Having just finished a build, this is very true. New construction methods are amazing. My home had rough in plumbing in a day. Scheduling, inspections, and credentials eat up the most time. Why a plumber can't hook up power to a water heater is beyond me. That alone ate a week.
I just redid my 15 year old original builder-grade kitchen sink and cursed the quick-construction plumbing the whole way. It was all glued together ABS plastic pipes instead of threaded pieces and single-use plastic shutoff valves with non-threaded supply hoses. I had to saw off all of it down to the wall and replace it all, this time with quality components.
So yeah, you're right, the new methods and parts make for very fast construction but the maintenance and repairability/reusability is trending toward zero.
>>> single-use plastic shutoff valves with non-threaded supply hoses
Yes, this is the standard now for an number of reasons:
* because it is far easier to cut damaged sections of PVC on site and assemble replacements than it is to cut metal piping
* PVC is wildly less expensive than the equivalent length of metal piping, because it is used in a huge number of applications
* PVC is non-reactive and does not corrode like metal
and lastly, threaded pipe connections significantly decrease the throughput of a pipeline, reducing available water pressure at the endpoint. It is basic best practice to limit where threaded connections are used so that you can maintain uniform pressure across the whole unit.
Please don’t assume that copper and metal are the best in all situations. My home has in slab copper plumbing. The problem with this is that the copper pipes develop pinhole leaks over time. The slab itself is under tension and can’t be cut into easily. So repiping is a substantial effort. PEX is the only “cost effective” solution for this.
One interesting thing about pex is it can't be left in the sun, even when you have a roll of it ready to install. The UV in sunlight will degrade it and cause failures.
Also, have you seen the new (expensive) crimpers that let you crimp not only pex, but copper pipes?
FYI, you can rent the press tools reasonably cheaply if you’re not a plumber by trade. I rented one for $80 for a plumbing project a few years back and it was worth every penny. A million times easier & faster than sweating joints.
>Many Florida residents have their second set of pipes running through their attics
When/if I remodel my bathrooms I have to have this done due to my existing galvanized steel pipes being horrendously brittle and filled with 70 years of gunk. Ah, the joys of a house built in the 1950s in Florida.
For me it was the waste lines giving me trouble. The drain lines for a tub in a house built in 1962. The size of the inlet meant I wasn't finding a drain at Home Depot.
> Why a plumber can't hook up power to a water heater is beyond me.
Depending on jurisdiction, they can. In Germany, you can train to be an "Elektrofachkraft für festgelegte Tätigkeiten" - i.e. an electrician trains your staff to do a specific task, like hooking up the water heater.
The problem is, plumbers already have more than enough work. They could do that technically but they don't because they want to move to the next job site as fast as they can.
A while ago I read that here in Germany you can also do the house wiring yourself, it's just that it has to be inspected and certified by a master electrician or you'll be really hosed if something happens since insurance won't pay etc.
How does this make any sense? The customer has to pay the transportation costs of the plumber and electrician. If the customer only has to pay the transportation costs once, there is more money left for the plumber.
Presumably the water heater is not the only electrical thing in your house so if things are scheduled correctly (which is a really big if in the construction world) the electrician is coming out the same number of times regardless.
There is a specific order things need to be done. You need the fountain, then the walls, then the roof - only then can plumbers start. Because water runs downhill, the plumbers MUST be done next, as otherwise something else might be in the way of where a pipe needs to be. Once the plumbers are done, then the HVAC people come, and then after that the electricians come - it is no problem for them to put power to the water heater at this point - the water heater must already be installed. (or at least roughed in). This is how all houses are done, so there is never a problem unless all the electric is delayed.
In large buildings things are done different. Architects spend more time designing exactly where the pipes, HVAC, and wires go. Then the trades people work to spec, and they can thus work in any order so long as their parts go where they are told to. This is a lot more effort/cost though, so it isn't worth it for a small house but is critical for something large. A small house turns out to have plenty of space for everyone to design as they go, and thus this is cheaper. For a large building there are a few places where there is barely enough space for everything that must go through that spot so you better ensure upfront there is enough space.
Because most construction projects aren't "just" new plumbing... if you're operating beyond the "Yugoslavia way" aka renovating/constructing in pieces whenever you had scraped together some cash (as my grandparents did back decades ago), you want to do everything at once - first you tear out all the old stuff and then you sequentially have every trade come in to do their respective job.
This is odd given that in a lot of places, a home owner can run their whole electrical, and the inspection is just a dude plugging shit in to the receptacles.
Also, are most modern water heaters not just a standard plug in? Even my dishwasher, which was a curiously long hold out, doesn’t have direct power any more.
Around here, home owners are not allowed to plumb, not even with inspection. Plumbing permits are only given to plumbers.
My brand new (last year, anyway) high efficiency water heater is direct wired. The plumbers connected it. I can't say I've ever seen a plug-in water heater (bigger than a few gallons).
2020 house and the tankless water heater is just plugged into a 110 outlet. Kinda surprising when I saw that. Also shoutout to the builder predicting that we'd want to replace every overhead light with a fan and using the correct boxes with two hot wires from the switch to handle that. Really appreciate it.
Yes we installed ceiling fans with lights in the bedrooms and living room. The smaller bedrooms (currently offices) have the light controlled by a switch next to the fan switch on the wall. This is because the fans we bought for rooms only use pull chains and have separate conductors for light and fan. The larger rooms have remote control fans so for now the control unit is switched from the wall and then the fan speed and light is controlled by the fan's remote. I actually hate this arrangement and am going to do some splicing of the fan's wires and expanding the switch box in the largest bedroom so I can control the light from a normal switch.
