copper consumption in U S homes ..

This article made me wonder about the residential copper pipes in winter season in U.S.

Will water not freeze in winter thereby bursting the pipes ? Or are the pipes buried deep in the earth ? If so what about exposed portion ?.
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In cold areas, water supply pipes are buried below the frost line. Once they’re inside the house, the general assumption is that they’ll remain warm enough not to freeze. (But it still happens occasionally. Usually they don’t burst since there’s some room for the ice to expand inside the pipe, but sometimes they do.)

If you have external spigots (for garden hoses, etc.) there is a valve on the inside which lets you shut off the supply before winter. Then you can open the spigot to drain the pipe before the frost.

I’ll probably get swamped in simulposts but…

  • yes, pipes often freeze and burst in winter. It’s a common (but not overwhelming) problem, especially in older homes

  • but… homes in the US are heated and insulated against winter cold. This generally keeps pipes from bursting

  • as long as there is water movement through the pipes, they are unlikely to freeze. So homes that have been left vacant (homeowners away on a trip, didn’t set their heat to the proper level while gone) are at greater risk.

  • water supply lines (from wells or the city) come into the house from underground. So they are buried, and will not freeze. (Although, a friend of mine whose well line ran too close to the surface had her water supply line freeze last winter; she had no water for 3 months, until the late-spring thaw)

  • outdoor water fixtures (hose bibbs, to which garden hoses are attached) are generally drained and covered with an insulating cap over the winter to prevent freeze damage

Also, a lot of the US doesn’t get cold enough to freeze pipes very often.

Thank you all for the quick responses…

With copper prices hitting the roof , is there any substitution ,of copper pipes by galvanised iron pipes or plastic pipes , happening??

Replacement of galvanized by copper, so called “copper repipes”, have been popular in old houses for many years. I had mine done a few years ago. Old galvanized pipe tends to corrode and be full of crud - copper is much better. Using galvanized would be a step backwards. Plastic is an alternative, and probably becoming more appealing as copper prices soar.

There’s a newer system called “PEX” that is starting to make inroads. It’s a plastic pipe, and it requires adapters for almost all current plumbing fixtures: http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=howTo&p=Improve/PEX.html

I plumbed my supply with copper, and my drainage and ventillation with PVC. Many people are using some kind of plastic pipe for supply, but I was concerned with it affecting the taste of the water, and the conections are not designed to last forever like solder is.

As stated above, outside pipes are insulated by burying them, and the inside pipes have to be heated by the room temperature. If you plan to leave a house unheated, you need to drain the pipes to avoid burst pipes.

Contrary to what was stated above, my outside faucet actually has the valve in the house, so it remains active all year. It’s a special valve designed to work that way - the knob outside attaches to a 8" shaft in the pipe that opens the valve inside the house. The exposed part can freeze without fear of damage, as it is only full of water when it’s flowing.

Around here, someone occasionally tries to steal copper from electrical transformers and such. I’ve never heard of anyone stealing pipes out of the walls of houses. That seems like a big job, with little payoff. How much wall do you have to rip out to get a pound of copper?

Occasionally on one of the home improvement shows that fill several channels of my cable TV, I’ll see an installation of plastic (usually cross-linked polyethelyne aka PEX) water supply, but it still seems quite rare. Copper seems to be the gold standard for water supply. Drains, however, tend toward PVC or cast iron, especially in big cities – NYC and San Francisco, for example, require cast iron.

15-20 years ago, a lot of homes here in metro Atlanta (and probably other parts of the country) used polybutylene pipe (aka blue poly) for water supply. This pipe had a nasty tendency to break or crack; most of it has been replaced, paid for at least in part from settlements of class-action lawsuits.

My own house (built in 1992/3) had blue poly running from the meter to the outside of the foundation – all the interior supply piping was copper. One cold weekend in 2000, the blue poly broke where it joined the copper, rendering my house without a water supply. We had two back-to-back ice storms that weekend, so the plumbers were busy with frozen & burst pipe calls. It took 5 days (and $1800) for me to get someone to come out & replace the poly with copper.

