If your home is a little older, then it’s likely that at some point or another you may experience a pipe leak due to house settling, pipe corrosion, or deterioration of seals and gaskets. When this happens, it’s possible that a leak detection and plumbing specialist might try to steer you toward repiping your entire home. It’s not unreasonable to question this advice. Steven Nagel, owner of American Leak Detection, Tampa, has nearly 10 years experience in fixing and detecting home and pool leaks. He answers a typical repipe vs. repair inquiry as follows:
Q. I recently called a service company to search for a leak in my hot and cold water lines. The technician came to my house and spent all of five minutes looking for the leak. Then he said I should have my home totally repiped instead of having the leak found and fixed. Apparently the plumbing is so corroded that it is not worth the headache of fixing. Is this good advice?
A. It’s certainly true that pipes can deteriorate over time. So if the pipes truly are bad, then the specialist may be right. But it also sounds like the specialist might not have wanted to spend time working and might just want to make a quick sale. Without actually seeing your pipes, it’s hard to say.
In general, [American Leak Detection] doesn’t recommend replacing all the plumbing in your home, because quite frankly, it’s expensive to do an entire repipe. When you talk about repiping a home, you have to consider that you won’t just end up paying for the plumbing work. You’ll also end up paying for any restoration work that is needed, such as tearing up flooring, going through a wall, or redoing tile. If the leak is in pipes that are interlaid with the foundation, then you may have to hire contractors to redo the foundation as the plumbing is replaced. It usually only costs about $1,000 to do a pipe locate and repair, which is much cheaper than doing restoration and repiping.
There are occasions when a full repipe actually is the right choice. An example would be if the same line had had several leaks in a short time. Frequent leaks indicate that the entire line, not just part of the line, has deteriorated. You may think you’re saving money by doing the fixes. But if you have to keep fixing the same problem, just in different parts of the pipe, then you’ll probably shell out more money than the bad pipe is worth.
What is most disconcerting about your question is your description of your service provider’s “inspection.” Although some pipe problems are located and analyzed easily, five minutes really is not enough time for a trained specialist to go through your house and check all your lines, and it’s inappropriate to suggest such a costly solution if you don’t have all the facts first. Secondly, a good specialist should be able to find a pipe leak regardless of whether the pipes need a simple fix or a complete repipe. The fact that he didn’t even find the location of the problem before throwing his advice at you is suspicious, since a pipe problem can be caused by plenty of things aside from corrosion (such as a shifting foundation). It’s not to say he’s not correct that the pipes need to be replaced, but rather to say that he should have proven the correlation between the corrosion and your leak. And he can’t do this if he doesn’t even know where the leak is.
Before you go ahead and repipe, make sure you have all options in front of you so that you can make the best choice. If a company is not willing to provide you with accurate, valid information about the leak location and some reasonable repair offers, then you should be concerned with the soundness of their advice.
