> "Sharkbite" fittings... I have worked with these and they can be quite convenient. "Sharkbite" is a brand name and at the moment they don't have any competitive knock-offs that I'm aware of. I have used them in plumbing copper and pex. They can work well when installed carefully. Problems relate mostly to "cocking" the pipe in the fitting and not getting the pipe seated fully in the fitting; both problems are not that hard to avoid but they're not that hard to cause either. Most installations are not totally perfectly staight, pipe and tubing cuts can be burred (pipe) or not perfectly square (tubing) and either pipe or tube can be slightly out of round or out of spec. In my experience, fully 1/3 to 1/2 of the sharkbite connections require some "persuasion" to seat properly; it helps _greatly_ if you mark the proper depth of the joint on every pipe or tube before installing a Sharkbite - otherwise after wiggling and pushing the connection it's often purely a guess whether it's made up properly.
The other particular of the Sharkbite as I understand them is that their "bite" depends to some extent on being pressurized and they don't attain as firm a seal at low or no pressure - note particularly for drain lines (actually I've never seen Sharkbites larger than 1" anyway). A small boat uses low pressure, no pressure, and at times even a small negative pressure in a few lines; there is never a pressure of 35psi or above, the environment, I believe, the Sharbites were designed for. I'd like to find some data on the use of Sharkbites in low pressure conditions. Rufus _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
