Pipe Leak Repair and Repiping in Richardson, TX

A PEX repipe generally runs $4,000 to $10,000. Copper runs $8,000 to $15,000 or more. A partial repipe, meaning one bathroom or one section, is usually $1,500 to $5,000. Square footage, number of bathrooms, and how accessible the walls are all move the number. We quote a flat rate once we have looked at the house.

An accessible leak is typically $300 to $800. A leak inside a wall runs $500 to $1,500 because of the access work. A slab leak is the wide one, $1,500 to $15,000, depending on whether we go through the slab, tunnel under it, or reroute the line overhead. Electronic leak detection runs $250 to $600 and it narrows things down before anybody opens anything.

Try the meter test. Turn off every faucet, appliance, ice maker, and irrigation zone, then go look at the water meter and find the small triangle or dial that spins when water moves. If it is moving with nothing running, water is going somewhere. One caveat: a leaking toilet will trip this test. Put food coloring in each tank, wait twenty minutes without flushing, and if color appears in a bowl, that is your answer and it is a $15 flapper.

It is a water line failing under your foundation. North Texas clay swells and shrinks with the weather, the slab moves, and the copper underneath moves with it until something eventually rubs through. The usual first sign is a warm spot on the floor, because it is generally a hot line. Others are a water bill that jumped and stayed up, the sound of running water when everything is off, and new cracks in the slab or the drywall.

Not necessarily. We locate it first with acoustic listening equipment and thermal imaging, which narrows it to a small area. From there there are usually a few options: open the slab in one spot, tunnel underneath from outside, or abandon the bad line entirely and reroute it overhead through the attic. Which one is right depends on where the leak is and what shape the rest of the plumbing is in.

Individual leaks can be patched, but it is worth understanding what is happening. Galvanized steel rusts from the inside out, so the opening gets narrower every year and the pipe is failing everywhere at once, not just where it leaked today. Fix one spot and another one usually turns up. If you also have low pressure and brown water in the morning, that is the pipe telling you it is done, and a repipe is the actual answer rather than an upsell.

Gray or blue plastic pipe used in a lot of homes built roughly between 1978 and 1995. Chlorine in municipal water degrades it from the inside and it tends to fail without much warning. The part most people do not know is that many insurance carriers will not write a homeowner's policy on a house that still has it, or will write it with a water damage exclusion. It usually shows up near the water heater or under sinks. Worth finding out either way.

Most repipes we do are PEX. It can be pulled through existing walls with a limited number of access holes, it does not corrode, it handles a freeze better because it can expand a little, and it costs meaningfully less. Copper is still excellent pipe and it lasts a long time, and it costs more. Both are good. Happy to walk through the tradeoff for your house.

Most houses take a few days. Larger or more complicated ones take longer. Water is off for parts of it rather than the whole time, and you can almost always stay in the house.

Almost always a garden hose left connected over the winter. The hose traps water inside the valve, it freezes, and it splits the valve body. You often find out in spring, when you turn it on and the water comes out inside your wall rather than the yard. It is a $250 to $500 repair, and disconnecting your hoses in November prevents it entirely.

If you call before noon on a weekday, usually yes. We are open Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. We are not a 24-hour company. After hours and weekends carry a flat $199 dispatch fee, quoted on the phone before anyone gets in a truck. A burst pipe is one of the few things that genuinely does not wait, and if we cannot get there fast enough, we will say so.

Yes, more than people expect. According to the EPA, a small household leak can waste more than 10,000 gallons of water in a year. That is real money on the bill, and it is usually the cheap part of the problem compared to what the water is doing to the wood and drywall around it.