Hidden behind drywall and other building materials, your pipes play a major hand in determining the health and overall habitability of your home. Pipe ruptures, clogs, and backflow issues can lead to contaminated water, wastewater backups, and widespread problems with mold. But when plumbing problems arise, how can you know whether to repair your pipes or replace them? At Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, we’re sharing a few insights to help you out.
Which Type of Plumbing Pipe Has a Problem?
Your home has three primary types of plumbing pipes: water supply lines, wastewater pipes, and your sewer line. The decision of whether to repair or replace your pipes largely depends upon the pipes that you’re dealing with. Water supply lines should be tightly sealed and have contaminant-free interiors. When these pipes develop pinhole leaks and other structural damage, replacing them is always the best choice. Patching and other external repairs are often temporary fixes to long-term issues. They can also leave the health and safety of your tap water in question.
Water Supply Lines and Backflow Issues
Backflow occurs when incoming water flows backward in water supply lines. It’s often the result of back pressure caused by a non-potable water source. For instance, if you have a drip irrigation system in your yard, your landscaping water could be making its way into your water supply pipes.
Backflow can leave tap water foul-smelling, odd-tasting, and cloudy or discolored. Backflow caused by landscape irrigation systems introduces harmful biological and chemical contaminants into tap water. Fortunately, solving backflow problems could be as easy as installing a new backflow preventer rather than replacing the affected water lines.
Sewer Lines and Tree Root Encroachment
When homeowners plant trees too close to sewer lines, tree roots can grow into sewer pipes. Tree roots can branch into smaller, secondary root systems that can enter sewer pipes via cracks that measure just millimeters. Weed roots can do much the same. Once living roots enter sewer lines, they often grow exponentially.
Although our team at Benjamin Franklin Plumbing can use hydro-jetting to break invasive roots down and flush them toward the sewer main, this won’t close the openings that let tree roots in. If these openings remain, invasive roots can regrow within just months.
Depending upon the size of sewer pipe cracks, cured-in-place pipe linings could keep new roots out. This and other trenchless pipe repair techniques allow for minimal soil disruption. However, when sewer line cracks are sizable, replacement is often the best choice.
Other Common Sewer Line Issues
Shifting soil, soil erosion, and placing heavy items on the ground just above your sewer line can crack this pipe, cause it to offset, or crush it. Offset pipes are fairly straightforward to repair. However, when sewer lines are severely cracked or crushed, sewer line replacement is the only viable option.
Leaky Wastewater Pipes
Leaky wastewater pipes may be the result of built-up debris, trapped, slow-degrading items, or other maintenance-related issues. However, they can also be the result of heavy buildups of hard water sediment, advanced corrosion, or general age-related wear. It makes no sense to repair pipes that are nearing the end of their service lives. Late-in-life pipe repairs are often followed by additional plumbing problems.
As pipes age, their walls grow thin. Repeated use of chemical drain cleaners and DIY clog repairs performed with sharp, piercing tools can accelerate this process. Replacing worn pipes rather than fixing them is the best way to prevent messy pipe ruptures.
Frequent Pipe Clogs
Apart from poor drain use, the most common causes of frequent pipe clogs are built-up sediment, age-related wear, and insufficient drain maintenance. If you’re careful not to pour rendered fats, cooking oils, and grease down your drains, recurring clogs are likely due to greatly decreased diameters in pipe interiors. Over time, aging pipes develop tough, tacky build-ups on their interior walls. With increasingly less room to move, draining water slows down and solid and semi-solid items get trapped or snagged.
General aging, sediment, and some drain cleaning techniques can also make pipe interiors rough and ragged. Replacing old pipes will ensure that larger or slow-degrading items don’t get snagged and cause partial or total blockages.
Visible Pipe Damage
Visible pipe damage is a good indication that you need replacement rather than repairs. Pitting, corrosion, pinhole leaks, and cracked or crushed sections aren’t problems that plumbers can fix with guaranteed watertight results.
Questionable Pipe Materials
If you haven’t repiped your home in quite some time, there’s a good chance that it has questionable pipe materials. For instance, terracotta or baked clay pipes are extremely vulnerable to tree root encroachment. Although pipe lining is an effective repair technique for cracked terracotta pipes, these pipes are outdated and increasingly prone to problems over time.
If you purchased existing construction without a pre-sale inspection or have inherited an older home, you may have lead water supply pipes. The use of lead in residential plumbing systems was outlawed in 1986. However, this ban didn’t require homeowners to remove existing lead plumbing elements.
In the 1990s, many homes had polybutylene wastewater pipes and water supply lines installed. These pipes are leak-prone. Polybutylene water supply pipes can also negatively interact with the fluoride and chlorine in fresh water to cause dangerous levels of chemical contamination.