1King55,
I agree with everything you say here, you just missed one thing, it looks a bugger when you lift the floor board or open the door, it is impossible to make look good, if you all don't mind this is my main beef. If you were brought up as a fully trained plumber in the 60's as I was then you will know appearance was number one, it had to be water tight, plumb, straight, bend following each other, falling or rising the right way,clipped neatly, plastic can never fit that bill and never will. As you say it has its place, it has on an only one advantage I would consider is a good point, when you break into it you don't need to worry about water dripping down the pipe, with copper end feed it's a pain. I think plastic will always fail were it has not been fitted correctly and you cannot blame it for that, time alone will tell 1king55 I don't have much of that left to hang about and find out, I will leave it to you lads, but IMO plastic has not help you in anyway in fact I think it will damage your ability to call yourself plumber in the sense that I was when I was young only a plumber could do plumbing that has now change forever, I could teach my 11 year old granddaughter how to put an outside tap on in an hour does that mean she got a trade.
I have now asked you all when was plastic first used for domestic central heating and no one has come up with an answer maybe you all think that the 15 mm and 10 mm plastic you now see Guest etc is the first well you be wrong it's been on the market before and die a death, I used it in the late 60's, when Yorkshire first brought out there mini bore manifold, they were painted in bright blue and they made to 4 port brass mini manifold, a company call SYR also brought over from Sweden GEECOL a steel pipe 6 mm and 10 mm in Europe they didn't lift floor board to installed heating the routed two groove in the floor and laid the pipe in the groove and then tacked is piece of sheet metal off a roll to cover it about 2" wide, they designed there system on a very high temp drop F/R as high as 50 C they sealed all their systems and ran their boilers up to 100 C so you had 100 C flow and about 50 C they used SYR radiators convectors coils on the back with hardly any water in them , the whole 8 rad system had no more than a few gallons of water in them. Turn the boiler on and you were up to temperature in mins, I fitted a few but the convectors were very noisy ticking like a clock, they crimped the coils on the back of the convectors instead of tack welding, they system die a death, and so to the then plastic Impalyene, so you see you plastic chaps its all been done before, most of you were born, but not all of you.
Cheers 1King55
