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14 Answers 14

up vote 6 down vote accepted


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For a water usage POV, if you kitchen, and bathrooms are at all connected. you will find that when you sporadically use any faucet, you can still make use of the warm/hot water in the pipes (with insulation), my bathroom requires me to run the water for about 30s before it gets warm, then if i try again in about 5 mins, i need to run it for 30s again. -- waste of water and electricity. –  Hightower Jan 9 at 7:41
PEX is used for radiant floor heating and for radiant heating to de-ice driveways. Which means it is a very good thermal conductor. So there is definitely a benefit to insulating it, because it has no significant insulating properties of its own. –  Craig Jan 16 at 4:15

There are two reasons to insulate hot pex pipes:

  1. Keep them hot in cold temperatures
  2. Keep them from heating up cold pex pipes


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Figure 12



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Grab your pex and see what you can feel.

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  1. Cost of insulation
  2. Cost of labor to install insulation



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Probably not worth it.



  1. water costs in your area
  3. average temperatures inside and outside your house and
  4. the percentage of the pex that is inside your house
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Here is an unusual use for the insulation. At a commercial building they had chunks of insulation all over the PEX, hot and cold. They had the PEX secured all over, though they had the insulation between the places it was secured. They said the reason was to prevent the PEX from vibrating the studs they were attached to.

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It just makes sense to spend a few dollars to ensure your hot and cold water PEX pipes are well insulated for energy consumption if no other reason, but with the winters we have been experiencing here in the northeast during the last few years, it pays to do what you can so the pipes don't freeze. I used the fiberglass tubing on the hot water lines and the foam tubing on the cold on the advice of a plumber.

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