Plumbing

Grey plastic water pipe installed in BC homes roughly between 1978 and 1997. Chlorine in municipal water makes it progressively brittle, and it fails at the fittings, usually without warning.

Look at the pipe where it comes out of your hot water tank or under a bathroom sink. Grey plastic, roughly garden-hose flexibility, often with grey or copper crimp rings, sometimes stamped PB2110. Send us a photo and we will identify it free.

No, and it is not illegal to have. It is a discontinued material that insurers and inspectors treat as a known risk.

Many BC insurers now restrict coverage, increase premiums, or decline to write new policies on homes with it, though practices vary and change. Your own broker is the only reliable answer for your policy.

Often, but it is your insurer's decision. Ask your broker with our written completion report and permit record in hand — that documentation is what they will want.

Sometimes, and we will do the repair if that is genuinely the right call. But Poly-B and Kitec fail as materials rather than in one location, so a repair leaves you the same pipe everywhere else and the same insurance position.

Almost never. It is dusty and disruptive rather than uninhabitable, and water is restored each evening in most cases.

No. Different polymer, different failure mechanism, and decades of field data. The comparison comes up often and it is not a fair one.

Yes, in most Metro Vancouver municipalities. We pull it and it is in the quote.

Four things: is the permit included, is drywall repair included, is disposal included, and is it PEX or copper. Those four omissions are how a cheap quote becomes an expensive job.

Sometimes — a bathroom at a time, or floor by floor. It costs more overall but spreads the expense.

Galvanized steel supply pipe, common in pre-1960 homes, rusts closed from the inside over decades. Symptoms are water pressure that has been declining for years and discoloured water first thing in the morning.

Four common causes: a failed pressure reducing valve, corroded galvanized piping, a failing water service line, or a hidden leak. The regulator is the cheapest to fix and the most commonly missed.

The most reliable early sign is a water bill rising with no change in usage. Also: a damp or discoloured patch, a musty smell in one room, the water meter moving with everything off, or a warm spot on the floor.

We start non-invasively — acoustic detection, thermal imaging and pressure testing. Only once we know where it is do we open anything, and then it is one precise access point rather than a wall.

Yes, with photographs and findings. It is what insurers ask for and we produce it as standard.

Freezing in an unheated crawlspace, garage or exterior wall during a cold snap; age and material failure in Poly-B, Kitec, old copper or galvanized; or excessive pressure from a failed regulator.

Never with an open flame — blowtorches on frozen pipes cause house fires. Open the tap the pipe feeds, warm the area gently with a space heater or hair dryer, and be ready to shut the water off in case the pipe has already split.

No, it is naturally soft — it comes from mountain reservoirs with very low mineral content. A water softener is almost never the right product here, whatever anyone is selling.

Chlorine is used to disinfect the municipal supply and the residual is what you taste. Carbon filtration removes it, either under the sink or whole-home.