Repiping in New Hampshire, New Jersey & Southern Maine

What a whole-home repipe actually replaces

A repipe swaps out the water supply piping inside the house: every hot and cold line from the point water enters, either the meter or the well pressure tank, out to every fixture. New shutoff valves go in at the same time, along with new angle stops under sinks and toilets, new supply risers, and new hose bibs. Drain, waste and vent piping is a separate system and a separate job. So is the buried service line between the street or the well and the house, though it often gets quoted alongside.

Not every house needs all of it. If the failures are concentrated in exposed basement runs and the branches upstairs are newer, a partial repipe of the horizontal mains is a real option. You find out which one you are looking at before anyone opens a wall.

The signs your pipe is the problem

Failing supply pipe announces itself in ways that look like other problems first. Watch for:

• Pressure that collapses the moment a second fixture turns on
• Hot water noticeably weaker than cold at the same faucet
• Brown or rust-tinted water on the first draw after the house has sat overnight
• A second and third pinhole leak within a year of the first
• Green or chalky white crust dried around joints and valves
• Aerators and shower screens clogging with grit or flakes

One slow faucet is usually a plugged aerator or a tired angle stop. When the whole house is weak, and it got worse over years rather than overnight, the pipe itself is closing up.

Galvanized and polybutylene fail in opposite ways

Galvanized steel gives you years of warning. The zinc lining wears away, the steel underneath rusts, and the rust builds inward in hard nodules until a three-quarter-inch line carries about what a straw would. It corrodes from the inside, so a pipe that looks solid from the basement can be nearly closed. Hot lines go first. Where old galvanized was tied straight into copper without a dielectric fitting, the joint itself eats away faster than either pipe.

Polybutylene gives you nothing. The gray and blue flexible pipe run in homes from the late 1970s into the mid 1990s breaks down from the inside where treated water touches it, and the plastic insert fittings and crimp rings often let go before the pipe does. It has not been an approved material for a long time. It can look flawless the day it splits, usually inside a wall, usually at full pressure.

Copper or PEX, and what makes the choice

Type L copper is rigid, handles heat without complaint, and looks right where pipe stays exposed in a basement or mechanical room. It also takes more joints and more labor. PEX is flexible, so it fishes through existing joist bays and stud cavities with a fraction of the wall opening, and it can be run home-run from a central manifold, giving every fixture its own uninterrupted line and its own labeled shutoff.

Water chemistry decides more of this than preference does. Acidic, low-mineral well water off granite bedrock is hard on copper and shows up as blue-green staining and repeat pinholes. If that is your water and nothing is neutralizing it, new copper will do what the old copper did. Past material, cost tracks fixture count, number of floors, whether the house sits on a basement, a crawl or a slab, and how much of the route is reachable without cutting finished surfaces.

Staged so the house keeps water

New lines get roughed in alongside the old ones while the old system stays live. Water shuts off in blocks of a few hours to make tie-ins, and it is back on before we leave for the day. Bathrooms come over one group at a time. Everything is pressure tested and inspected under permit before a single opening gets closed up.

Plaster and wood lath change the plan. Plaster does not patch like drywall, and cutting it cracks the keys well past the edge of the cut. In older homes the route goes through closets, basement ceilings, attic floors and existing chases, openings stack vertically inside the same bay, and cuts are clean rectangles in low-visibility places rather than a chase run across a finished wall. You see every planned opening marked before the first cut.

Why homeowners here call High Ground

Cold changes routing. Across New Hampshire and southern Maine we keep new supply out of exterior walls and unheated crawlspaces wherever a warmer path exists, and we finish with frost-proof sillcocks so the outside hose bib is not the weak point in January. On the Jersey Shore, high water tables and slab-on-grade construction push more of the work overhead instead of underfoot.

High Ground is veteran-owned, licensed in every state we work in, and about 120 people across four branches. We pull the permit, price the job up front before work starts, answer the phone instead of sending you to voicemail, and back every repipe with our Lifetime Workmanship Guarantee. If something we installed is not right, we come back and make it right.

Related Plumbing services

• Leak Detection
• Water Heaters
• Drain Cleaning
• Sewer Lines
• Trenchless Sewer Lining