Plumbers in Palmyra, PA

The borough core and the newer edge

Palmyra, 17078, is unusual in the county for how cleanly it divides. There is the older borough core, laid out along Main Street with the compact lots and closely spaced homes that go with a nineteenth and early twentieth century town. Then there is everything built since, a steady expansion of postwar and later subdivisions spreading out from that core, driven substantially by the borough’s position next to Hershey.

That proximity is the reason Palmyra keeps growing. A great many households here work in Hershey and Derry Township, minutes away over the Dauphin County line, and the borough has absorbed the demand that comes with that. The result is a housing stock with a wide spread of ages, and a plumbing profile that depends heavily on which part of it you live in.

In the older core, expect the problems of original galvanized supply and cast iron waste: pressure that has faded over years, brown water after the house sits, waste stacks that catch and block. Retrofits over the decades mean most of these houses are now a patchwork of materials, and locating the surviving original run is usually the job.

In the newer developments, the pipe itself is generally fine and the failures are equipment. Water heaters reaching the end of their service life, fixture and valve failures, supply line connections to appliances, and the occasional leak in a crawl space or under a slab.

Creek water, and sediment in the water heater

Palmyra and much of the western side of the county are served by Pennsylvania American Water. The borough is on its Hershey system, which treats water drawn from Swatara and Manada Creeks. Being on a public supply means somebody is testing and treating your water and reporting on it annually, which is a real difference from the well properties out in the townships.

It does not exempt you from mineral content. Dissolved minerals are what put scale on kettles, spots on glassware and sediment in the bottom of water heaters. Sediment in the heater is the one that matters, because a scale layer insulates the burner from the water and shortens the life of the tank. Flushing the tank annually and keeping an eye on the anode rod is genuinely worth the trouble here. The water heater page covers the detail. On the sewer side, permits are a municipal matter rather than a county one: see sewer lateral permits.

Sinkholes, and the half of the cause that is plumbing

Palmyra sits on the limestone belt, and about a third of Lebanon County does. That geology is the reason sinkholes happen here and it is nobody’s fault.

The second cause is the one worth a homeowner’s attention. In August 2026 a geologist told Palmyra Borough Council that limestone is the first cause of sinkholes in the borough and that leaking utility lines, water, sanitary sewer and stormwater, are a close second. A pipe leaking underground washes soil into the voids in the rock, continuously and invisibly, and that is what turns a slow geological process into a hole in somebody’s yard.

So a leak on this ground is not only a water bill problem. The signs to take seriously outdoors are a patch of lawn that stays green or soft when the rest is dry, ground settling along the line of a pipe or around a cleanout, a dip that keeps needing topped up, and a sewage smell outside with nothing wrong indoors.

Any of those on a Palmyra property is worth locating properly, or a camera run down the lateral, before the ground decides the timing for you. We have written up how a leaking pipe contributes to a sinkhole in more detail.

Lead service lines apply here too

The federal service line inventory requirement covered every public water system, Pennsylvania American Water included. If your address is in the lead, may-contain-lead or unknown categories, you should have been contacted.

The older core is where lead and galvanized service lines are most plausible in Palmyra, for the same reason as everywhere else: the age of the connection. Newer developments were connected in materials that do not raise the question. Either way, the five minute check with a coin and a magnet settles it, and our lead service line guide explains what each result means and who handles which half of the line.

The age of the house narrows it down

Roughly when it was built, plus what is going wrong, usually tells us what the supply and waste are likely to be before anyone arrives. The borough core and the postwar streets fail in different ways. If water is coming in and you cannot stop it, shut the main off and see the emergency page first.