We haven't pulled permits for any copper piping and there isn't even any going into the house...it's all PEX.

You need appreciation, both forced and natural to make up for the 40 year rehab cycle. 

We take off the outlet and switch covers (easiest to replace these as it's sometimes tough to get the odor out of plastic) and we pull out the cabinet drawers and open up all we can to let the ozone penetrate as deep as possible.

I would force appreciation if are able to add value, raise rents, decrease expenses and refinance asap to pull the free money out.

As it stands now you should be able to refinance and get a better rate, while also pulling out cash for reinvestment.

The HELOC seemed easier with less fees( I had to pull out a certain amount of money but put it right back in).  

Can I pull comps (CMA)  with one MLS system?

When I have completed the renovation, can I pull the forced equity out and use it toward another home while collecting the monthly payment and putting toward the equity refinancing?

The taxes around my area are typically high and I pulled that number off of Zillow.

I believe they have a subscription system however from what I recall it's a little bit expensive and is not very user friendly.You can pull the public data from the various websites and then go and extrapolate everything, but unless you've got a pretty good programmer who can build out some engines to go scrape everything you will end up doing a lot of that mining manually.