Repiping for older houses. Gas lines too.

Galvanized pipe rusts from the inside. The opening gets a little smaller every year, until the shower upstairs drops to a trickle when someone runs the kitchen tap. There’s no cleaning it out. Once it gets there, the fix is new pipe.

Signs your pipes are due

Galvanized is the gray steel pipe with threaded joints, and it’s common in homes built before the mid-1960s. Huntsville built a lot of houses in the 1950s. Low pressure that keeps getting worse, brown water after the house sits for a few days, and leaks at the threaded fittings all point the same way. Our post on galvanized pipes in older homes shows how to check yours with a magnet and a screwdriver.

Polybutylene is the flexible plastic pipe, usually gray, often stamped PB2110, that went into a lot of homes from about 1978 to 1995. Madison and much of the area saw heavy home building in those years. Look where the pipe comes out of the wall under a sink, or where it connects at the water heater. Polybutylene tends to fail at the fittings, without much warning. If you find it, we’d plan the replacement on your schedule instead of waiting for it to pick one.

Copper usually lasts. A house that’s springing pinhole leaks in several places, though, probably has more of them on the way.

Partial or whole house?

A lot of older houses are already a patchwork. Someone replaced the kitchen lines years ago and someone else redid a bathroom. The rest is original. In a house like that, a partial repipe that finishes the job can make sense.

If the old pipe is everywhere, or it’s polybutylene, a whole-house repipe is usually the better deal. Doing it in pieces means opening the same walls more than once.

PEX or copper?

Both are good pipe. PEX is flexible, so it can be pulled through finished walls with fewer and smaller openings, and it has fewer joints where a leak could start. It also handles a freeze better than copper does, though no pipe likes it. Copper is rigid, has decades of track record, and takes more cutting to run through a finished house.

For most repipes in lived-in houses, PEX is the practical choice. If you’d rather have copper, that works too, and the price will reflect the extra labor.

Living through a repipe

It’s less dramatic than people expect, and it depends a lot on the house. Usually the new lines go in while the old ones keep working, and then each fixture gets switched over. Expect small openings in the drywall near fixtures and along the runs, and expect the water to be off for parts of the day. Houses over a crawlspace are usually easier, since most of the pipe can run underneath. Slab houses route through the attic and the walls instead.

Ask what’s included for drywall patching when you get your price, so you know who’s closing up those openings.

When you call, tell us roughly how old the house is and what the pipe looks like where you can see it. Photos help if you can take them.

Gas lines

We run gas lines for ranges, dryers, water heaters, and outdoor grills. The pipe has to be sized for everything on the system, so adding a big appliance like a tankless water heater can mean a larger line from the meter. Gas work usually needs a permit and an inspection. Check with your city’s inspection office.

Smell gas? Get out of the house without flipping any switches. Once you’re outside, call the gas company or 911.

Please don’t run gas pipe yourself. A bad joint can leak into a closed wall or room, and gas pipe has to be sized, pressure-tested, and inspected.