice, and if I should seriously redo all that insulated tubing? It does get down to -15 sometimes -20 here and I would never want a frozen pipe problem but considering that the pipes are in the walls, that they already have all that tubing on them and that they already have made it through about three winters since I replaced the tubing ... I just don't know what would be best to do.
Any thoughts on this? Thanks.
So, my decision/dilemma is that the stuff in the crawlspace is super easy to replace but the stuff in the walls will of course require me to cut the walls again and patch them again! Arrggh. Can anyone at all tell me if I got good advice, and if I should seriously redo all that insulated tubing? It does get down to -15 sometimes -20 here and I would never want a frozen pipe problem but considering that the pipes are in the walls, that they already have all that tubing on them and that they already have made it through about three winters since I replaced the tubing ... I just don't know what would be best to do.
Any thoughts on this? Thanks.