Plastic versus copper plumbing in France

I had an annoying little plumbing problem to deal with: I needed to create a new bit of piping. 

It was too small to call in a plumber, even if I could find one to do a fiddly job, and I knew I had to do it myself. 

My first instinct was to do the work in copper because the parts are cheap and I know the principles; but on this occasion I could not make it do what I wanted so I decided to join the modern world and learn how to use plastic tubing. 

Plastic leads market in France

There is a bewildering array in the average French DIY shop so let me walk you through the options.

There are two kinds of plastic tubing in France. The first is PER (called PEX in the UK and US), which is red or blue (normally, for hot and cold water). 

Then there is white multicouche which, as its name suggests, is a sandwich of materials. 

You can also get these tubes fed through corrugated housing (pre-gainé) to protect them as they run beneath floors and through walls. 

As with copper pipe, there are various diameters of both available, depending on what you are going to do with it. 

An average, general purpose size is 16mm but if you want a high flow rate (say, for a shower), you may want to consider 20mm. 

Both kinds of tube are easy to cut with a pair of ratcheted scissors (coupe-tube).

Multicouche is more resistant to high temperatures and exposure to light, but it is also more expensive. 

PER is far more widely used. If you have no strong preference, I would opt for PER as the cheaper all-rounder, which is good enough for most purposes. 

You have chosen your material but there is a catch to going plastic: you need an expensive tool to work with it properly. 

There is a way around this using spanner-tightened compression fittings or even push-fit junctions, which supposedly work with all kinds of pipe, but for serious jobs you need to invest in, borrow or hire the right piece of equipment. 

Tidy-looking joints

There are two methods of making joints with PER and they should not be confused. The fittings are not interchangeable.

In the UK and the US, plumbers use joints that are squashed with a giant set of pincers called a crimping tool (pince à sertir). 

You feed the tube into the fitting until it appears in a small observation window, then you crush the barrel of the fitting to make it watertight. 

You can buy cheap pincers but I do not advise this: you get what you pay for. A decent one will set you back €90-€100.

In France there is an alternative method: glissement (sliding). 

This involves sliding a separate metal collar over the pipe, wedging the end of the pipe over a nozzle, and then fitting the whole thing into a gun-like tool called a pince à glissement, which forces the collar home. 

A pince à glissement costs upwards of €60, depending on the quality, and it should come as a set accompanied by a tool for expanding the pipe (pince à emboîture). 

My neighbour happened to have the tool for the second method so that is the one I went with to finish my little job. 

It took a little figuring out with the help of an online video, but once I got the hang of it I was soon making satisfactory joints. 

I have to admit that the finished thing looked a lot neater than the flawed copper version. Pince in hand, I am now a convert to plastic plumbing.