Milpitas
Clint Giardina and his crew from M&B Plumbing of Milpitas, CA installed Speedfit along with Zurn PEX tubing in a new 3,800 sq. ft. home being built by developer Dividend Homes in the Morgan Hill neighborhood, south of San Jose. The two-story, five bedroom house comes with a master bath with whirlpool tub, walk-in shower, two sinks and a toilet along with plumbing for three additional bathrooms, a laundry room, kitchen, family room and outside BBQ station sink. M&B Plumbing normally installs copper piping and metallic fittings, and so this installation represented a first use of PEX and plastic fittings. (CA recently approved use of PEX in residential construction.)
Clint Giardina was very impressed with the ease of installing Speedfit from rough-in to completion, and especially with the time savings gained. Speedfit requires no tools other than a pipe cutter so there’s no need for welding or glue. “It was simple and worked well,” he says. His crew used Speedfit connections to make the manifolds needed, saving the expense of purchasing them. While constructing manifolds is not a typical use of Speedfit fittings, its flexibility and universal nature (Speedfit can be used with copper pipe, CPVC and PEX pipe) came in handy on this job. The installation time savings were significant (John Guest states an average 40 percent installation time reduction): Cliff estimates that his crew saved between 24 and 30 hours using Speedfit and PEX over copper. Would he use Speedfit again: ‘I’d most definitely use it again,” he says.
Also of benefit is Speedfit’s plastic composition, as CA has just introduced its new lead-free law, commonly known as CA AB 1953, which permits plumbing products to contain no more than a weighted average lead content of 0.25 percent when used on wetted surfaces of pipe, pipe fittings, plumbing fittings and fixtures. Speedfit fittings are made entirely of highly quality engineered plastic using advanced resins. Speedfit is also corrosion resistant and allows no scale buildup; copper, while not containing lead, is subject to corrosion build-up, especially in the hard water conditions applying in many water systems.