Having your home’s pipes inspected can protect your health, according to Aniello Napolitano. As the owner of Strong Home LLC, a home and termite inspection company in Westchester, New York, Napolitano insists that many older homes have pipes that have been contaminated without their knowledge.
This contamination has to do with lead, which more pipes are made out of than most people realize. In Westchester, it is common for Napolitano to discover that a home has lead pipes, even if the current owner did not realize that was the case.
If a home does have lead pipes, than that can be a major problem. “Lead pipes could make your water toxic,” Napolitano says. First and foremost, the lead from the pipes can get into the water that people are drinking and showering in, which could cause damage to the central nervous system that requires serious medical attention. “So when you get lead in the water, that can become a health issue,” Napolitano says.
Of course, if someone loves a home, then he or she is unlikely to turn away from buying it just because a home inspector finds lead in the pipes. Issues like lead pipes, asbestos, or termite damage are actually common finds for an inspection company in Westchester, or at least more common than most people think.
What people should realize, according to Napolitano, is that fixing a problem like having lead pipes is not an easy thing to do. In order to get rid of lead pipes in a home, those pipes would have to be completely removed. There is no special cleaning process that can get rid of the lead in lead pipes, so people need to be aware of that before purchasing a home that might require thousands of dollars in plumbing work.
The problem with trying to get rid of the lead pipes, and one of the reasons why the process can be so prohibitively expensive, is because even if a homeowner hires a company to change out the lead supply pipes, that does not mean that all of the pipes in the home are necessarily free and clear.
Napolitano says that there is a good chance that some of the interior pipes may have been soldered with lead when they were initially put in. If that is the case, then the lead could be embedded in the piping system throughout the home—not just in the supply pipes where the lead was initially found. Even if the home does not have a lead supply pipe, that does not 100% guarantee that lead was not involved when the pipes were soldered. “So either way, you could be drinking lead,” Napolitano explains.
In the New York and Westchester area, having lead in the pipes is a tremendous problem that Napolitano often catches during the full house inspections he performs. The reason it is so common for homes in New York City and the surrounding areas to have lead pipes is because these homes are generally older than many of those in other parts of the country.
Although Napolitano regularly inspects the pipes in people’s homes, he says that people are not generally any more concerned about the pipes than anything else. Most new homebuyers are more worried about asbestos and termite damage, which are the two main reasons an inspection in Westchester should be performed. “Termites are a big issue for this area,” he says.
Additionally, one of the reasons that people do not worry about their pipes as much as they should is because they feel confident that the water they are drinking is safe, thanks to the high standards of New York City’s water system. “I really don’t have much of a call for water testing, because most of the areas where I work, or the municipalities, test the water regularly,” he says.
No matter how clean the water in a municipality is, it could still become toxic if it is contaminated with lead while it runs through the pipes in your home. To prevent this, Napolitano recommends calling for a home inspection every few years to make sure everything in your home is at the safety level it should be.
