Replacing the supply piping in a house is a decision made from evidence, not from one pinhole and a bad feeling.
Four things, mostly, and they have very different stories.
Copper is the long-lived one, and when it fails here it usually fails as pinholes, often on the hot side, often on horizontal runs. Causes vary: water chemistry, velocity where a line was undersized, or poor workmanship at installation. One pinhole on a forty-year-old copper system is a repair. A third pinhole in eighteen months, in different rooms, is a pattern, and that pattern is what a repipe decision should be made from.
Polybutylene — gray, sometimes blue, flexible, installed widely into the mid-1990s — is the one with real history in this state. Its failures were associated with the fittings as much as the pipe, and with degradation from chlorinated water, and they had a habit of arriving without warning. Insurers know it by name and it affects policies. If you have gray polybutylene, this is not a maintenance conversation, and we will say so plainly whether or not it is currently leaking.
Galvanized steel in the oldest houses fails predictably: internal rust builds up and narrows the bore, so the first symptom is usually pressure that has been quietly disappearing for years rather than a leak. Cutting a section open and looking at the opening is the most persuasive thing anyone can show you.
CPVC and PEX are what goes back in. CPVC is rigid, solvent-welded, entirely proven here, and gets brittle with age and UV; it is unforgiving of movement and of being knocked in an attic. PEX is flexible, run in long lengths with far fewer joints — and fewer joints means fewer places to leak — but it must be kept out of sunlight, protected where it passes through framing, and installed with fittings and a tool that match the system.
A traditional repipe runs a main trunk with branches teeing off to each fixture. It uses less pipe and it is what most houses already have. A manifold, or home-run, system sends a dedicated line from a central manifold to every fixture. That gives you a shut-off for each fixture in one place, no concealed joints in walls at all, and more consistent pressure when two things run at once. It uses considerably more pipe and takes longer.
Which is right depends on the house, the routing available and what you care about. We will price both if you want to see the difference, rather than quoting the one we prefer to install.
Access. A repipe means opening walls and ceilings, and the number and location of those openings is a real part of the job that should be discussed before anybody starts, not discovered. So should who closes them: whether the quote includes drywall patching, whether that patching is finished ready for paint or finished and painted, and whether texture is matched. A repipe quote that is silent on drywall is not a complete quote, and the gap is usually thousands.
Also on the list: the pressure at the meter. If your incoming static pressure is above 80 psi, a pressure-reducing valve is part of the job, because putting new pipe behind old pressure repeats the conditions that shortened the last lot. And the water heater connections, the shut-offs at each fixture — which are usually decades old and worth replacing while the water is off anyway — and the permit and inspection, which this is.
When it is one leak, in accessible copper, in a house with no history of them. That is a repair. We will fix it, note where it was and what the pipe looked like at the cut, and tell you what would change our mind — which is a second and third failure in different runs. A repipe sold off a single pinhole is the largest unnecessary invoice in residential plumbing, and the evidence for it is usually a photograph of one wet spot.
Request a visit and the office will call you back to agree a time. We measure before we price, and you keep the readings.
Scripted demonstration. It cannot book, hold or confirm a time, and it will not quote a price.