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Testimonial: Schuller Hydronics

Watch Using EvoPEX to Cut Labor Costs by 40% | SharkBite Plumbing Testimonial on YouTube.

Stouffville is just North of Toronto. Everybody in the afternoons, weekends, they're out barbecuing. You see construction workers with their construction boots on, pushing the baby carriage, walking the dog. This still has that country feel to it, but then at the same time it's close to the city. It's the reason we specifically bought in this neighborhood.

My name is Tibor Schuller. I own Schuller Hydronics and we're a design and floor heating install company. Here we are at my house in Southern Ontario, which we're currently under construction. The house is about 3,200 square feet. It's a modern design. It overlooks the lake in the back and we went with floor heating throughout just to keep it a certain level of comfort. So on this project we use SharkBite, Cash Acme, HoldRite and StreamLabs. I'm Gabor Milisics, I'm the president of Schuller Hydronics. The system basically works by distributing the hot water to the places that we want to heat. We can do snow melts, heat houses. You can scale it to airports if you wish. It's a very scalable, very efficient system of heating. The entire house will be heated by hydronics from the basement to the very porch. We tried to make this house such a model home for hydronics.

The flexible PEX and fewer installation tools made the job easier on our installers. A roll of PEX and pipe cutters were the main tools we needed on site. - Tibor Schuller

For the floor heating we use the oxygen barrier SharkBite PEX. The PEX is forgiving. You can bend it. It has a certain amount of rigidity to it, but it's not too rigid. If you bend it in place, it'll stay there for a little bit. You can put it down, clip it in place and off you go. As opposed to having it being difficult to handle. The EvoPEX™ with SharkBite fittings, we saved about 40% of the labor. Using the EvoPEX, I found that I was spending less time on the ladder. I allowed for, you know, four or five hours to do a certain amount of job and two hours into it I was done and I was looking around if I missed anything. I think it's much cleaner, longer life and easier to work with it. It's easier on the installers and if your installers aren't getting beat up on the job site, they're going to usually do better job for you.

On the fastening side for the piping system, we're using the HoldRite products. Whenever you have water running through pipes, you're going to get some vibration. With HoldRite products it allows for expansion without making noise. So in my house we're using the StreamLabs Control mainly for peace of mind. The Control in the valve allows me to keep an eye on the water usage in the house. I know what's happening in my house, even if I'm gone on holiday. You know I don't have to worry about coming back to a flood. SharkBite allows us the comfort of knowing that if we mess something up we can easily undo it and do it properly without losing any fittings. The speed of which we can install these systems is second to none. With new employees, it's a lot shorter period where they get comfortable putting stuff together.

You don't need crimpers, you don't need to solder. Essentially with a PEX cutter and a roll of pipe, they can go out and do most of the job. When you put the fittings together, there's this little green dot that comes on in the side of the fittings. It gives you a level of reassurance right as soon as you put it together. If it's green, you know you did it. If it's not green, then somethings wrong. The SharkBite system as a whole is very user friendly and all around good product to use. SharkBite gives me a lot of peace of mind.