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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Before then, those of us with homes that aren't 100% rodent-proof forever have to factor in just how much mice and rats luuuuuv chewing on PEX hot water pipes. https://www.bobvila.com/articles/rodents-chew-pex-pipe/

PEX is easy to work with and cheap up front. The cost and risk are shifted onto the future owners.

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My copper pipes have with some regularity gotten small pinholes that blossom from tiny drips into tiny high-pressure jets. (E.g.: https://whyrepipe.com/blog/what-causes-pinhole-leaks-in-copp...)

The longer I have a home, the more I realize every thing has its gotcha's.

Entropy is a bitch.

If you have rodents inside your walls or attic, you have a major issue unrelated to the PEX. Also, to my knowledge, the colored PEX is the main culprit. Clear variants aren’t nearly as “tasty”.

Either way, if you have rodents inside… that’s its own issue.

Do you argue against layered security in your day job? I'm making a case for reducing blast radius in the event of a breach.

Of course rodent issues are related to PEX: now if a rodent ever does get in, the damage is multiplied when they eat your delicious PEX water pipes and you get a flood in addition to all the other horrors. Not so with metal piping.

It would be nice if all homes on earth could be completely 100% rodent proof forever. And it would be nice if attackers never breached computer systems. But some of us have to live in a world where such things happen.

You’re over prioritizing an edge case while ignoring benefits, I’d say.

If you want to talk about blast radius: PEX is substantially more resistant to freeze bursting. What about houses that are poorly insulated, so they are prone to pipe freezes? Copper pipes would be ill advised in that situation. I assume the same houses that are prone to rodent infestations are also poorly insulated. Which is more likely to happen I suppose depends on your climate.

Maybe I'll run it by my homeowner friend who suffered through the rat-chewed-PEX flooding that a PEX booster I came across considers her experience an "edge case". If I want to see her cry tears of blood, that is.

For good measure, I might also remind her that notwithstanding the flooding, the rats were a "major issue". Just in case she was confused about that!

Here in Europe, PEX is perfectly normal. The key difference is that we build our homes out of brick and mortar or outright solid concrete instead of wood, cardboard and glasswool, so pests have it much, much more difficult to cause damage.

Doesn’t Paris have an annual rat culling since their population of rats is like 10mil? And London is almost as bad as New York (which is also mostly stonework). The material hardly matters for rodents, as stone will make its own holes over time for them to get into, and the sewers in Europe are even older and in parts less maintained than the US.

Oh we do have rats but they live in the sewers and gutters where food waste ends up, not in the walls of our homes.

> we build our homes out of brick and mortar or outright solid concrete instead of wood

I mean yes, you chopped down your forests millennia ago ;).

Nah, according to what I've read, we really ran out of forest (wood) and had to start replanting them about 500 years ago, give or take a factor of two.

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