Should I re-do this cinched PEX connection?

Question

It is tight against the connector on the other side, but not quite even on this one. (See pic). It is not leaking and seems to be working well. Just don’t want issues down the road and don’t know how precise this needs to be.

Answer 1

I'd be less concerned about the squareness of the cut and more concerned about whether you've got the crimp ring on more than 1 barb. You've angled the two crimp ears to the same spacial area and cause the horizontal crimp ring to be further from the fitting than it should be. Put a 90 fitting up and see how many of the barbs your crimp ring is hitting.

The vertical crimp has the correct spacing from the end of the fitting. The horizontal crimp in both is pushed out.

While you may not have leaking now, what you do have is a crimp that is less resistant to sudden pressure changes and is more likely to blow off in the future.

It can be hard to get a really square cut on pex. I like the sharkbite 23369CA pipe cutter as cuts more square than any other cutter I've used ( I have 5 different ones ). I like my plumbing to look perfect but then I don't have to do production work so I can afford to spend 2-3 times as long per crimp as a production plumber. Be careful if you do use the 23369CA and if a piece of pipe gets stuck in it never clear it with your digits.

Answer 2

If it didn't leak and doesn't leak after you crimped it, it won't start leaking because the end cut is imperfect.

If you were a wet-behind-the-ears apprentice for a plumber that gave a darn, sure, the master who you were working under would make you cut it out and redo it so everything looks perfect, and you'd learn not to do it that way in the future to avoid being made to redo it. Or go into a different trade.

The actual seal is made nearer the clamp. The tubing beyond the clamp is mostly not involved. A little bit is.

3 of the 4 connections are visibly not perfect right angle cuts. The red one coming up looks pretty good. None of them are bad enough to matter. The yellow line is an approximation of "bad enough to matter" where the cut end starts impinging on the part of the tube being compressed by the clamp.

Note that the illustrated "bad cut angle" is quite extreme. There's tolerance for real world working conditions built-in.

So, the TL;DR: Make an effort to do better in the future - yes. Redo this - only if it will haunt your perfectionist tendencies.

Answer 3

Page 23 of the PPFA PEX installation guide addresses this; it is best practice to make sure every cut is square.

1. The tubing should be cut squarely and evenly without burrs. Uneven, jagged or irregular cuts will produce unsatisfactory connections.

2. The diagram shows a correctly cut tube compared with an incorrectly cut tube.

The referenced diagram:

Another question you did not ask, but may influence your decision of whether to replace: PEX install guides require 1/8" of slack per 1 foot of run for thermal expansion/contraction. You can find this in the linked install guide. Both the red and blue tubing in your photo look like they may be too short.

Answer 4

That crimp would keep me up at night. It is way to far from the edge. I'll upload a picture of my work later once I am home.

Apollo makes guided crimp rings for this exact reason:

As you crimp the ear, the little red thing just falls off.

Even if you don't buy them, just look at how close to the edge is considered ideal.