Services · Repiping
Repiping & Galvanized Pipe Replacement in York County
Half the housing stock in the older boroughs still has its original supply lines. If your pressure has been falling for years and the water runs brown first thing, that is not the well — that is the inside of your pipes.
Signs
How old pipe tells on itself
Any two of these together and it is worth having someone look properly.
🟤
Brown water first thing
Rust flushing out of galvanized line that has been sitting overnight. Clears after a minute, comes back tomorrow.
📉
Pressure that has slowly fallen
Not a dramatic drop — a gradual one over years, as the inside diameter of the pipe closes up with corrosion.
💧
Pinhole leaks appearing
One is bad luck. Two in a year in different places is the pipe telling you it has reached the end.
🚿
Cold water when someone flushes
Pressure that cannot keep up with two things at once is often restriction, not demand.
🏚️
Pipes older than you are
Galvanized was standard into the 1960s. It does not last forever and much of it is well past its span.
⚠️
Grey plastic pipe
Polybutylene, common in late-70s to mid-90s builds. It fails from the inside with little warning. Worth identifying now.
What is actually in your walls
A one-inch pipe with a quarter-inch hole left in it
Galvanized steel corrodes from the inside out. From the outside the pipe looks fine — solid, painted, no leaks. Cut a length out and hold it up to the light and there is often a channel narrower than a pencil left down the middle of it.
That is why pressure falls so gradually that people stop noticing, and why adding a bigger water heater or a new fixture never fixes it. You cannot push more water through a pipe that is mostly rust.
We will show you the section we cut out. No one should agree to a repipe on the strength of a stranger saying the pipes are bad. When we open a wall, you get to look at what came out of it.
Materials
What we replace it with, and why
| Galvanized | Polybutylene | Copper | PEX | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Era | Pre-1960s | Late 70s – mid 90s | Long-standing | Current |
| How it fails | Corrodes shut from inside | Degrades, fails suddenly | Pinholes, worse on low pH | Rarely, if installed right |
| Freeze tolerance | Poor | Poor | Splits | Some give — matters here |
| Disruption to install | — | — | More joints, more wall opened | Fewer joints, less opened up |
| Our usual recommendation | Replace | Replace | Fine where it is sound | Yes, for most repipes |
Pricing
What moves the price
A repipe is a real job and the number depends almost entirely on your house, not on a price list.
- How many fixtures and floors — the run length is most of the labour.
- Access — an unfinished basement with open joists is a very different job to a finished ceiling on every floor.
- Whole house or the worst of it — sometimes replacing the main runs and leaving sound branches is the sensible call, and we will say so.
- Making good afterwards — what gets opened, and who closes it back up.
Flat price in writing before we start. If we open a wall and find something worse behind it, we stop and re-quote rather than adding it to the bill at the end.
Brown water in the morning?
Worth a look before the first pinhole leak, not after. We can usually tell a lot from a few photos and the age of the house.