Plumbers in Lebanon, PA

What plumbing in the city actually looks like

Lebanon is the county seat and by some distance its densest housing. A large share of the city was built before the Second World War, and attached brick rowhomes are the defining housing type across neighbourhoods on either side of Cumberland Street. That age is the single most useful thing to know about plumbing here, because it predicts most of what goes wrong.

Houses of that vintage were originally plumbed in galvanized steel supply and cast iron waste. Both have finite lives, and both are now well past them. Galvanized corrodes closed from the inside, which is why upstairs pressure fades, why hot water browns after the house has sat empty a few days, and why running two fixtures at once collapses the flow. Cast iron waste stacks rust from the inside out, roughening until they catch everything that passes.

Much of that piping has been replaced piecemeal over the decades, usually a section at a time when something failed. The result in a typical city house is a mix: copper here, plastic there, and an original galvanized branch still feeding a back bedroom. Finding the remaining original run is often the fix.

Service lines and the water authority

Lebanon city is supplied by the City of Lebanon Authority. COLA completed the federally required inventory of service line materials and wrote to customers whose line is lead, is a material that may contain lead, or could not be identified from its records. It has published service line information so customers can look up their own address.

Because of the age of the connections here, the city is where lead and galvanized service lines are most likely to turn up in the county. If you had a letter, or if you simply want to know, the check is a coin and a magnet at the point the pipe enters your basement. Our guide to lead service lines walks through it, and the service line replacement page covers the work itself.

The ownership split matters more in the city than elsewhere for a practical reason: front yards are short. The customer-owned run from the curb stop to the house is often a matter of feet rather than tens of feet, which changes the calculation on excavation considerably.

Sewer laterals under old streets

Laterals in the city are frequently cast iron close to the building and an older material further out, and they run under narrow streets with everything else. Two consequences follow.

Root intrusion is common wherever a street tree sits over the line, and it enters through joints that have already opened rather than causing the failure itself. And access for excavation is harder here than in a township, because the trench often crosses a sidewalk or reaches into the cartway, which brings permits and traffic control into a job that would be straightforward on an open lot.

This is why a camera inspection earns its keep in the city specifically. Knowing whether the defect is six feet out or thirty is the difference between a morning’s work and a street opening. The sewer line page covers the options.

Winter, and old exterior walls

Rowhomes were not built with insulated cavities, and supply lines run in places nobody would put them today: along exterior walls, through unheated back additions, into enclosed porches that were closed in later. Every hard freeze produces a run of burst pipe calls from exactly those locations.

The preventive steps are dull and they work. Disconnect and drain hose bibs before the first freeze, insulate anything running through an unheated back room or crawl space, and open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls during a cold snap. If a pipe does burst, the main shutoff is usually on the street-facing basement wall near the meter, and it is worth locating it before you need it. The emergency page has the full sequence.

Getting a plumber in 17042 or 17046

Tell us your ZIP and what is happening and we will arrange a visit. We work throughout the city, and you get the price before any work starts.