It usually starts as something you work around rather than something you report. The shower upstairs is fine as long as nobody runs the kitchen tap. Then it is fine as long as nobody runs anything. Then it is not really fine at all.
Almost everybody's first move is to replace the shower head, and almost everybody is disappointed. Here is what is generally going on instead.
Galvanised pipe closes from the inside out
A great deal of the housing around Pawtucket, Central Falls, Providence and Fall River was plumbed in galvanised steel. It was a good material and it lasted a long time, but it corrodes from the inside, and the corrosion builds inward rather than eating outward.
So the pipe looks completely sound from the outside — no drips, no green, nothing to see — while the bore inside it silently narrows. A pipe that started out comfortably wide enough ends up with a channel through the middle of it that is a fraction of the original.
Two things follow from that, and they are the two symptoms people describe on the phone:
- The top floor suffers first. Water has to be pushed up there, so the highest fixtures are the first to feel a restriction lower down the system.
- It gets dramatically worse when something else is running. A narrowed pipe has almost no capacity in reserve, so anything else drawing water takes the difference straight out of your shower.
How to tell it apart from a fixture problem
There is a rough test you can do before anyone comes out.
Run the cold tap in the kitchen — usually one of the first fixtures on the system — and see whether it is strong. Then go upstairs and run the cold there. If the kitchen is strong and upstairs is weak, and the weakness affects every fixture up there rather than just one, the fixture is not your problem. The supply is.
If only one fixture is weak, and it is weak on both hot and cold, that is much more likely to be an aerator, a cartridge or a shut-off valve that has partly closed. Those are small jobs.
The other tell: the water is brown first thing
If the first draw of the morning comes out tea-coloured and clears after a few seconds, that is the corrosion inside the pipe settling overnight and getting stirred up when flow resumes. It is not dangerous in the way people fear, but it is a fairly clear statement about what condition the inside of that pipe is in.
Why patching it stops working eventually
When a galvanised system starts leaking, the leaks are pinholes, and the natural response is to cut out the bad bit and replace that section. That works, and it is the right answer the first time and probably the second.
The difficulty is that the rest of the system is exactly the same age and has had exactly the same water through it. Fixing one section does not make the neighbouring sections any younger, and there comes a point where the gaps between repairs get short enough that you are effectively paying for a repipe in instalments, without ever getting the benefit of one.
The moment worth doing the arithmetic is when the same house has needed more than one pinhole repair in a single winter. At that point it is worth asking what a proper replacement would cost, if only so the decision is being made deliberately.
What replacement actually involves
It is disruptive, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling. Walls and ceilings have to be opened in places to get pipe through, and a house cannot be entirely without water while it happens.
What can be controlled is how much gets opened and in what order. A route planned in advance opens far less than one worked out as it goes, and staging the work means the house is not without water for days at a stretch. It is also the one chance to fix everything that was awkward about the original layout, because nothing will ever be this accessible again.
If you are not sure
Take a photo of the pipe where it comes into the house — usually near the meter — and send it to us. Galvanised, copper and plastic are easy to tell apart in a picture, and knowing which you have changes the whole conversation. It costs nothing to ask, and plenty of these end with us telling somebody their supply is fine and to change the aerator.