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March 2, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
16:01
PrepWithMike: How to be your own professional plumber...
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Alright, welcome to this Prep with Mike video.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
Today we're going to do some plumbing together here using the Propex expansion system that I love.
In fact, I mean, these folks are not a sponsor or anything.
I just want you to know how to do your own plumbing because we're facing a supply chain collapse and I like to teach practical prepping skills.
You can see more of my videos at prepwithmike.com.
Covering everything from tying knots to organizing firearms magazines and all kinds of things like that.
But today we're going to talk about plumbing and the easiest, simplest way to solve your plumbing problems.
And it's using this system right here.
It starts with these rings and these fittings.
It's called the UPONOR, I think is how that's spelled.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly.
But this blows away every other kind of plumbing system that I've ever seen.
PVC, forget it.
You have to use toxic glues and chemicals, and then you have to wait for it to bond or dry, or cure, frankly, correctly.
And who wants to work with copper?
Who wants to be a metallurgy expert with all that stuff?
You can solve your plumbing problems very easily with this Youpner system.
And this is the tool that does it.
This one happens to be made by Milwaukee, and when you squeeze the trigger, this end expands.
So it keeps expanding over and over again, like a little Pac-Man there at the front.
So using this system, I'm going to show you how to do something very simple, which is to just connect two pieces of PEX pipe together with a coupler.
And here's the coupler piece.
I don't know if you can see it.
That's what we're going to use, this coupler piece.
Now, this is considered to be one-inch PEX pipe, and PEX stands for cross-linked polyethylene, but they call it PEX, so polyethylene cross-linked.
And this is far more resistant to cracking during freezing.
In fact, PVC is largely obsolete because of PEX. PEX is the way to go.
And I use PEX on everything these days, including irrigation projects and running water for my backyard chickens or my dogs or what have you.
PEX works great.
It's malleable.
It's safer than PVC. It's not made from polyvinyl chloride, right?
It's polyethylene.
So it doesn't have all the chlorine atoms in it, so it's not nearly as toxic if it catches on fire compared to PVC, by the way.
That's another benefit a lot of people don't know about.
But it's also much easier to work with, and again, it's resistant to cracking.
And with some force, you can also bend it, by the way.
I mean, it takes some force, but you can see you can put a bend on it there.
And so it doesn't just crack.
It's not brittle.
It's malleable.
And you can even use a blowtorch and heat it up, and then you can bend it in the shape that you want rather easily.
You can actually, believe it or not, you can weld these pieces together with a blowtorch just by having the plastic, well, the polyethylene kind of mend with itself.
It takes some effort.
And it's not super easy.
What I'm going to show you is way easier than that.
But that's just one of the things that you need to know about PEX is that in a pinch, if you don't have the tools, if you don't have the couplers and the parts, like in a collapse scenario or a Mad Max scenario or a supply chain collapse, you can still work with PEX. In a lot of really interesting ways, even if you don't necessarily have the parts.
For example, you can make your own elbows.
You can make your own tees if you're good at it.
But today I'm just going to show you the coupler, how this works.
This is a one-inch PEX pipe, as I said before.
And let's talk about flow restrictions.
Because most conventional plumbers use couplers that are not these Yupener couplers.
They use couplers that have a very small internal diameter.
And it drives me bonkers, actually.
They have these fittings.
I think they're called like Viega or...
Or they have these crimp fittings and in a crimp fitting the fitting goes inside the pipe and then the fitting has its own wall and then the fitting has an internal diameter which is much smaller than the diameter of the original pipe.
So with a traditional fitting, you think you're getting one inch flow rate through the packs, but you're not.
It might be only 5 eighths inch by the time that fitting is put in place, and you can't have the same flow rate through 5 eighths inch.
Oh, sorry about my bloody knuckles.
Training accident.
Another training accident.
Little gnarled up knuckles and hands here, but whatever.
We're hands on.
So the thing about the Yupener fitting is that the Yupener fitting expands this pipe.
It makes it bigger.