All the overhead lights outside of the kitchen and showers were cheap "boob lights." The kitchen and shower lights are LED pucks that mount flush to a shallow box and kind of look like recessed lights. First we replaced all of the boob lights with wider LED panel lights with a warm color temperature. While doing this I noticed something about the light boxes in the centers of the living room and bedrooms: the boxes were mounted so they are centered over a joist, meaning you can screw a fan directly into the joist. They also had two hot conductors running from the switch box. One was colored red and the other was colored black. The red one was wired from the switch to the light, and the black one was capped at both ends. They were set up to have fans installed without any modification to the box.
I think you certainly could set up a water heater with something like a clothes dryer lead and plug, but I've never seen it done. I'm not sure why kitchen ranges and clothes dryers tend to be plug-in and water heaters tend to be hard-wired; in my experience they all get replaced about every 10 years or so.
Isn‘t that mostly a question of the wattage the appliance needs? Here in Germany we have a Max of 3000W on the regular plugs which is why, for example, stoves need special plugs. Not sure about water heaters though
The limiting factor for outlets is typically the wire, not the plug. A standard NEMA 14-30 plug that is often used here in the US for high power appliances like dryers and ranges can provide 24amps continous at 240V, for a total of 5760[0] watts. Electric water heaters typically run at around 4500 watts. If you need more power, NEMA 14-50 is available as well.
More capable options exist if needed, but I have never seen them in a residential setting.
[0] The 30 indicates that it supports a peak wattage of 30.
A typical German water heater, e.g. from stiebel eltron, will be between 15kW and 22kW at three phase 400V, which is obviously too much for a regular outlet. Which is why it's usually wired directly, the same as stoves/ovens tend to be.
Geez, three phase 400V using up to 22kW?! That would be quite a rare sight to see in the US. Afaik most houses only even get two of the three phases from the power line poles, for a max of 240V.
This is a common misconception. US homes are not two phase, they are single phase 240 volts, called split phase because the single transformer leg is tapped in the middle to form two 120 volt lines, each 180 degrees out of phase with the other.
But isn’t it just “two phase”? I.e. how “true” two phase would be different?
Ok, help from our new common friend:
Yes, your statement is essentially correct. In the United States, residential electrical supply is typically a single-phase, 240-volt system that is "split" into two 120-volt legs. Each of these legs are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, which allows for both 120-volt and 240-volt circuits within the home. This arrangement is often referred to as "split-phase" electricity. It's not technically two-phase because a true two-phase system would have two waves offset by 90 degrees, not 180.
A tankless electric water heater could use that much I suppose. I wonder if that is what Germany uses? Tanks take up more space, but they need a lot less power at once so they are kinder to the grid.
In the US houses get 1 of the 3 phases. That phase is split in half, and so each phase is 180 degrees. This is different from 3 phase power where each phase is 120 degrees. 3 phase is good for a few things, but for a water heater it doesn't matter, and most of the things 3 phase is good for you today will run off of an inverter for speed control which in turn can run off of single phase (3 phase is still better but only because you can use smaller capacitors)
> A tankless electric water heater could use that much I suppose. I wonder if that is what Germany uses? Tanks take up more space, but they need a lot less power at once so they are kinder to the grid.
Tankless water heaters are much more common in rental apartments, and Germany has one of the highest quote of people living in rented apartments. And if space is at a premium, of course tankless heaters are preferable. Apartments are also the reason why electric stoves (again, using 400V tri-phase) are so popular in Germany.
Just looked that up, apparently some tankless water heaters in the US will use up to 30kW, supplied as 240V/120A. Yeeeesh. That's one helluva circuit, and you better believe it's direct-wired too.
It's pretty common to see 240V/50A plugs/sockets in the US. That's how you'd power e.g. an electric stove, and that's 12 kW in total which is quite a bit of power.
The water heater I just replaced lasted something more than 25 years. I don't expect this one to. But that's a different brand of "get off my lawn" than this thread is about. :-)
> I'm not sure why kitchen ranges and clothes dryers tend to be plug-in and water heaters tend to be hard-wired
The kitchen and laundry appliances are sometimes moved with the homeowner or tenant, but not the water heater. Also a plug can make it easier to pull out for cleaning.
Kitchen ranges, clothes dryers, and literally every other appliance large or small are usually moved with the homeowner or tenant in Germany - until the last decade or so, rental apartments almost always came with completely empty kitchens, and it was on the tenant to fit in the cabinets, appliances and even the sink. Bathroom cabinets are also usually the responsibility of the tenant, but the toilets, sinks, and showers/tubs are built in.
On the upside, even a small studio apartment usually has enough space and an extra water hookup for at least a washing machine, so no dealing with other apartment residents or a public laundromat for laundry. Dryers are usually condensing; no need for an outside vent.
Until the last few years, short tenancies were unusual for Germans; in the little building we rented in before we bought our house, the other tenants had been renting there for 20-40 years! Given the terms of our contract, I gathered that they must have had very small, if any, rent increases written into their unrestricted contracts, and the only way to get them out was if the building owner decided to live in one of the units herself.
Sometimes yes. Often they stay, especially if they are reasonably new and the buyer wants them. It's seen as a selling point that the buyer won't have to go out and buy appliances right away. Of course the hidden downside is that they are financing used appliances for 30 years so it's generally better if the buyer negotiates a lower price in lieu of appliances. But a lot of new homebuyers don't think about that.
But I'll grant that appliances are probably moved more often than water heaters are.
The rules for what homeowners are allowed to do vary by jurisdiction, but the underlying principle is that if you are living in the home, you have an incentive not to mess up.
