Barry Jolly is the owner of Jolly Drain Cleaning in Wilder, KY. His company serves clients throughout the greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky areas, and has been in business for 31 years. Here, Jolly explains what people can do to increase the water pressure in their homes.
Yes, it is definitely possible for homeowners to increase the water pressure in their houses. And the best part is, it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to do.
As long as your home has a pressure regulator on it, which most homes do now, then all you have to do is make an adjustment on the pressure regulator that will allow you to increase the water pressure in your house.
If that isn’t the issue, or if you for some reason don’t have a pressure regulator, then another thing that might be causing your poor pressure is your old water pipes. As pipes age, then they get more and more clogged up with junk and debris. When it gets to this point, where your pipes are clogged so much that it is decreasing your water pressure, it might be time to replace your old pipes.
You should start with replacing the water lines in your basement, and work your way to the plumbing fixtures. This, obviously, is a much bigger job than just adjusting the pressure regulator, which is why it wasn’t the first thing I mentioned. However, by doing this and changing your lines out, you could definitely start increasing the water pressure throughout your house.
Most people don’t know much about what the water pressure levels in their home should be. They just know how much water they do or don’t like coming out of the shower head.
Ideally, a good working water pressure in a home should be around 75 pounds. You really don’t want to get that water pressure level up much more than 100 pounds, though, because it’s at that point when it starts making it hard for your fixtures to function properly. Having your water pressure set too high can make it difficult for your toilets to shut off or for your water faucets to shut off, too, which is really more pain than it’s worth.
When your fixtures start having a hard time turning off because of your high water pressure, that will lead to increased maintenance issues that need to be tended to. And the reason for that is because the increased water level is putting more pressure on all of your fixtures and your pipes, too.
So you will start having more washers to change and more leaks and drips to catch and fix as you increase the water pressure levels in your home too much. That would be the main downside of having too much water pressure, and that’s why we don’t recommend that anyone adjust their levels to anything above 100 pounds.
