Home Inspection - What Are The Problems With Polybutylene Pipes?

http://www.fairbairninspections.com 604-395-2795

Hi, it’s Mark from Top Local Lead Generation. We’re here today with Mr. David Fairbairn of Fairbairn Inspection in Vancouver. He’s Vancouver’s mold expert and a fantastic home inspector, how’re you doing today David?

David: I’m great Mark considering I’m in a crawlspace.

Mark: So, we’re broadcasting right from someone’s crawlspace. I want to talk about the problems with poly‪butylene‬ piping. What’s the deal?

David: I’m glad we’re in a crawlspace today Mark, because this is a great opportunity for us to see, I want to show you exactly what it looks like and some of the problems with it. So if you’re not familiar with poly‪butylene‬ pipes, it’s a grey plastic pipe that was extremely popular back in the ’80’s and the first half of the ’90’s particularly in our area, in Vancouver, you seen a lot of these in homes built anytime after 1980. So what I’d like to do is go through the pros and cons of it and what to expect if you’re buying a house that has poly‪butylene‬ pipe in it. I don’t fee like saying poly‪butylene‬ every time, so I’m going to say PolyB - that’s the name that everybody refers to it by - so we’re talking about PolyB pipes.

So what we’ve got here, is a house that was build in 1985 and if you look, we’ve got some great plastic pipes here in the crawlspace, these are poly‪butylene‬ plastic. These were invented in 1978, so any house built after 1978 could have it. It largely replaced copper for most homes where cost was an issue and ease of installation. You know, PolyB was supposed to be the next big thing and the reason they like it is there’s no soldering involved. You could just assemble it, it’s very easy to put together on site and the big thing here is that it’s flexible. When you’re dealing with plastic pipe, you can bend it around different angles, it’s not like rigid copper where you have to create elbows everywhere to work it around obstructions. So from an installation standpoint this is a very cool back in the time. So what we’re looking at here is a poly‪butylene‬ with plastic fittings. We have plastic fittings at all the connection points, all our T’s and straight fittings are all plastic. This is known as a bit of a problematic type piping.

The house I’m in right now has actually had a pinhole leak, so the owner of this house, they had at their hot water tank, they actually had a leak already and that’s because PolyB has had a history of failure and that’s why we don’t use it anymore. So after they developed it, they put it out in a lot of houses, there was a lot of bursting at fittings, we had the pipe itself splitting and eventually there was a class action lawsuit. So when there was the class action lawsuit, the piping got a really bad name for itself - and of course, it’s no longer manufactured. I’d like to show you the there generations of poly‪butylene‬ pipe and which ones to look out for and which one are not as bad.

I’d like to screen share with you, just let me know when it comes up. We’ve got some photos to share of what the different types of PolyB look like. So what we’re looking at here, this is a very early generation poly‪butylene‬ fitting - which is a compression fit style. So what they would do with these compression nuts, they would tighten them, they’re also called grip fittings. This is something you would see in a very old PolyB installation, probably very early 80’s. If you see this type of pipe, there is a pretty good chance that you either had failure already or a leak already. Usually you don’t even see this type of piping because it’s already been, the house has already been re-piped. So this is the early generation of the stuff.

If you go to the next generation, that’s actually the same stuff we’re looking at in the crawlspace here. This is our plastic fitted poly‪butylene‬. You can see at the T’s where they connect, you’ve got these metal rings here and they are a crimp fitting. So you have these plastic fittings, you would slide the pipe overtop of the fitting and with a crimp tool you would crush down these rings and they would grab onto the fitting and compress it down. So this is what we have right now in this house from 1985. So you see the plastic fittings, they’re not great, they have a history of bursting and splitting. This would be your high risk style as well. If you see this in your house, there is a pretty good chance it at some point in the future, you’re going to have to re-pipe your house.