How Do I Know If My House Needs to Be Repiped?

Your house probably needs to be repiped when it has had two or more pipe leaks in different places within a couple of years, when the water runs rusty or brown after sitting, when pressure has dropped throughout the house rather than at one fixture, or when the pipes are a material with a known failure history and the home is past 30 years old. One leak is a repair. A pattern is a pipe system telling you it is done. We wrote separately about polybutylene pipes, which is a yes-almost-always case. This post is about every other Phoenix house: copper, galvanized and the ones where nobody knows.

The Signs We Look For

Three generations of our family have been crawling Phoenix attics, and these are the signs that turn a leak call into a repipe conversation:

• Repeat leaks: a second pinhole in a different section of copper within a year or two. Once copper starts pitting from our water, it does not stop.
• Discolored water: brown or rust-tinted water first thing in the morning points to galvanized steel corroding from the inside.
• Whole-house low pressure: galvanized pipe closes up with scale until a half-inch line has a pencil-sized opening. If every fixture is weak, it is the pipes, not the fixtures.
• Green or white crust on visible copper: that is corrosion working through from the inside at joints and bends.
• Water that tastes or smells metallic.
• A slab leak in a house that has already had one.

Why Phoenix Pipes Fail Early

Our water runs 16 to 20 grains per gallon of hardness, and it is also slightly aggressive to copper. Minerals scale the inside of the pipe, and where the flow is fast, at elbows and under the slab, the water eats pinholes in the copper wall. Galvanized steel, common in Phoenix homes built before the late 1970s, corrodes from the inside until it chokes off pressure and finally leaks at a thread. Add summer attic temperatures that push 150 degrees and cook the pipe every year, and a system rated for fifty years often gives out at thirty.

Repair or Repipe? How We Decide

We do not walk into a house and say repipe. We find the leak first, using leak detection equipment rather than opening walls on a guess, and we look at the rest of the system while we are there. Then we tell you which of three situations you are in:

• One leak, otherwise sound pipes: repair it, and we are done.
• One leak, but the pipe around it is pitted or the house has a history: repair now, plan a repipe on your schedule.
• Repeat leaks or failing material: a repipe is the cheaper path over the next five years, because you stop paying for drywall and water damage every few months.

You see the price for each before we lift a wrench, and our 40-point inspection on every visit is where most of these patterns get spotted early.

A Central Phoenix House That Was Repaired Four Times

A homeowner in a 1968 block home near Camelback had called three different plumbers over two years for copper pinholes. Each one patched the leak in front of them. The fourth leak was under the slab, so they called us for slab leak detection.

We located it without breaking concrete, but when our tech pulled a section of the attic copper to look, it was pitted along its whole length. We laid out both options. They chose a full PEX repipe, routed through the attic so the slab was never opened again. It took two days, the water was off for a few hours each day, and they have not had a leak since. Four repairs and two drywall patches would have paid for most of it.

The Honest Part: When You Should Not Repipe Yet

Not every old house needs new pipes. Copper from the 1990s and 2000s in a house with a water softener often has decades left. One leak at a fitting that a previous owner installed badly is a fitting problem, not a pipe problem. And if you are selling in a year, a targeted repair may be the smarter spend, as long as you disclose the history. We will tell you honestly which case you are in, because we do plenty of both and a repipe we talk you out of is still a customer who calls us back.

Call Phoenix Plumbing Co. If You Think Your House Needs to Be Repiped

If your house has had more than one leak, or the water looks or feels wrong, find out whether it needs to be repiped before the next leak picks the timing for you. Phoenix Plumbing Co. is family owned since 2012, with upfront flat-rate pricing, a written workmanship warranty, a live Phoenix dispatcher and trucks stocked to finish most jobs on the first visit. Our pipe repair and replacement team will inspect the system and give you every option. Call 602-834-1208.