One failure, or the pipe
A single leak at a single joint is a repair. Something was over-tightened, a fitting was wrong for the material, a line got knocked in a wall, a pipe rubbed on a strap for twenty years. One cause, one spot, one fix. Most leaks are this.
The pipe failing is different. The whole run went in on the same day, out of the same batch, carrying the same water at the same pressure. When the material itself starts to go, it does not go in one place — it goes everywhere at once, and you find out one pinhole at a time.
The pattern is what separates them. Repairs that cluster in time, in different rooms, on different runs, with no common cause between them, are not bad luck. Write down every leak with the date and the location. Four dates on a page say more than any single leak does.
That is the question a repipe answers. Not whether this joint can be fixed — it almost always can — but whether you are going to be fixing the next one in March.
The signs the pipe itself is failing
Repeated pinhole leaks. A pinhole is corrosion working through the wall from one side, and it weeps rather than bursts. The first one gets patched and nobody thinks much of it. The second one, in a different part of the house, is the signal. Pinholes mean the wall thickness is going, and wall thickness does not go in one spot only.
Discolored water. Rusty, brown or tea-colored water on both the hot and the cold side, worst first thing in the morning or after the house has sat empty, is the inside of the pipe arriving at your tap. Rust on the hot side alone usually points at the water heater instead. On both sides, standing overnight, it is the lines.
Pressure dropping everywhere at once. One slow faucet is an aerator or a stop valve. Every fixture in the house weak at the same time, with no change at the meter or the street, means the inside diameter of the lines has closed up with scale and corrosion. That happens gradually and people adjust to it without noticing, which is why it often gets mentioned as an afterthought.
Flakes or grit in the aerators, a metallic taste, visible green or white crust on exposed pipe at the water heater or the main shutoff, and hot water that takes longer to arrive than it used to. None of these on its own proves anything. Three of them together in a house of a certain age is a pattern.
A pinhole is not a leak that happened to appear there. It is the first place a wall that is thinning everywhere happened to give way.
What is in a Pasco house and how each one fails
Copper. Durable, and most copper outlives the people who installed it. When it does fail here it fails by pinhole corrosion from the outside in, often in lines run under a slab where the pipe sits against damp sand and fill. Pinholes in copper tend to repeat once they start.
Polybutylene. Grey flexible plastic, usually stamped PB2110, in houses built or repiped between roughly 1978 and 1995. Chlorine in treated water makes it brittle from the inside, and it splits rather than weeps. The original grey acetal fittings commonly fail first. If you have it, identify it properly rather than from the two feet visible at the heater.
Galvanized steel. Older than most of this county's housing stock but it turns up. It closes up from the inside with rust and scale, so the first complaint is pressure, and the discolored water follows.
CPVC and PEX are what most repipes go in as now. CPVC gets brittle with age and UV exposure and can crack at fittings. PEX is the common choice for a repipe because it runs in long flexible lengths with far fewer joints, and a joint is where most things fail.
Service-life ranges for these materials are real and we will talk about them. What we will not do is tell you how many years are left in the specific pipe in your walls. Nobody can see inside it.
What a repipe actually involves
A whole-house repipe replaces the supply plumbing — the pressurized lines carrying water to every fixture. It does not touch the drains. Those are a separate system with separate problems.
Most of the new run goes overhead. New lines go through the attic and drop down inside the walls to each fixture, which is the main reason a repipe is often a better answer than opening the slab for one failure at a time. Where overhead is not possible, lines go through walls, and occasionally under the floor. The old pipe is abandoned in place or pulled where it is accessible.
It means holes in drywall. There is no version of this that does not. Openings get cut at each drop and at each fixture, the work is inspected while it is open, and then the drywall is patched. Ask up front who is patching and who is painting, because that varies between contractors and it is a real part of the job rather than an afterthought.
It is permitted work and it is inspected by the county. Pipe Perfect LLC is a Florida Certified Plumbing Contractor, licence CFC1431903, and permits are pulled under that licence. We are a plumbing contractor and nothing else — we do not perform or sign home inspections, four-point inspections, or anything requiring a licence we do not hold.
How long the house is disrupted
The house stays livable. Water is off for stretches during the working day and back on overnight in most cases. People stay in their homes through a repipe routinely.
How many days it takes depends on things we have to see to count: the size of the house, the number of fixtures, whether it is one story or two, what the attic access is like, and how much of the run can go overhead. A small single-story house with good attic access and a two-story house with a finished ceiling under the attic are not the same job.
Plan around the water being off rather than around the noise. Fill some jugs. Know where the nearest shower you can borrow is if your household does not tolerate an unpredictable day well. The drywall patching and painting usually happens after the plumbing is signed off, which means a second, quieter visit.
We do not name a number before seeing the job, and we do not name a number of days either. Anyone quoting a repipe over the phone has not counted your fixtures or looked in your attic.
If you are repiping because the old material was polybutylene or because the house has a history of failures, tell your insurance agent when it is done and keep the permit, the invoice and the photographs. A house that had that pipe removed is a different house to an underwriter. Whether it changes anything on your policy is between you and your carrier, and we will not predict what they decide.