Kitec piping in your house? Be ready for trouble

Kim Shanahan

Building Santa Fe

Santa Fe builders have never seen a wall system they weren’t willing to try. Many, like straw bales, tires or compressed bundles of plastic, are silly but hold up roofs with no catastrophic failures.

Santa Fe plumbers have never seen a tube they haven’t tried. Unfortunately for them, and Santa Fe homeowners, some have failed catastrophically. The poster child for tubular failure is a product called Kitec, manufactured by a company called IPEX, which shouldn’t be confused with the generic name for piping products that have not failed. More on PEX later.

Kitec’s failure came quickly on the heels of the failure of Entran II, which followed the failure of polybutylene piping. All three are found in Santa Fe homes, and all faced class-action lawsuits, ending their production.

They came to the market as alternatives to copper and were touted for lower costs with more flexibility. Santa Fe is an especially tubular-friendly market thanks to its long love affair with in-floor radiant heating featuring tubes encased in concrete slabs — a beautiful and efficient heating system. Until pipes fail. Then it’s an expensive nightmare

Before radiant heat became popular, most copper pipes were rigid and soldered together at corners and connections. Early solders had high lead content that leeched into water — not good.

After the end of polybutylene piping in the early ’90s, and before the rollout of Entran II, Santa Fe plumbers utilized a softer copper piping for in-floor heating that came in long rolls and were tied to steel reinforcing mesh embedded in concrete slabs. The thinner walls of rolled copper have also been known to have pinhole failures.

When Kitec came along on the heels of the demise of Entran II, it seemed the perfect product. Unlike rubber and plastic products, it was a combination of metal — aluminum — and plastic. Plastic was used as both a liner inside the aluminum and a casing outside the aluminum.

Unlike polybutylene and Entran II, which were used exclusively for heating systems, Kitec worked for radiant heating and in walls for domestic hot and cold water. It was flexible enough to turn corners, but the aluminum kept shapes of bends with no spring-back. Plumbers were thrilled.

From the late ’90s until production stopped in 2005, it enjoyed growing market dominance. Then the failures started. Experts say if a Kitec system hasn’t failed yet, it eventually will. Lawyers for Kitec argued it wasn’t their pipes that failed, it was brass fittings manufactured by others with high concentrations of zinc.

They also argued the chemistry of some municipal water systems degraded fittings and caused “dezincification,” which led to zinc oxide buildup in the pipes and increased internal pressures — causing the pipes to burst.

All those arguments were true, but IPEX insurers still ponied up $125 million to payout class-action lawsuits filed in the United States and Canada. The deadline to join the lawsuit ended in January 2020, but thousands of homeowners are still waiting for reimbursement for new piping.

Kitec piping was typically blue for cold water and orange for hot water and heating systems. If you have a house built between 1997 and 2005, check the color of lines coming out of walls and floors of utility and mechanical areas to see if you’ve got the bad stuff.

Concurrent with all three tubular failures has been the success of cross-linked polyethylene, also known (confusingly so for this column) as PEX. First imported as a product from Sweden called Wirsbo, which perfected the manufacturing technique in 1972, it opened a plant in Minnesota in 1990. It has since become ubiquitous and is holding up well in thousands of Santa Fe homes. Hope yours is one.

Contact Kim Shanahan at [email protected].

Kim Shanahan

Building Santa Fe

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