PEX-A sleeve – GreenBuildingAdvisor

1″ PEX is pretty stiff, but should still work. The thing that helps you here is that PEX is *very* strong in tensile strength. You could pull it with hand labor, or use a “chugger”, which is what electricians use to pull long runs of heavy cable. A chugger can easily pull with enough force to break/damage things though, so be careful if going that route.

You may need to water seal the conduit on the inside of your foundation wall to keep out water. An “entry seal” gland is perfect for this, and is what we often use for a similar application in the telecom world:

https://www.roxtec.com/us/knowledge-library/sealing-solutions/conduit-applications/

Another trick from the telecom world: try running a bit of water in the conduit and then pulling in the pipe. Poly pipe in a poly (or PVC) duct will often get enough lubrication from water alone to make the pull a lot easier, and water is super duper easy to clean up! If you need more lubrication than water provides, try Ideal’s Aqual-Gel.

One more suggestion: try running an HDPE conduit instead of PVC. HDPE can be one piece (no splices), and you can form it into wide sweeps without much difficulty. For a simple conduit like this placed in an open trench, you could use SDR13.5 (thinner wall than schedule 40, and a bit cheaper). HDPE is slicker than PVC, so it’s easier to pull stuff in it. You can also get HDPE duct with grooves molded into the interior to cut down on friction, which also makes it easier to pull stuff in. The only downside might be finding someone to sell you a “short” piece of only 90 feet or so. I would try utility contractors, and directional drilling companies, many of those companies will also sell “pipe”, and 90 feet is leftover material for them, so they might let you have a run of around that length for cheap or even free!

BTW, do NOT use yellow or red HDPE for your water line. Yellow is reserved exclusively for gas lines. Red is usually power. Try to get blue, otherwise black. Gray and white are other options. Orange is usually telecommunications.

Bill