Plumbers in Massachusetts

Soft water, old pipe

Massachusetts is an unusual case. In most of the country the water is the enemy of the plumbing, filling heaters with sediment and crusting fixtures. Around Boston it is the opposite: the water supplied from the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs is among the softest of any major American metro, roughly 12 milligrams per litre of hardness, against a threshold of about 75 for water that would be called hard at all. A water heater in Dorchester has an easy life compared with one in Phoenix or Cincinnati.

The pipe is the problem instead. This is one of the oldest housing stocks in the country, and much of it still runs on what was installed generations ago. Galvanized steel supply lines corrode from the inside, and the bore closes gradually until an upstairs shower will not run properly. Lead appears in service lines, in interior supply lines and in solder joints in anything built before the 1986 federal ban. Polybutylene turns up in some later work. Cast iron drains narrow as they rust inward, so grease and hair catch almost as soon as the line is cleared.

The practical consequence is that Massachusetts plumbing work skews toward replacement rather than treatment. There is little point installing a softener here. There is a great deal of point in finding out what your supply lines are actually made of.

Low pressure is a diagnosis, not a complaint

The single most common call in an older Massachusetts home is weak pressure upstairs. Homeowners often assume the city has changed something. Almost always it is internal corrosion in galvanized pipe, which reduces the bore year after year until the top floor loses out to the ground floor. Brown water on the first draw of the morning is the confirming sign.

No amount of cleaning restores a pipe that has corroded from the inside. Repiping the affected runs does, and it usually gives back the pressure the house had when it was built. A plumber can scope the lines and tell you how much of the system is involved before you commit to anything.

Winter, and what it does over decades

A four-foot frost line and a winter that crosses the freezing point repeatedly does two kinds of damage. The obvious one is the burst: an uninsulated line in a cellar, a crawl space or an exterior wall splits during a cold snap, and the house floods when it thaws. The less obvious one is cumulative. Decades of freezing and thawing stress the joints in old galvanized and copper, creating micro-fractures that show up as leaks years later, in a pipe that looks fine from the outside.

The preparation is the same every autumn: insulate the exposed runs, disconnect the hoses, keep unused rooms above freezing, and know where the main shutoff is. It is also worth watching for ice dams, which push melt water back under the roof and into walls. That arrives looking exactly like a plumbing leak and no plumber can fix it.

Cellars, sewers and who does the work

Nearly every Massachusetts home has a cellar, which puts the floor drain and the laundry below the level of the sewer in the street. Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Worcester and Springfield all run combined sewers in their older districts, carrying storm water and sewage together, so a heavy rain or a fast melt can fill the main and push back into the lowest opening nearby. A backwater valve on the house drain and a working sump pump are the two things that keep that out of a finished basement.

Massachusetts licenses plumbers at state level through the Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and the state plumbing code is among the strictest in the country. Every plumber we dispatch here holds that licence and pulls local permits for the work that requires them.