i've been looking at central heating packs and the choice is either plastic pipes or copper, does anyone know what the pros/cons are of either (it will be quite a small system in a small house)?

Easy to connect plastic pipes.

I like the certainty of soldered joints especially under floorboards. Solder rings stuff is easy.

Copper on your own house, plastic on someone else's!

you can use push fittigns with either copper or plastic.

If there's any opportunity for rodents to get at the pipes I'd go for copper. One of my freinds has had dreadful problems with squirrels in his roof chewign through pipes.

Copper on your own house, plastic on someone else's!

😀

Certainly if you don't like them much.

Plastic is easy and you can take it apart if you get it wrong. With copper you get nice straight runs solid joins and for the little bits that do show it just looks so much better.

Used both types
.Plastic easy to fit but tend to pull air into systems and can / have failed.
.Copper if soldered correctly if bomproof but takes longer.
Personally i wouldnt bother with the plastic stuff

Cheap plastic systems – avoid, although most of the problems I find with them is poor installation.

I would personally use a plastic system where pipework is hidden (I use Unipipe, but the joining tool is expensive) and copper for any exposed sections that need to be straight and are readily seen. Saying that Unipipe has aluminuim in it so in cupboards etc it is fine, just wouldn't use it on an exposed drop to a radiator.

As for copper being superior is a myth. I've repaired too many pin holes in pipe (in systems only 18 months old) and see a lot of 'dry' joints where the solder hasn't run properly.

Bear – Member
Cheap plastic systems – avoid, although most of the problems I find with them is poor installation.

I would personally use a plastic system where pipework is hidden (I use Unipipe, but the joining tool is expensive) and copper for any exposed sections that need to be straight and are readily seen. Saying that Unipipe has aluminuim in it so in cupboards etc it is fine, just wouldn't use it on an exposed drop to a radiator.

That's what we did in our extension & it's proved faultless so far.

Bear – i think the Unipipe is great stuff – same pipe for underfloor and plumbing! price both, but use the leftovers from underfloor system to do the plumbing 🙂

Uponor are doing a deal on the tools – use a certain amount of pipe in 6 months and they give you the cost of the tool back in free pipe.

anyhow, copper for exposed pipe, unipipe for non visible runs. my 2pworth.

My plumber used copper for most of the house but plastic for aesthetic reasons to some radiators.

I have used plastic successfully.

Plastic is a definite no in rural areas, mice make a right mess of it.

used hep plastic pipe in 4 houses, copper for exposed as above, its excellent stuff, no leaks except for my badly installed joints…

both, if installed correctly will do the same job. as said plastic draws in air. but it takes all of a minute to bleed a rad. im a plumber and have seen no plastic failiures yet. i have seen any anmount of copper pipe/joint leaks.

Few manufacturers of PP-R pipes and fittings claims that their plastic pipes would be a better substitute of copper! Is it really true?!

brother is a plumber and wouldn’t touch plastic pipes, but I think a lot of it depends on where you are running them

I’m no expert.. but

Is plastic better for avoiding the horrible expansion contraction noises when pipes heat and cool down through floor boards etc?

Also I imagine plastic is much cheaper than copper these days?

Plastic pipes have an inherent flex in them that copper doesn’t so you might find you can connect two points with one run of plastic (or feed though a hole easily) whereby you might need a cheeky joint in copper. Not that that is a showstopper for copper of course.

Speedfitted a couple of taps to the existing copper piping and it was a godsend in the 1mm x 1mm area I had to work in under the sink.

FunkyDunc – the plastic stuff is actually more expensive but the argument is that you don’t need additional stuff like solder etc. and they are potentially reusable, quicker (time is money!).

25 year warranty on the grey Wickes push fit connectors. The ‘grey’ stuff in general feels better quality for a few pence more.

Plastic is also less hassle if you have to lay in a concrete base. I’d go HEP every time now myself, but I’m not a plumber! I’ll be replacing some runs in the bathroom soon with HEP.

I replumbed my whole house using plastic and have had no problems with it in 8 years. Our plumbers at work tend to use Hep20 as much as they can and have no real issues with it either. The europeans have been using it for ages now.

My father installed plastic central heating in his house built 27 years ago. This was the very first Hep2O stuff which was fairly radical in those days. It has been 100% reliable and is still going fine. These days the fittigs are improved and the pipe is better with a gas barrier. I have no probllems with it and use it in preference to copper. I don’t ever make fittings completely inaccessible though, which isn’t so hard since you can thread the pipe round corners and through gaps pretty easily.

One thing to not do: Don’t fit plastic push-on to copper! It fits nicely ansd will work for a few years. Green copper oxide builds up in the anerobic area beneath the o ring and will cause leakage after a few years. I found this out myself, so nowadays always use compression when converting copper to plastic.

