Plumbing Is Finally Complete!

Plumbing... The aspect of construction where we were most apprehensive. Neither of us had ever done any plumbing and we don't have any plumber friends, but we were determined to do it ourselves. How hard could it be anyway? We only have to plumb for 2 sinks and a shower (we don't need plumbing for the composting toilet).

Sans any experience, installing the plumbing involved a lot of googling and YouTubing. Spoiler: we finished the interior plumbing ourselves! **fingers crossed, we haven't pressure tested it yet**

As you may remember from our Planning & Purchasing post, we went with the Rheem Performance Plus 7.0 GPM Propane Outdoor Tankless Water Heater. It will be installed outside on the backside of the trailer (short side) once we finish staining the exterior. We need to wait for the cedar to weather for a few weeks before we stain it. Since construction is iterative, the plumbing is finished to where it can be, which is to the hot and cold water pipes sticking out the back wall on the trailer.

The process started with and comprised of a lot of Drew drilling holes in Rosey Leigh/Swiss cheese house (Drew's favorite thing), but he insists it must be done! Unfortunately, we don't have too many pictures of the step by step install (so you can't see all of our mistakes). You would think that with this process taking several weekends that we would have lots of pictures, but there are only so many pictures Abbie can take of Drew staring at the wall (Drew's other favorite activity).

So we decided to start with the manifold for the system since it was going to be the heart of all the plumbing. For reference, below is a finished picture of the plumbing manifold. Normally (as we understand it) you would have plenty of room to put a manifold in a closet or the garage, but since this is a tiny house, we had to get a little creative with its placement. We decided to put it in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink. And to make things even more interesting, we are putting this Ikea sink in that has a pretty small footprint (10" x 24"). So cramming the manifold inside of it was a little bit of a challenge, but we rose to the occasion! 

We purchased two PEX compatible copper manifolds (one for hot, one for cold) and devised a way to fit them in the tiny space. We stagger them vertically and horizontally to be able to complete all the routings and still have them fall within the footprint of the sink. You can see it from a different angle and with less pipes in the picture below.

The manifold took a lot of time to construct correctly. It even had us working through the night! Well not really through the night, but a little bit after dark. Plus we forgot our headlamps at home, so it was by phone light.

I don't believe we have said it in any of our previous posts, but for our shower we choose to go with a U by Moen Digital Shower Valve. It was actually Abbie's idea because she likes the ability to have the water set at the exact temperature she wants without having to constantly play with knobs. Drew definitely jumped on board when he heard it was soon to be compatible with the Google Home. Which will come in handy when you need to take a morning shower, but don't really want to get out of bed. You can have the shower at the perfect temperature before you even get out from under the sheets!

The picture below shows the 1/4 inch plywood behind where our digital shower valve will go. This will all be inside the cabinet so it will rarely be seen, but we needed to get something behind the valve before we install it since it is not going inside the wall. We also put some insulation in the wall cavity before we covered it to, hopefully, prevent the pipes from freezing! This is an exterior wall after all.

Below is a picture with the digital shower valve installed over the painted plywood.

Next up we installed the copper pipes that head outside to the water heater. This needed to be completed so that we could seal them to the house wrap before the siding went on (we put the siding up the very next weekend). Since we are using PEX throughout the tiny, this is the only copper sweating that we have had to complete. PEX cannot be used outside (UV light breaks it down) so we had to transition to copper and that meant sweating the PEX adapters onto the copper pipes to head outside. You can see that copper pipes are offset vertically by the width of a 2x4. This is done to match the height of the manifolds.

Below is a picture showing where the water enters the house in relation to the manifolds. Not very far away because, again, we want to keep it all in the footprint of the small Ikea sink.

If you hadn't noticed from the pictures, we didn't really do the plumbing in any particular order. So somewhere in the mix, we ran the PEX piping for the shower heads and the kitchen sink. The bathroom sink run was straight from the manifold and didn't go in the walls since it was already below the sink.

Above is the run to the kitchen sink looking from the kitchen to the bathroom before we wrapped it with the pipe insulation. This run was quite difficult to do with all the bends in it. If PEX gets kinked or scratched you are supposed to cut that section out and start over. We ended up doing that a few more times than we would like to admit... Looking back we probably could have picked a little easier routing for ourselves, but what's done is done!

Here is the kitchen sink run from the other angle (from the bathroom to the kitchen) with the pipe insulation installed. We wrapped the pipe in insulation just to give it that extra layer of protection in keeping the water at the intended temperature. We will still have rockwool insulation in the walls around it, but the pipe insulation makes sure it is wrapped nice and snug.

These next few photos show how the two shower heads and the kitchen sink hot and cold lines run from the manifold.

Below shows a close up of the location of the shower heads. Drew has always wanted a rain shower head and after all his nagging, Abbie finally gave in. So below on the left you can see the location for the rain shower head and on the right you can see where the normal shower head is going. Abbie needed a normal (angled) shower head so she could shower without having to wash her hair.

Our two shower head set up was another reason that led to the decision of purchasing U by Moen. It is designed to control two different fixtures and also simplifies the plumbing with only needing one line run from the valve to each shower head (as you can see coming out the top of it). The final reason for picking the digital shower valve was to keep the shower stall looking more modern and clean without any mechanical shower valves muddying up the lines.

In the middle-left of the above picture you can see the circular white cardboard holder of the control cable for the U by Moen. This is for the electronic controller we will use to select the water temperature and which shower head we want to use (this includes it coming out of both at the same time if we so choose).

This last picture shows the comparison of the non-insulated to insulated PEX piping. Also in this close up you can see the plastic guides we used in a lot of spots to keep the pipe from rubbing on the wood. Hopefully this will increase the longevity of the plumbing system.

That is it for interior plumbing! We still need to finish installing the exterior water heater and its valves, and connecting it to the rest of the system. Then the pressure test to make sure that everything is ready to be sealed up.

For now though it is on to electrical! And with the help of Abbie's Dad, Buddy, it should go pretty fast! That is if we can make our minds up on exactly how many outlets and switches Drew needs...