That's what this thing does here.
Check it out.
See?
It expands.
And as it expands, it's loud too, but as it expands, it increases the diameter of this pipe, and then you shove this fitting in, and then it shrinks back down around this fitting, and so you end up with almost the full flow rate, very nearly the full flow rate that you had in the original pipe.
So you're not introducing flow rate restrictions, which is absolutely crucial.
And that's what makes this revolutionary.
You maintain full flow rates.
Now, the way this system works, I'll demonstrate it here for you simply.
By the way, you can cut PEX pipe with a simple little cutter like this that costs $10, and it's very easy to cut pipes.
And then what we're going to do is we're going to put a ring on this right here.
Let me get a better angle for you.
This is the ring that slides on.
This is an expansion ring for 1-inch PEX. And then this tool...
It's going to expand this ring.
We're going to shove it in here and expand it.
And then once it's fully expanded, we're going to shove the fitting in.
This is a coupler.
We're going to shove this in, and then this ring in the pipe is going to constrict.
It's going to shrink back down to size around this coupler, and it's going to create a secure, watertight seal in about a minute.
About a minute.
I don't know what the manufacturer recommends.
They might recommend you wait two minutes, or maybe it depends on the temperature.
If it's colder outside, it'll take longer for the polyethylene to come back to size.
But I've done it in about a minute, and it's worked great for me.
The key is you have to use this PEX-A pipe.
This is considered ProPEX pipe or Yupener pipe, and it is actually a standard type of piping, but if you're buying PEX pipe, make sure it's PEX-A, not PEX-B, because PEX-A is designed to be expanded and then it will shrink back to its original size with the help of this expansion fitting.
Now, these fittings can be a little pricey at first if you only think about the parts price, but if you value your time, then they're a bargain at the current prices because it saves you so much time, and again, you don't have all the toxic chemicals.
And I don't want to be around chemicals.
I don't want PVC cement.
I don't want to breathe the fumes.
I don't want it on my hands, all that garbage.
I don't want to have to carry around an extra set of cans.
And I don't want something that's flammable, which the PVC cement is, of course, highly flammable.
So here's how this works.
It's very simple.
Again, this is the Milwaukee M12. It uses a simple battery right here, which I think is three 18650s in a triangle format.
Hey!
And it just does this expansion thing here, which you're going to see.
So we're just going to expand this, and we're going to shove in the fitting.
here we go it's getting larger and larger Okay.
And then I just put in the fitting.
Shove it in, just like that.
Oh, hey, Rhodey.
What's up?
You want to be part of the plumbing?
Are you happy about the plumbing, Rhodey?
Okay, stay on camera one.
We can still see it.
Dog balls.
Yeah, I saw some dog balls right there.
Rhodey wants to show you plumbing and dog balls.
Anyway, here it is, the one-inch pipe there that is now secure and watertight.
And then all we have to do is do that to the other pipe, but we have to get the dog off the desk.
Hey, Rhodey, let's go down.
Come on.
I know this is fun and everything.
I know you want to be part of every show.
Alright, so Rhodey's under control now.
And we're halfway done, so now we want to put the other pipe, we want to connect it, so we're going to do the same thing here.
Let's see if Rhodey jumps up on this one too.
So same deal.
We're just going to put the fitting on, which we have here.
This is the expansion fitting.
And then we're going to insert this.
And by the way, this expansion tip here from the Milwaukee tool, it also rotates, which is important because it's expanding, but then it's rotating like a quarter inch or something with every cycle, and that's making it uniformly expanded.
So here we go.
Here we go.
That's plenty.
And then we just jam it together and just kind of push it together.
And there we go.
And it squeezes back down by itself and you're done.
And that's it.
And you can see that we've even done a reducer here.
This goes from one inch down to three quarters of an inch.
And then a little bit further down here, we've also gone from three quarters of an inch to a half inch PEX pipe here, which is what you see sticking out here.
So that's how you do a one-inch coupler, but of course you could do an elbow, you can do, you know, a tee, there's all kinds, I mean...
