Replacing Copper and Galvanized Steel Pipe
Replacing Copper and Galvanized Steel in Mulberry, Florida
In the past, building contractors have set up the plumbing of a house or a whole subdivision with materials that (as we find out a few years later) are less than ideal—like copper and galvanized steel. Liberty Plumbing and Septic has recently been taking several trips to Mulberry, to an upscale residential subdivision, to replace the rolled copper pipes of several different houses there. In some houses, we have had to re-pipe the whole house because that was the most cost-efficient option for the home owner.
Copper pipes are easy to bend and were favored for several years, but copper is progressively weakened by the electrical effects of running water, especially if the house is still grounded through the plumbing, as many older houses are. Compounding this problem, most homeowners opted for the cheaper, thinner rolled copper pipes. The result is usually a call to us when the weakest section of the copper piping breaks, sometimes doing significant water damage before it can be fixed.
If only that section of copper piping is fixed, of course, then it just moves the title of “weakest link” to another nearby section of pipe, meaning that we will be getting another call very soon. Often, it is more cost-efficient to replace all the copper piping with some of the newer versions of CPVC, which does not corrode or weaken. After all, if we have to open up walls to fix one section of the pipe, why not fix everything before closing up the hole? Repiping is often the economical solution in the long run.
Galvanized steel piping wasn’t the problem in that Mulberry neighborhood, but it is still in the ground and walls of many older houses in Polk County, mainly those built in the 50s and 60s. Because galvanized steel pipes rust from the inside, they send little bits of oxidized metal into and through the valves in your plumbing fixtures. This often destroys the rubber seals in your fixtures, forcing you to replace them or fix them multiple times. Eventually, of course, the pipes rust enough so that they start failing too.
If your house’s pipes are starting to fail in these ways, giving you the “homeowner headache,” call us or an estimate and advice on re-piping. We’ll help you figure out if you need the big fix or the little fix, and why. Copper and galvanized steel were good for their time, but the hard water in Polk county makes CPVC piping the new Cadillac.