How to Repipe a House – Assessing Your Plumbing
This is our first part in a series on “How to Repipe a House?” We will be following up with further articles that examine specific details along the way.
How to repipe a house is going to differ from situation to situation. How much plumbing needs to be replaced, what can be repaired without replacement, what kind of plumbing it is, and what types of pipe you will be replacing it with can all dramatically alter the costs and amount of time involved. In some cases you can even be better off leaving the old plumbing in place and just running new lines altogether. This is often the best option when dealing with slab leaks for instance.
Because of this variation the first step in how to repipe a house is to identify the plumbing problems that need to be addressed. Are pinhole leaks always popping up? Are pipes rattling when you run water? Is the water quality diminished? By looking at the problems in this way you can determine how extensive the problems are, and localizing problems can save you a huge amount of money and hassle sometimes.
It may just be that you need to replace the pipes in a couple of places. Sometimes, you may only need to better secure the pipes to keep them from rattling and vibrating and thus causing stress on the pipe joints. (Not to mention your ears!) This can reduce a job from months of renovations on your house and thousands of dollars to a weekend and a couple hundred bucks. So take your time assessing the problem and get the opinion of multiple professional plumbers before even starting on the repiping project.
Types of Problems that Require Repiping
There are several different piping problems that can lead to repiping being necessary. Knowing which one you are dealing with, and how to best deal with that specific problem, is going to determine the best way to repipe your house.
Pinhole Leaks
Professional plumbers will often give you a free evaluation of your situation. You can get more than one opinion and quote before deciding on what needs to be done, and who will do it. You can save thousands of dollars in some cases by doing so. So take the time to get your home’s plumbing problems accurately assessed, as well as to find out what your options are!
One of the more common problems with older pipes is the formation of pinhole leaks. These often occur on joints where over time small vibrations or other stresses have caused a crease to form in the metal. Corrosion works on these small imperfections and eventually a small hole forms. They are most likely to form in hot water pipes because of the expansion (heating) and contracting (cooling) of the metal.
Pinhole leaks usually do not require extensive repiping as they are very localized problems. Replacing the joints can often be a very simple process. When fixing pinhole leaks it is a good idea to try to track down the cause so they can be avoided in the future. This could mean replacing lengths of pipe that were poorly installed in such a way as to add stress on the joints, or it could be as simple as supporting the pipes with better fasteners.
In some cases pinhole leaks can be indicative of a system wide problem though. Over time corrosion can weaken pipes, and if it’s doing so evenly across the plumbing system then the formation of pinhole leaks can mean that it’s time to repipe the whole thing. Otherwise the leaks will just keep popping up over and over again and fixing it piecemeal will take more time and effort than to do it all at once.
Slab Leaks
Perhaps the worst type of problem that can pop up for a home owner is a slab leak. This is where a leak occurs somewhere inside a concrete slab that the pipes are encased in. Not only does this make fixing the leak very difficult, it can be hard just to find out where it is occurring. The water from the leak can travel along the pipe for quite a ways before finding cracks in the cement to flow to the surface from.
There is equipment that can be used to track down the source of the slab leak so that you don’t have to rip up all the cement to get to it. The use of these leak locators can save you a lot of money by doing so. However, it can still be prohibitively expensive even to fix the pipes in a defined area of a concrete slab.
Often the cost is so great that it just makes more sense to leave the old piping in the slab and run new water lines through the framing of the house instead. This way you won’t find yourself having to jack hammer through sections of your flooring to get at each new leak that springs up.
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