Every kind of fitting that you would need, you can accomplish with this system.
And notice how fast it is.
Again, we're done.
You can put water pressure in this thing right now.
You don't have to wait for hours or overnight.
And there's no mistakes.
Like, oh, I didn't get the glue in the right place.
Oh, you missed it.
Oh, you didn't twist it just right with the glue.
Or I've even had cases where you get some parts of PVC, And they don't quite have the diameters just exactly right, and they're a little bit too loose-fitting, and so you put the glue in, and it's just like, eh, it doesn't seem that it's that tight.
And sure enough, it leaks.
Well, with this, you don't have that problem at all.
This is, through the power of polyethylene, man, it's gripping around that.
This is watertight, and it's going to stay that way for as long as you need it, you know, for centuries until you rip it out or...
Someone chews on it or something.
I think that could be a possibility.
Anyway, just to be clear, I'm not sponsored by any of these companies.
Milwaukee is the tool of choice, but they're not a sponsor.
I found that I just want tools that work and that are reliable and that get the job done.
It's Milwaukee.
I don't know what else to tell you.
The PEX pipe system, I had a lot of problems in the big Texas freeze in 2021 with PVC pipes.
And ever since then, I've done everything over into PEX. And I've had no problems ever since.
Even when there's a freeze, the PEX can handle a little bit of expansion without fracturing.
So it's been great.
And then this Youpner system, or Propex expansion fitting system as it's called, this is the best system out there.
So folks, if you want to be like a professional plumber and get it done, and without a bunch of mistakes, this is the system.
So check it out.
I guess you can buy them all over the place, but I don't know.
Look around.
We don't sell them, but look around.
You'll find them.
Here's one of the replacement battery packs.
This is an M12 battery, and Milwaukee also has an M18, which is 18 volts.
This is an M12 because it's 12 volts.
And then...
You've got to buy these rings right here, these rings, the expansion fitting rings, which are Yupener rings, and you've got to buy your fittings, of course, whatever fittings you need.
So anyway, that's it.
You can watch more videos of prepping advice and how-to, hands-on type stuff on my website, prepwithmike.com.
I'm the founder of brighteon.com, the free speech video platform.
I'm a prepper for decades now, And I plan to bring you a lot more show-and-tell videos right here in our new Brighteon Studio.
Now, if you want to support us, we have prepping products that I'll show you here on the side.
We've got IOSAT, which is potassium iodide, and we have nascent iodine as a tincture format, which you see in the bottles there.
We have broccoli sprouts, which are certified organic freeze-dried broccoli.
And we have broccoli sprouts in a capsule format that's in the bottles there, if you prefer to take capsules.
And you can work these into your smoothies, like here's my smoothie for today.
Here it is.
Yum, yum.
Wonderful.
Good smoothie.
Avocados, bananas, broccoli sprouts, you know, flax seeds, whey protein, coconut water, the whole deal.
That's what I do.
If you want to support us, go to healthrangerstore.com.
You can find all these products in stock and so much more, including...
We've got ranger buckets, we've got mega buckets, and we've also got what are called mini buckets.
So just go to healthrangerstore.com, search for the word buckets, and you'll find all kinds of buckets and plus these supplements, personal care products, fragrance-free, certified organic, non-GMO, kosher certified even as well.
It's an amazing, super clean line of solutions and nutritional products for better living.
And also, Check out the Youpner Plumbing System because this is going to save you all kinds of time and it's going to make you more self-reliant.
Finally, if you want to learn more techniques about being self-reliant, download my free online audiobook.
It's called Resilient Prepping and you can find that at resilientprepping.com.
Download the MP3 files for free, and you'll be able to get a lot of skills, a lot of knowledge about how to live with not just a high-tech environment, but a low-tech environment and a no-tech environment, you know, when the power grid completely fails.
So thanks for watching today.
Mike Adams here for brighteon.com and prepwithmike.com.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
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I'll describe how the monetary system fails.
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So download this guide.
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