Seattle Plumbing Blog | Fox Plumbing & Heating

When to replace the pipes in your older home

David Brown, Owner of Seattle's Fox Plumbing and Heating, explains how to know when to replace or repipe your older Seattle or King County home.

The main thing that comes up with older homes. Is the water pipe in these houses. It's galvanized pipe, it has a lived its life it is going to be in giving very discolored water, the quality of water is poor, it's also restricts all the pipes so eventually we don't have any water pressure going to any of the faucets tubs or the fixtures. So with all of this restrictive flow of water, ultimately we've got to replace all this restrictive piping.

You can nurse this along so far then I gets to the point it's so restricted, You just can not function any longer especially in tubs and showers, we have got to replace the piping. So the most common thing in the older home is the water piping, so we go in, give an estimate to you open up walls whatever is necessary to do the replace of the piping. Today we use a plastic piping, it's a high grade type of plastic called PEX, along with copper, we still use copper but this PEX piping is superior today for water piping and the average cost to a home is not as much as a lot of people think. Re-piping a 2 bathroom house for instance is a four to five thousand dollar job.

We also have to look at the water service. That's the line that runs from the meter out at the street to your house and that's underground and today we use what's called Trenchless Technology. We have several different ways to do that. We have a piece of machinery that tunnel bores underground and pulls the pipe back and then we also have these devices that are hydraulic in nature and they go underground and they thump and create a tunnel that we than can then pull a pipe back.

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