I had another post about my slab leak (thanks for all the comments), but I wanted to hear specific comments about rerouting my current under-slab hot water line around the back yard, underground a foot or so.
My house is about 40' long, so the current run from the heater to the far side of the fouse is about
37'. The plumber would rather reroute the line outside the house rather than tear out ceilings, etc. And he has a bit of a philisophical problem with running pipes up into the attic and down again (I'm not too thrilled with that either).This reroute would add several feet to the run (10-15' or so). Currently, if I haven't been using hot water for a while it takes about 1.5 minutes (timed this last night) to get hot water.
I haven't seen a lot of posts about rerouting "around" the house, though I have seen posts about running hot water between houses and out buildings.
As long as the plumber uses high quality copper (and I know some of you recommend PEX), is this a reasonable solution? I would assume that the temperature a foot down is the same whether outside or under the slab (constant 55 degrees?).
Thanks.