Whole-House Repiping in San Jose, CA
If your San Jose home was built before the 1970s and still has its original galvanized steel pipes, they are rusting from the inside out right now. The symptoms creep up: pressure fades year by year, water runs brown after vacations, and pinhole leaks start appearing, first one and then a pattern.
Repiping replaces the supply system entirely with Type L copper or PEX. It sounds disruptive; done well, it is not. We work room by room, keep water on overnight, protect floors and furniture, and coordinate drywall patching so the house comes back together properly.
A repipe is also the moment to fix everything at once: new shut-off valves at every fixture, a proper pressure regulator, and clean hose bibs. Most single-family repipes take 2 to 4 days of pipe work. We quote the whole scope, including pipe, patches and permits, in one written number.
When people call us about this
- Low water pressure that has worsened over years
- Brown or yellow water after the house sits unused
- Repeated pinhole leaks in different spots
- Galvanized pipe visible at the water heater or under sinks
- Insurance carrier asking about plumbing age
Questions we get asked
Copper or PEX: which should I choose?+
Both are good, and the right answer depends on the house more than on the material. Copper is rigid, it has decades of track record, and it looks like proper work when it is exposed in a garage or a crawlspace. PEX is flexible, which means fewer joints and far less opening of walls to route it, so on a finished house with awkward runs it often means noticeably less drywall repair. PEX also tolerates our water chemistry well and does not develop pinholes the way copper eventually does. Where we lean copper is on exposed runs and where it connects to existing copper; where we lean PEX is long concealed runs through finished space. We will walk the house and tell you which parts suit which.
Will I have water during the repipe?+
During working hours the water is off while we are cutting and connecting, and we turn it back on at the end of each day so the house is usable overnight. That is the normal rhythm: no water during the day, water in the evening. We work room by room rather than opening the whole house at once, so on a multi-day job there are usually fixtures still in service even while we are working. If there is a particular bathroom or the kitchen you need kept running for a specific reason, tell us before we start and we will sequence the work around it. What we will not do is leave you without water overnight without warning you well in advance.
Who handles the permit and inspection on a repipe?+
We do. On a job this size the paperwork and the inspection are part of what you are hiring us for, not something we hand back to you to chase, and the cost of handling it sits in the quote rather than appearing later. It is worth being wary of anyone offering a whole-house repipe noticeably cheaper by leaving that side of it out. It tends to surface at the worst possible moment: when you sell the house and a buyer asks what was done, or when an insurer wants to know who signed off on work that later failed. Documented work is worth a good deal more than the small saving of undocumented work.
Further reading: Do You Actually Need a Repipe, or Just a Repair? and Why Your Water Pressure Is Wrong, and What Actually Fixes It.
Describe it to us and we will tell you what it is.
Phone consultations do not cost anything. If it turns out to be something you can sort out yourself, we will say so.
Related work
Whole-House Repiping across the South Bay
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