Residential Pipe Restoration

My house has galvanized water pipes that are starting to deteriorate. I thought my only option was to replace all the pipes which would involve quite a bit of mess and repair afterwards due to having to break into the walls in some places.

I recently found that there is a process for restoring existing pipes. It involves blasting a corrosive substance into the pipes to scour them clean and then blowing in an epoxy like substance to coat the interior of the pipes. No wall destruction.

Does anyone here have any experience with this? If it works well it would be *so* much better than having my walls torn up.

Here's a link to one companies product:

http://www.cleanncoat.com/#

Every time that I've lived in a house with deteriorating galvanized water pipes, I've had to have them replaced rather than repaired. The problem is that they often rot and if you try to clean them when they are so bad, you'll blow holes right thru them.

But that said, it's probably worth having someone out to assess them. Look at how badly rotted the ones you can visually see are and go from there.

I never heard of that, but I would be interested to hear what those who have had it have to say. I live in an 80 year old six flat, and the pipes bursting is one of my fears!

Originally Posted by Momofmany

Every time that I've lived in a house with deteriorating galvanized water pipes, I've had to have them replaced rather than repaired. The problem is that they often rot and if you try to clean them when they are so bad, you'll blow holes right thru them.

But that said, it's probably worth having someone out to assess them. Look at how badly rotted the ones you can visually see are and go from there.

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Yeah, it occurred to me that this might not be something you want to do with pipes that are badly deteriorated. I'm trying to catch the problem early though. The house was built in 1980 so they aren't really all that old. Also they say that the pressure they use in the cleaning and epoxy spraying is the same as normal water pressure so the risk of damaging the pipes during the process should be pretty low.

Originally Posted by mschauer

Yeah, it occurred to me that this might not be something you want to do with pipes that are badly deteriorated. I'm trying to catch the problem early though. The house was built in 1980 so they aren't really all that old. Also they say that the pressure they use in the cleaning and epoxy spraying is the same as normal water pressure so the risk of damaging the pipes during the process should be pretty low.

Click to expand...

A 1980's house is very new compared to the homes where I had problems. My last house was built in 1884 and we think the bathroom was installed in the 1940's. When I pulled a toilet to replace the floor, the galvanized drain pipe from that toilet cracked off. It sounds like you should be ok.

And thinking back, when I bought my first home in 1983 (built in 1960), we had someone out that talked about blasting out the galvanized pipes back then. We didn't do it because we didn't have the money at the time, but it sounded like a great idea at the time.