Fixing a hole

We recently had our plumber over to assess our needs, and while he was there, he took a look at our tub and said that we’d need to drill through our concrete floor so that the water supply lines for our rim-mounted faucets could go down into the concrete and across into the framing. I’m not sure why this wasn’t considered before we had the concrete pour.

To keep the cost down a bit, I volunteered to remove the concrete as I had a good idea where all the PEX pipes for our radiant heating lay. I don’t have a detailed map of where the radiant pipes go, but I did take a lot of photos before the concrete was poured. When cutting into such a floor, there is always the worry that you’ll damage the PEX and you can probably guess where this post is going.

I’ve highlighted the section of Pex that I had to be careful of.

I marked with a Sharpie where not to drill and then went to work with my big jackhammer, which was a mistake. The jackhammer makes easy work of breaking up concrete, the downside is that it bounces about a bit,  accuracy isn’t its forte. When I did uncover the pipe, I noticed one dent and one hole in it, definitely my fault, as that hole would have been discovered during the pressure test.

Replacing the damaged pipe meant exposing more of it, and for this, I used a smaller hammer drill to first drill a series of holes and then a bunch of different chisels. Once I got the hang of where to chisel, it was pretty easy, and 30 minutes later, I had exposed enough pipe to cut the bad section out.

We’re using PEX A (Uponor) in the house, and I’d like to thank John Paul for letting us use his PEX expander tool. The expander tool is pretty neat, and if you’ve never seen one in action, here is a quick video of how it works. PEX A always wants to return to its original shape, so a joint is never going to loosen.

The actual repair took less than 5 minutes, and I’m glad I’ve been through the process of making such a repair, just in case another pipe gets damaged in the future.