Crosslinked polyethylene piping, better known as PEX piping, is great to have alongside your tools for home-improvement jobs, whether it’s professional plumbing installation or just a bit of DIY tinkering. It’s temperature-resistant and highly flexible, so it can be snaked into all kinds of tight nooks and crannies. However, while PEX piping is very flexible, it obviously can’t be too flexible, or the whole thing would fall apart. That’s a bit of a problem if you’re trying to attach a PEX pipe to certain fittings and the pipe doesn’t fit. It may be flexible, but it’s not so flexible that you can expand the opening with your bare hands.
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Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to aid in the installation and upkeep of PEX piping, including a series of tools designed for this exact scenario. If you’re trying to get a PEX pipe plugged into an uncooperative fitting, a PEX expander tool from a hardware brand like Milwaukee will help you to make the connection. Under its ProPEX line of tools, Milwaukee sells several different PEX expander tools with varying features and levels of strength along with its other plumbing-centric offerings, but the overall function is more or less the same between them all.
PEX expanders expand the end of the pipe for larger fittings
Let’s say you’re working on a plumbing project in your home, and you need to plug a PEX pipe into an existing fitting in your setup. In the best-case scenario, the PEX pipe is already perfectly sized for the fitting you’re trying to attach it to, requiring nothing more than a crimp ring. However, as can frequently be the case, the fitting may be too large for the pipe to properly attach. If you tried to stick a PEX pipe into a larger fitting like that, all you’re going to get is leaks and water damage.
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The purpose of a PEX expander is to physically increase the size of the opening at one end of a PEX pipe. Since PEX is made of polyethylene, it’s flexible enough to accommodate this process without breaking or wearing down. The only catch is that you’ll also need a special connector for the PEX pipe called an expander ring. These rings go onto the end of the pipe and sets the target to which you’re trying to expand the opening. An expander ring is sized for the fitting you’re trying to connect the pipe to — without one, you wouldn’t be able to get a precise size on the pipe.
The tool expands the opening of the pipe, which then contracts after you attach it
Expanding a PEX pipe with a Milwaukee ProPEX expander tool sounds a little complicated if you’re not familiar with it, but in actuality, it’s a pretty straightforward process. All you need to do is place an expander ring onto the PEX pipe you want to use that’s properly sized for the fitting you’re aiming for, and then stick the tip of the expander tool into the opening.
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When you pull the trigger, the tip of the tool will begin rapidly and forcefully expanding, pushing the PEX pipe outward from the inside. After a few seconds of this, the inside of the pipe will be at a proper size to connect to the fitting. Of course, PEX’s flexible nature means it’ll always return to its original form after being expanded, so you’ll need to quickly affix the pipe to the fitting before it shrinks again. Once it’s on, the pipe will contract, perfectly covering the fitting.
In the event that the base expander tool can’t expand a pipe to the right size, Milwaukee also sells interchangeable expansion heads for its tools that can pull out the PEX pipe to the right size.