Pipe Repair and Repiping in Brooklyn, NY

Galvanized pipe closes from the inside

Galvanized steel was the standard in Brooklyn for decades, and it fails in a way you can't see: rust builds inward, layer by layer, until a pipe that started at three-quarters of an inch has an opening the width of a pencil. Cut a section out of an old building and look through it - or don't, because often you can't.

The symptoms are familiar to anyone in a prewar walk-up. The shower dies when the kitchen sink runs. Top floors get a trickle while the basement is fine. The first draw in the morning runs brown for a second before clearing. None of that is a pressure problem the street can fix, it's the pipe itself, and it only moves in one direction.

Burst and frozen pipes

Freezes hit the predictable places: lines on exterior walls, uninsulated cellars and crawl spaces, vacant apartments where nobody's running water, and outdoor spigots that never got shut off in the fall. Here's the part people learn the hard way - a frozen pipe often shows its damage at the thaw, not the freeze. The ice splits the pipe quietly, then melts, and the flood starts while everything seems to be returning to normal.

If you've got a frozen line, shut the supply to it before warming anything, and have it checked before trusting it. An actively spraying split is a Emergency Plumbing call at any hour. Prevention is cheaper than either: insulate the vulnerable runs, drain the hose bibs in October, and on the brutal nights, a pencil-thin stream from the farthest faucet keeps water moving.

Copper and PEX, compared honestly

When a run or a building gets repiped, the material question comes up fast. Copper is the proven veteran: rigid, durable, familiar to every inspector, more expensive in both material and labor. PEX is the flexible newcomer that isn't new anymore: fewer joints, and it snakes through finished walls and tight joist bays with far less demolition, which matters enormously in occupied Brooklyn apartments. Both are code-approved. The right pick usually comes down to access, budget, and what the building's bones allow, and we'll tell you which one we'd put in our own place and why.

Occupied buildings get staged repipes - riser by riser, line by line - so tenants have water every night. And wherever new pipe meets surviving old steel, the connection gets done with the right fittings, because copper touching bare galvanized is a corrosion project with a start date.

Repair the section, or replace the run

Not every failure means a repipe. One damaged section gets cut out and replaced properly, and plenty of our visits end exactly there. The line we watch for is repetition. Patches on a corroded run are a subscription - each one holds, and each one is followed by the next weak spot letting go. When we recommend replacing a run, we hand you the piece we cut out so you can see the inside of your own plumbing. The bore makes the argument better than we can.

Supply pipe is this page. If the old cast iron waste stack is the failing half of the building, that work ties into Sewer Line Repair and Replacement, and mystery wet spots that haven't announced their source yet start at Leak Detection and Repair. Owners in Crown Heights and Greenpoint have run whole-building upgrades with us in stages, one budget cycle at a time.