Do You Actually Need a Repipe, or Just a Repair?

Repiping is the biggest residential plumbing job most people ever pay for, so it is worth being clear about when it is genuinely necessary and when somebody is over-selling. There is a real answer, and it mostly depends on what your pipe is made of and how many times you have already been here.

What you probably have. Houses in San Jose built before roughly 1960 were plumbed with galvanized steel. Between about 1960 and the present, copper. Some houses from the late seventies through the nineties have plastic supply pipe of varying reputation. And a great many houses have a mixture, because somebody repiped the kitchen in 1988 and left the rest alone. If you do not know what you have, look at the pipe where it comes into the house or in the garage: galvanized is dull grey and threaded, copper is copper.

Galvanized is a different conversation from copper. Galvanized rusts from the inside out. The pipe looks perfectly sound from the outside right up until the day the shower has no pressure and the water comes out looking like weak tea, worst first thing in the morning after it has been sitting all night. You cannot fix that with a fitting, because the problem is the whole inside surface of the run. Once it has closed up, it has closed up. If your house still has original galvanized supply, you are not deciding whether to repipe, you are deciding when.

Copper is a judgment call. Copper does not close up; it develops pinholes. One pinhole is a repair, straightforwardly. The question is the pattern. A single leak in a fifty-year-old copper system is bad luck. Three in eighteen months, in different parts of the house, is the system telling you its remaining life is shorter than your patience. At that point you are choosing between paying a plumber four more times and paying once.

A simple test. Ask yourself two things. How many separate leak repairs have you paid for in the last three years? And has the pressure or the water quality changed gradually over time, rather than suddenly? Repeated repairs plus gradual decline is a system at the end of its life. A single sudden failure with everything else fine is a repair, and anybody telling you otherwise should be asked to explain why.

What it involves, so it is not a mystery. A repipe means running new supply lines to every fixture, which means opening walls in a number of places (not every wall, but more than one). It is a few days rather than an afternoon, the water goes off during the working day and back on at night, and there is drywall repair afterward. We work room by room so the household keeps functioning. Copper or PEX both work; which one suits depends on the layout and on what you want to spend, and we will talk you through both rather than pushing one.

One thing worth doing first. Before committing to anything, have somebody check the pressure. Occasionally what looks like a dying system is a failed pressure regulator making every symptom worse, and that is a very much smaller job. It is a ten-second test with a gauge and it is worth ruling out.

And a word on the odd sizes: a lot of older San Jose housing has pipe in dimensions the supply houses stopped stocking decades ago, and the standard answer from a counter is that the part has not been made in forty years, followed by a quote to repipe the whole run. Often that is not necessary. See fabricating obsolete sizes. More on whole-house repiping, or on pressure and regulators if that is where this starts.