Plumbers in Myerstown, PA

A borough with its own water

Myerstown, 17067, sits at the eastern end of Lebanon County, close to the Berks County line, and it does something most places in the county do not: it runs its own water utility. The Myerstown Water Authority was chartered by the borough and supplies the town from local wells and its own treatment facility.

The detail is more specific than that. Wells 3, 5 and 6 feed a treatment plant on Stracks Dam Road, where the pH is adjusted before the water goes out to Myerstown Borough and Jackson Township.

That pH adjustment is the part worth knowing if you have moved here from a well. Treated borough water is corrected to sit in a range that does not eat your pipework, which is exactly what untreated well water in this county often fails to do. It also means a softener is rarely the answer to a complaint about borough water, because the thing being corrected is acidity rather than hardness.

On the waste side the borough runs its own sewer, and received $352,256 toward replacing the main line interceptor. Work on a main can briefly change how a house drains while it is going on, so if your drains started behaving oddly in the same week as street work, that is worth mentioning when you call.

The borough’s system was covered by the same federal service line inventory requirement as every other public water system in the country. Given how much of Myerstown’s housing dates to well before the war, the question is worth taking seriously. Our guide to lead service lines covers how to check your own pipe and which half of the line the utility handles and which half is yours.

Older borough housing

The building stock through the older parts of the borough is what you would expect of a town with this much history behind it, and the plumbing follows.

Original galvanized steel supply is the recurring theme. It corrodes inward over decades until the bore is a fraction of what it was, and the symptoms arrive gradually enough that people stop noticing: weak flow upstairs, pressure that collapses when a second faucet opens, rusty water when the house has been empty a few days. Cast iron waste stacks age on a similar schedule from the other direction, rusting rough on the inside until they catch what passes through.

Most of these houses have had work done piecemeal, so what you actually have is a mixture, and the useful job is usually finding whichever original run is still in there causing the trouble.

Outside the borough line

Cross the borough boundary and the situation changes completely. The 17067 ZIP takes in a lot of farmland and rural property, and out there households are typically on private wells with their own pumps, pressure tanks and treatment.

Nobody tests that water but you. Nobody maintains that pump but you. The most frequent call is the pressure tank losing its air charge, which announces itself as the pump kicking on and off every few seconds while a faucet runs, and it is worth fixing quickly because that cycling destroys pumps. After that: weak pressure throughout, a pump running without building pressure, or water turning cloudy or gritty.

Water quality out here brings its own list. Corrosivity is the one that quietly does damage, because water low in pH takes metal out of your pipework. Hardness, iron, manganese and sulfur odor are all familiar in wells around the area as well. The right sequence never changes: test at a certified lab, read the results, then size treatment to what the test actually found. The well and water treatment page covers it in more detail. Permits for work on a sewer lateral are set by your municipality rather than the county, which this post explains.

Farm properties also carry plumbing that suburban houses do not: lines out to barns and workshops, outdoor hydrants, and buried runs to outbuildings. These are the first things to freeze in January, because they are the least insulated and the least used, and draining what you do not need over winter is far easier than repairing what splits.

Borough water or a well? It changes the call

Start with which of the two you are on, because the questions after that are completely different. Then what is happening, and whether the trouble is inside the house or out toward a barn, a workshop or an outdoor hydrant. The buried runs out there are their own job, and knowing in advance saves a second visit.