3/8" PVC Pipe

[nickgardner]

My house was built in 1974 and has PVC piping for the distribution of mains pressure cold water to the bathroom and kitchen. The pipe is labelled as 3/8" BS3505, Grade E and is dark grey in colour. I have been to just about every plumbing supply company with absolutely no success in trying to obtain a connector/adapter (compression or plastic) which will allow me to connect this pipe work to a standard 15 mm copper pipe. They just seem to shrug their shoulders and seem to be unable to offer any suggestions.

The PVC pipe is 17 mm in diameter.

Anybody have any ideas on how to solve this problem? ____________ Nick G

[Brian Sharrock]

please take this message for what it's worth.

IMHO, the pipe _might_ be ABS and not PVC.

My property was replumbed in 1974 - the original 1935 'plumbing' was all in lead - and at that time there was a shortage of Copper (Belgian paratroopers were dropping into Zaire IIRC) and copper prices were high. Imperial Metal Industries ( IMI ) the manufacturer of Yorkshire fittings were 'pushing' the usage of ABS pipes for cold water - a BCO locally insisted that copper pipes were utilised solely for hot water runs and ABS , solvent welded unions, elbows etc, pipes from the stop-c*ck onwards. I've finally got rid of all those blasted ABS pipery in the last few months! The pipes were marketed under the brand-name 'Poly-York'. The seemed to go down with 'plumbers' like the proverbial 'lead balloon' - there's an etymological joke in there. :)

I too was faced with problem of shrugging shoulders from all the experts I asked for years, then out of desperation I discovered that 'push-pit' connectors _would_ suffice. Suck it and see! Once you've made one connection , you can continue with copper!

HTH

[Ed Sirett]

I've not come across this. But can you force a length of 10mm microbore pipe down the end of the pipe and then use a couple of jubilee clips to make it stay put?

From the 10mm you can convert to 15mm and then to standard plastic pipes.

Obviously you don't really want much of this stuff in the installation as it's non-standard.

[Ian Stirling]

Nope. "Specification for unplasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC-U) pressure pipes for cold potable water"

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Brian Sharrock" saying something like:

There's a lot of that stuff in Local Authority housing near me. I discovered the old Council works depot to be very helpful in supplying convertors from the plastic to local copper sizes. So, worth a try that way.

I've also seen it simply warmed up with a hot air gun and pushed over copper pipe, for a (supposedly) low pressure connection, but was actually mains. Surprisingly, it had lasted for years under several bar of pressure.

[Brian Sharrock]

OK! Sorry for _trying_ to help! Ignore suggestion !