Repiping
Galvanized steel supply pipe has a working life. In a lot of west-side buildings that life ended some time ago, and the symptoms get blamed on everything else first.
How you know
Galvanized pipe corrodes from the inside. The zinc coating goes, the steel underneath rusts, and the rust builds inward as a hard scale. From the outside nothing looks wrong for decades. What you notice instead is a set of symptoms that people usually attribute to the city supply, the building, or the fixture.
- Pressure that has quietly fallen over years, most obvious on the top floors
- Rust-colored water on the first draw after the apartment has been empty
- Hot noticeably weaker than cold, because hot water accelerates the process
- A new fixture that underperforms in a way the old one somehow did not
- Pinhole leaks arriving in a cluster on one run, which is the clearest signal of all
The pinholes matter. Individually they are small. As a pattern they mean the run has reached the stage where fixing each one as it appears becomes a worse deal every month.
What gets replaced, and by whom
| Fixture branches | Inside your apartment, from the riser to your fixtures. Yours, and the most common piece of work |
|---|---|
| Risers | The vertical supply lines serving every apartment on the line. The building's, and a coordinated job |
| House main and meter | Where the service enters the cellar. The building's |
| Service line | From the street main into the building. See water main service |
Doing it in an occupied building
This is most of the job. A loft with exposed ceilings is straightforward compared with a renovated apartment where every run is buried behind finished plaster and tile. The route matters more than the pipe.
- Trace what is live. Decades of partial work leave abandoned pipe in the walls. Cutting into a dead line wastes a day; missing a live one floods a floor.
- Plan the route for access. Sometimes the shortest run is the wrong one because of what has to be opened to reach it.
- Phase it. Section by section, so the apartment or the line is not without water for longer than a working day at a time.
- Pressure test before anything closes. Nothing gets covered up until it has held.
Co-ops, condos and alteration agreements
In most Manhattan buildings, work of this size needs the board's sign-off and has to run to the building's alteration agreement: approved hours, protection of common areas, insurance certificates from every trade, and notice to the neighbors on the line. Building that into the schedule from the start is the difference between a job that runs and a job that stops in week two.
Need this doing?
Call and describe the problem. You will get the price before anyone starts.