Repiping and supply line replacement in Murfreesboro

Older homes near the Public Square and along streets like Highland Avenue and South Church Street may have galvanized steel, which closes up inside with rust. Houses from the 1970s through the 1990s may have copper that pits or polybutylene that fails. Homes built since then are mostly copper or PEX.

Knowing what is in your walls helps you decide whether to repair or replace.

Most people picture an entire house torn apart. In practice, the heavy lifting depends on access. A crawlspace or an unfinished basement lets us run most of the new line below the living space. An attic can do the same from above. A slab house with all the plumbing in the walls is the hardest, and in those we sometimes propose running new lines through the attic instead of cutting concrete.

We lay out the route before anything starts, including where we will need openings in walls or ceilings, so you can see how much of the house is involved.

Polybutylene is a flexible plastic pipe, usually gray, sometimes blue or black, and often stamped with the letters PB along its length. You can see it where pipes enter the water heater, under sinks, or in a crawlspace. It was used widely in houses built from about the late 1970s into the mid 1990s. It was joined with crimped metal or plastic fittings, and those are where it tends to fail.

If you find it, do not panic. Plenty of houses with polybutylene have never leaked. But it is worth planning on, because insurance companies and home buyers both notice it, and a controlled replacement is much easier than an emergency one. Send us a photo and we will tell you what you have.