Yes, there’s a move away from copper and toward PEX, but it’s not a cost issue. (At least not yet.) It’s for two reasons:

  1. There are far fewer joints in a PEX system than a copper, so you’re less likely to have a joint fail (esp. to have one fail somewhere deep inside a wall/floor/ceiling)

  2. PEX allows you to do “home runs”—you have a manifold in your basement, etc., that feeds hot/cold water out to many individual fixtures. It’s like a fuse box/circuit breaker box. Each plumbing fixture in the house gets a direct, unbroken run of pex all the way from the manifold to the fixture. This REALLY cuts down on joints (only 2, one at each end!), and makes shutting off water to individual fixtures very precise–unlike in a copper system, where you often have to shut off water to the whole house/large sections of it.

Another plus is that PEX, being relatviely flexible, is slightly more freeze-damage-resistant than copper.
Also, indian, that article is a little misleading. Yes, many homes have been abandoned and no one wants to buy them. Yes, thieves break in and steal the copper pipe from these abandoned homes. This is because it’s easily taken, easily sold, and doesn’t have to be in good condition–it’s going to be melted down, anyway. In comparison, there’s no market for previously owned drywall and composite roofing, because those sorts of things have to be in good condition when you install them.

But for those building a new home, the cost of copper pipe is not yet an issue; there are far more expensive things that go into a new home. And, if you owned an existing home, it would also not be worth it to rip out your copper, sell it, and then re-pipe the house. The labor costs alone are probably far greater than the value of the pipe.

It’s still only copper, not gold.

My house was built in 1922, and has minimal insulation between the outside walls and the inside walls. So although the pipe bringing water into the house from outside is buried deeply below the line at which the ground freezes during the winter, there is a place under my kitchen sink, which is on an outside wall, where the uninsulated pipes are vulnerable to freezing during especially cold snaps. They’re exposed to the room under the sink, and there’s minimal insulation in the outside wall two inches behind them, so it gets quite cold under the sink.

Winters here in Central Illinois generally don’t get much colder than 10 degrees F., and when it gets down to 0, that’s an Event, but not a problem vis-a-vis the pipes freezing.

But on the few occasions every decade when an “Alberta Clipper” brings bitterly cold Arctic air straight down from Canada, and the thermometer plummets at night to 20 below zero F, that’s when I open up the cabinet doors under the kitchen sink, to allow warmer room air to circulate under there, and keep the pipes from freezing.

I also allow the cold water tap to run slowly all night, as running water freezes more slowly than still water, and all I need to do is get through the night, until our normal weather pattern reasserts itself and it warms up a bit, to 0.

For my house, you could get at most of it from the crawl space. Hack off the connections at the fixtures, pull the pipe out of the wall in the crawl space. The repipers didn’t knock out much wall. I was impressed that they could replace the plumbing lines for an entire house in a day so that you wouldn’t have to go overnight with your water off. Thieves, not caring about damage, could probably rip out the copper pipe pretty quick.

PEX is definitely getting popular. It’s a lot faster to run too, since you can just pull it instead of having to lay out copper and solder it.

There is some history here too: The building codes in the US tend to be very conservative, and it took a long time for PEX to get approved as an alternative to copper.

:smack: Didn’t think about the design of the house. Around here, almost everyone has a full basement, as the foundation has to be below the frost line. Almost all of the plumbing is buried in the walls. Of course if there is a crawl space, it would make it easy.

A 1/4" quarter-inch elbow is going for around $1 nowadays, which is ridiculous. It’s really easy to desolder pipes with a blowtorch. So it might be worth more to keep it intact as pipe fittings, and find a cut-rate remodeler with low standards.

I’m going on second-hand reports here but I’ve heard there’s a problem with PVC pipe that you don’t have with metal: as it gets brittle over time, PVC pipes can develop splits that propagate along the pipe. With copper, you can of course get leaks at the soldered joints, etc., but they don’t typically split (barring full freezing, etc. etc.). You have to patch a copper pipe, but you don’t have to replace the whole thing. Someone on the list probably has better info on that…