Know Your Home’s Plumbing And Your Plumber With A Plumbing Inspection Visit | Irving, TX
Getting a plumbing checkup for your home can help you manage an aging building, ensure your family has fewer disruptions, and check on your water supply and drain systems before you remodel or plan an addition. At Tioga Plumbing & Electric, our expert plumbers also get to know you and your Irving, TX home, while you get to know them under more relaxed circumstances than typical emergency plumber calls. It’s important to know the condition of your pipes and any concerns there are because, of course, it’s much easier to schedule a plumber appointment for maintenance and repairs than it is to deal with emergency drain cleaning service and hunting for hidden water leaks behind the walls or under the concrete foundation slab.
Plumbing Knowledge Gives You Power
Most homeowners don’t know what they’re not looking for when they look around the plumbing in the basement, or under their sink. For instance, when you’re doing the wash do you ever look at the hoses to the machine and think that they’re under constant water pressure, and made of rubber that decays? Your plumber will likely suggest stainless steel replacement hoses as an ounce of prevention to avoid a flooded laundry area. That’s just the beginning of the ways that an eagle-eyed plumber can help catch situations both common and unique that could cause trouble in your home’s plumbing.
Video Inspection
There was a time when inspecting your home’s plumbing above basement level involved cutting holes in walls that later had to be repaired. It was expensive and generally reserved for active leaks or other known concerns. Now, if there’s a less compelling reason such as the age of your home or the type of pipes used in some areas, it doesn’t take much to run a video inspection camera and, with an experienced eye, inspect a length of water supply or drain pipe, or even your sewer pipe, from the inside without tearing apart walls. You can see drain clogs, pipe cracks, even degrading PVC material or corroding metal pipe. It’s a simple way to get a lot of valuable information that will help you make repairs now or get an idea about how long it might be until you’ll need to consider work from pipe repairs and replacement to overall repiping, common in homes after a few decades of service.
Checking Shutoff Valves
A simple but critical inspection task for you and your plumber is to make sure that your shutoff valves are present and working properly. In some homes, they aren’t available where they might be useful in a plumbing emergency, and we can install one quickly for future use. Existing ones might not have been used in decades, and need some loosening up before use. The main water shutoff for your home is important to be able to locate, and get to, but in many homes it’s in the basement behind bicycles, boxes, and whatnot. When time is of the essence, you might need to be able to run to it and turn it quickly. It might also be buried in your yard in an access box, or even deep down for some homes, and there are cases where shared installations where neighborhoods were built at once provide water shutoff in a neighbor’s yard rather than your own. Now’s the time to find out.
Surveying for Leaks Electronically
In addition to the video inspection methods for checking pipes, there’s a tool specifically for locating leaks that uses ultrasonic detection to identify and even calculate the distance to the leak, using a sensor placed on the pipe. This is great for avoiding destroying parts of walls to locate and repair water leaks that could cause even more damage if they were left unrepaired. We can go right to the source of the leak in many cases and get the job done. Of course, even if there’s no known leak, this technology can be useful in inspecting your plumbing for unknown leaks.
Pipe Age and Materials
As plumbing experts, we have a pretty good idea of how long pipes tend to last and when they start leaking and need to be replaced. It’s a matter of age, but also of materials such as copper, iron, PVC, and other materials age and corrode at different rates, your water quality is a factor too, and in some cases such as lead pipes, there are compelling reasons to replace piping of any age.
Plumbing Issues Like Dissimilar Metal Joints Can Cause Future Trouble
Another of the issues that your plumber is likely to notice but homeowners might not think of is dissimilar metals. Making a simple plumbing repair, such as some homeowners might undertake on their own, using metals that interact chemically, can produce ongoing corrosion at an accelerated rate, followed by damage and leaks simply from lack of this somewhat esoteric knowledge. Even hanging a pipe on a bracket of the wrong kind of metal can cause trouble.
Drain Cleaning as a Preventive Measure
Running our video inspection gear down your drain pipes, can be a great way to recommend regular drain cleaning service for your whole house. What you’d see there, if left for years without cleaning, is a variety of growing clogs, all the way down the pipes horizontally on each floor and between floors, along with rings of grease waiting to accumulate more material. It’s no wonder some homes have frequent emergency drain cleaning needs.
Your Partner in Plumbing and Home Management in Irving, TX
Stay ahead of your home’s needs with the help of our expert plumbers at Tioga Plumbing & Electric. Whether you’re planning maintenance for your home over the years, or upgrades for luxury or expanding your family, we can help put you in charge of your future with the benefit of our experience and information from a careful plumbing inspection. We think you’ll enjoy working with our plumbers, just like we do. Give us a call today.
Photo By Hispanolistic at istock