TheVat
Registered Senior Member
With all the current fuss about plastic, the Vat household was pondering our PEX piping and its potential for adding leached chems or plastic nanoparticles to our tapwater. The popular wisdom seems to be let the water run a minute, especially on arising. Now my field is biology (plus some brushes with information sci), so my understanding of hydraulics is limited to a few bits of brain flotsam regarding the vascular system, i.e. extremely limited.
What I wonder is how exactly pipes drain. If I just run one tap, does a cylinder of moving water go directly from the main hookup in the basement to that tap, leaving other water lines fairly "stagnant" or does the whole network contribute to some degree? IOW, would it more efficiently freshen our water lines to go about and run all the taps in the morning, or is it okay to just run one tap longer? My intuition is that running all taps a little might be better, albeit time-consuming, and more efficiently flush out any leachate etc.
And yes, I've considered copper plumbing, though both expense and lower tolerance of freezing are not pluses here, where lows of minus 20 F. are not uncommon. PEX is popular here especially where piping must go through poorly heated spaces.
(and a shoutout to any members of scienceforums dot net who may wander through - that venerable site has fallen into a coma this week, from which it hopefully will emerge when Blike remembers to renew the domain name)
What I wonder is how exactly pipes drain. If I just run one tap, does a cylinder of moving water go directly from the main hookup in the basement to that tap, leaving other water lines fairly "stagnant" or does the whole network contribute to some degree? IOW, would it more efficiently freshen our water lines to go about and run all the taps in the morning, or is it okay to just run one tap longer? My intuition is that running all taps a little might be better, albeit time-consuming, and more efficiently flush out any leachate etc.
And yes, I've considered copper plumbing, though both expense and lower tolerance of freezing are not pluses here, where lows of minus 20 F. are not uncommon. PEX is popular here especially where piping must go through poorly heated spaces.
(and a shoutout to any members of scienceforums dot net who may wander through - that venerable site has fallen into a coma this week, from which it hopefully will emerge when Blike remembers to renew the domain name)