Today we’re going to cover whether or not you might need to have the water lines in your house or the yard line going from the meter to your house replumbed.
If you have an older house, for example, a house built between 1900 and 1970, the original water lines for your house and the yard line were old galvanized pipes. Metal deteriorates and water causes metal to rust.
If you’ve had water leaks in your home or water leaks in your yard line, a plumber has probably told you that you need to get those pipes replaced. We can come out and give you an estimate to tell you what it would cost to repair water leaks and replace those pipes.
Loss of Water Pressure?
Another result of needing your home replumbed is a loss of water pressure. Perhaps your water pressure was good once upon a time, but it seems to have gone down. What happens is there’s rust on the inside of your pipe and it plugs up elbows, or places where your pipes bend. That rust plugs up “tees,” which are places where the pipes meet in a T-shape.
Finally, you don’t have the same flow of water that you should have. So, you have lower water pressure. Basically, the only repair for that is to get rid of the galvanized water lines.
Because of this rust, the pipe shrinks on the inside. But as the rust grows, it appears on the outside. Sometimes I’ll go out and I’ll cut out a section of pipe and it looks really, really big. And I get a hammer and I knock the rust off and I show the customer what that pipe actually looks like without the rust.
Rusty Water from the Faucets
Another warning sign is if you have dirty, rusty-looking water coming out of your bathtubs and faucets. This rust also has a tendency to plug up the aerators on the end of your kitchen faucets and your bathroom faucets and your shower heads. That rust comes from old lines and the cure is to replumb them.
Updated Plumbing Materials
We’re not even replumbing in copper anymore. Copper was the best material at one time, but that’s not true anymore. The type of pipe that we use is AquaPEX piping. And they don’t know how long it’s going to last yet because it hasn’t started wearing out. Its life expectancy is going to be much longer than anything previously used.
An Example from a Real Job Site
There was an old galvanized line that we replaced last week that looked nearly three inches across. But it was, in fact, only an inch and a half thick. How could it look so thick when we removed it from the home? The majority of that thickness was rust. Once we knocked off the rust, you could see that it was just an inch-and-a-half pipe. In fact, the pipe itself was getting thinner and thinner as it rusted.
In another pipe we removed from a home, the only thing that was holding this pipe together basically was the rust. Once you knocked off the rust, the pipe was filled with holes.
A pipe like this definitely needs to be replaced and yours might also. Old, rusted pipes with holes will definitely cause your water bill to jump up and we don’t want that. If you need your home replumbed, give Rocketman Plumbing, your local plumber in Albuquerque, a call at 505-243-1227 for a free estimate.