First and foremost, this site is the answer to my prayers! I have an old 1980 14X70 mobile home and am in the process of turning it into a 26x70 ranch. First issue, I am tearing down walls and adding new walls in different places. I want to move baseboard registers to new walls. The crawl space under home is a nightmare! I recently replaced all water pipes with pex, because copper piping was full of pinholes due to extremely acetic water, so I was told by a plumber. I now want to replace all oil furnace piping to baseboards with pex. I have a lot of the blue pex left with a 180 degree water rating, is this ok to use? Last but not least I want to just disconnect some baseboards at present due to the lack of time since I am a landscaper. How do I do this and keep the hot water circuit complete while making it simple to reconnect this fall after new walls are built and baseboards are ready to be reattached? Thank you.

 

Generally, its not a good idea to use anything but a barrier pex for baseboard heating. I don't know if mobile home boilers are different than most, but that being said:

The first thing we need to know before answering the question is what type of boiler you have. If you have any iron components in your boiler at all (i.e. Cast iron boiler), you need to use barrier pex, such as Hepex, or Pex-Al-Pex. This is because oxygen molecules have a way of penetrating non-barrier pex and will cause your boiler, expansion tank, iron piping, etc... to oxidize, and eventually you will have pinholes. I have talked to people who have used the non-barrier pex, and they had leaks in their expansion tank within 2 years, so its not a decision to take lightly to save a few bucks.

If you boiler is something like stainless, and you have a brass/bronze expansion tank and air eliminator, you can probably safely ignore what I just said above.

As far as attaching the baseboards, it depends on the type of loop you have. If you have a single loop (i.e., the radiators are all in series) then you will have to do something like run a piece of pex where the old radiator was to keep them in series. Its either that, or you can convert the system to a diverter tee type system, where you put a couple of tees in the line to complete the loop to the rest of the system , and valve it off so you can just reconnect when the time comes.

I don't know if that completely answers all your questions, but I'm sure others will chime in where I missed.

 

I have a smith cast iron boiler. I have (3) zones in my home, I don't believe that my registers are in a series. How would I confirm that they aren't? Thank you for the great information, I really appreciate it. Have a great evening.