I use plastic a lot, not all the time, but certainly on new installations. I prefer Polyplumb, the grey stuff. The grey barrier pipe is far more flexible than the John Guest and Hep2O stuff.

Got a call to a leak this morning though, was a plastic on plastic joint that had popped out. The grab ring hadn’t latched onto the pipe properly and allowed it to seperate. I presume it had been damaged slightly upon installation. Took 5 mins to fine and fix. It was on a 6 way manifold, would have been a right pain had it been copper. That said, likely wouldn’t have happened if it was copper

with the price of copper at the moment it is a no brainer

Plastic. We use specialist 5mm and 8mm JG Speedfit stuff at work for compressed air when blowing fibre, it can hold 180-200PSI of air and I’ve never seen a connector fail (except some old obsolete stuff) so I’ve no doubts over its ability to cope with normal water pressure, which is usually between 5 to 60PSI.

I made some alterations using push fit, just planned the runs to ensure any joints were easyish to get to.

Yep used push-fit plastic, the Polyplumb stuff, for the first time a few weeks ago. As people have said great for longer runs as it’s far more flexible than copper and quicker to install. Use copper on the visible stuff and also if you have a combi boiler they specify that the first metre or two should be copper pipe. Assume the plastic stuff has a tendency to melt if coupled directly to the boiler.

i’ve used both and touch wood have not had a leak…

in our bathroom i opted for mainly copper with soldered joints. with the yorkshire fittings it’s really easy provided there is enough access, and satisfyingly solid when it’s all together. i also used a bit of plastic here and there for long runs under the floor

when i was at uni we decided to plumb in some more radiators when we were in a rented place 🙂
stupid idea looking back, but the house was bloody freezing! we did it all with plastic though which worked fine

We only use copper in our Bespoke kitchens and Bedrooms
The client knows there done by a plumber
Just dont like the look and looks crap when you open the
cabinet and seeing plastic, why use it when you have copper
and copper is cheaper?.
The finish feel Just looks like a have ago person’s touch to it.

15mm copper tube nearly £2 per m, plastic around £1.20, length of time to install 30m of copper under floor can be 5 times that of copper.

the plastic joints are expensive though. anyway as you say, plastic is way faster – horses for courses

Our whole estate has heating systems destroyed by plastic pipes that have pulled air in and speeded up oxidisation process, destroys pump, radiators etc. I dont know if these are only no good for central healting and ok for plumbing but thats what happened anyway.

If you are going to use plastic then speed fit is the only way to go, for added security you can now get lock,rings on the joints. did the whole house (3 bed semi) in a day and my mate installed & commissioned the boiler.
No problems with rodents either, as it has a barrier and a foil layer.
see speedfit stuff
Extruded copper is much rubbishness these days and you need to get a very good plumber who actually knows how to solder properly.

liquid 1000 – assuming your estate has a district heating system they should have fitted air/dirt separators?

To be honest I find the copper good but expensive and hard to repair if anything happened to them, so I have tried push fit in many occasion but they burst… and it wasn’t good experience to try to fix them and lately I tried green PP-R pipes which comes with 50 years warranty, it was hard to find some plumber that uses them and managed to find an Italian plumber who has uses for the last 5 years and without explaining a lot to him he knew what to order and what to with them. They’re welded together. The Italian plumber had a small welding machine with him and did all the work perfectly. I noticed later those pipes have got another good quality: they were really quite. I used myself Raktherm UK brand but later on I found other German known companies that sell same product in UK

A friend at work fitted anew bathroom, and as they did the work themselves they used plastic pipes, but the easy joints were also easy to leak. They eventually got a plumber in to sort the problem out, I think they stayed with plastic but I think he made sure the pipes were of a decent quality not cheap stuff.

When we got our bathroom done I asked the plumber what he was using, and he looked at me like I had two heads and said copper. Quite glad about that, for what we were paying him if he’d daid plastic I’d have been asking for a discount!

End feed jointed copper here, when I’ve done any plumbing. If done right it will last decades, & soldering isnt exactly rocket science, just takes practice.
I’d consider plastic if it were a manifold system with no joints, but ‘O’ ring sealed joints under floors/behind studwork…no chance.

We’ll put 10 bar through the pushfits we make, but air doesnt make as much mess as water. 🙂

We built the barn entirely in Hep2O except for the boiler room and radiator tails. Tested the lot at 10Bar + too.

Very solid joints and much easier for us for first fix as we could pull runs through joist holes the length of the barn. Not to mention second fix as I could just run around with joints and a cutter pointing the pipe where I wanted it. Not the cheapest tech, but since I didnt have to pay for a plumber to do it, ultimately cheaper IMO.

They manufacture a regular and barrier version. Barrier obviously for all heating systems…which reminds me I need to get some fernox in…oops 😳