In my expeirence a few years back as a plumber's assistant, these are GREAT for just making a couple of connections but you wouldn't want to plumb your entire house with them due to the price. Particularly if you're connecting copper to pex or PVC, but also handy if you are re-routing copper pipes or connecting to existing copper. As most people know, as you solder the pipe, you must always leave one end open so that the expanding air can escape from inside the pipe. This presents a problem sometime when re-connecting new plumbing to the old piping unless you have a valve you can leave open or something that allows you to leave that escape route for the air as you solder.
Even though the existing plumbing may be turned off, dry inside, and very well cleaned, if there is no place for air to escape, your solder will "blow out" as the air heats up inside the pipe and after the water is restored, you will end up with a leak (which is now MUCH harder to fix because your pipe is full of water again.
Anyway, these fittings are awesome for such an application, plumb up your new system, sweat all your joints, then push the sharkbite fitting onto your old plumbing and then your new plumbing and presto!
These fittings seem to be a lifesaver. Sweating pipes that have moisture in them is one difficult task. You can jam a piece of bread in the pipe to block the water, but it doesn't always work. The Sharkbite fasteners seem to help where conventional or PEX fittings fail.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
PTC will offer a virtual desktop environment for its Creo product design applications, potentially freeing engineers to run them from remote desktops on a variety of operating systems and mobile devices.
The push to achieving more intelligent, integrated manufacturing is putting a strong focus on networking and connectivity as key enabling technologies.
Now that solar and wind harvesting technologies are a thriving market, researchers are seeking other environmentally related energy sources for which they can create harvesting devices.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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