Homeowner guide
Do I Have Lead Pipes? A Lebanon County Homeowner's Guide to Service Lines
Water authorities across Lebanon County have been writing to customers about service line material. This guide explains what the letter means, how to check your own pipe in about five minutes, and what your options are if it turns out to be lead.
If a letter arrived from your water authority talking about service line material, you are not alone and you are not being singled out. Utilities across Lebanon County have been sending these because a federal rule required them to.
This guide covers what the letter actually means, how to check your own pipe without hiring anybody, and what your realistic options are if it turns out to be lead or galvanized steel.
Why every water system in the country did this at once
The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Lead and Copper Rule Improvements require public water systems to identify what every service line in their system is made of, tell customers what the records show, and replace the lead ones. The EPA’s stated timeline for systems nationally is to identify and replace lead pipes within about ten years, along with a duty to tell people where lead pipes are and when replacement is planned.
Building those inventories meant going back through decades of records, and the records are patchy. That is why so many letters say “unknown” rather than naming a material.
Locally that landed hardest in November 2025, when the City of Lebanon Authority said more than 10,000 customers would receive letters about the line running from the curb into the house. Of those, 8,682 are customer-side lines recorded as galvanized iron, lead or unknown.
The reason so many say unknown is worth understanding, because it explains the whole exercise. CoLA’s deputy director put it plainly: customer-side lines “historically have not been considered our asset”. The authority never had cause to record what they were made of, so now it is asking. Other systems serving the county have run the same process on their own schedules.
What the letter is telling you
Inventory letters generally sort addresses into a few categories.
Lead. Records show a lead service line. This one is definite and it is the priority for replacement.
Galvanized requiring replacement. Galvanized steel pipe that is or was downstream of a lead line or lead gooseneck. Galvanized pipe can absorb lead into its interior surface and keep releasing it afterwards, which is why it gets grouped with lead rather than treated as safe.
Unknown. The records did not settle it. This is usually the biggest group, and it is not a finding of lead. It means nobody has verified the material yet.
Non-lead. Copper, plastic or another material that does not present a lead concern.
The important thing about the unknown category is that you can often resolve it yourself, today, with a coin and a magnet.
Does a lead line mean lead in my water?
Not automatically, and the distinction matters because the letter frightens people more than the water usually warrants.
A lead pipe releases lead when the water running through it is chemically aggressive. Water treated to sit at a higher pH lays down a scale inside the pipe that keeps the lead out of the water. That is what corrosion control means, and the City of Lebanon Authority treats with lime for exactly this reason. Its position is that having a lead service line does not mean there is lead in the water.
Its testing record backs that up. CoLA has sampled for lead since 1992 without a problem result, until a recent sample drawn from a known lead line came back above the federal action level of 15 parts per billion. That line was replaced.
Two honest conclusions follow. The water leaving a treated system is generally not the problem, so this is not an emergency. And the pipe is still worth removing, because corrosion control is a treatment that has to keep working, and the one sample that failed came off a lead line.
How old does the house have to be?
Lead service lines went in when lead was the normal material for them, and that practice had largely ended by the 1970s. CoLA’s own guidance is that a house built in the 1970s or later most likely has copper from the curb stop in.
So the risk window is older housing, which in this county means the city rowhomes, the borough cores and the farmhouses, rather than the postwar subdivisions. It is a starting point and not a verdict: plenty of older houses had the service line replaced at some point, and the only way to know is to look at the pipe.
Checking your own service line in about five minutes
You need a coin or a key, a strong magnet, and a torch.
Step 1: find where the water comes in. Follow the pipe back from your water meter toward the wall it passes through. In most Lebanon County houses this is in the basement, usually on the wall facing the street. What you want is the section of pipe on the street side of the meter, before any valve, where it emerges from the wall or floor.
Step 2: look at it. Clean off any dust or paint with a rag first so you are looking at the pipe rather than at a coating.
Step 3: scratch it with the coin or key, gently, on a small area.
Step 4: hold the magnet against it.
Now read the result:
| What you see | Scratch reveals | Magnet | Most likely material |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dull gray, often with a slightly swollen or bulbous joint | Shiny silver, like a pencil mark on foil | Does not stick | Lead |
| Gray, sometimes rusty, threaded fittings | Stays dull gray | Sticks firmly | Galvanized steel |
| Brown or dark orange, like a penny | Bright copper, pinkish | Does not stick | Copper |
| White, blue, gray or black, feels like plastic | Plastic underneath | Does not stick | Plastic (PEX, PVC or HDPE) |
Two details make this more reliable. Lead is soft, so the scratch goes in easily and comes up bright silver, and lead lines often have a distinctive bulged joint where they were wiped into a fitting. Galvanized is the one the magnet sticks to, and that magnet test is the single most useful discriminator, because galvanized and lead can look similar under years of dust.
If the pipe is painted, wrapped, or buried straight into a concrete floor with nothing visible, you may not be able to tell. That is a fair outcome. Report it to your utility as unverified and ask what they advise.
What you have found, and what it means
Plastic or copper. Your service line is not a lead concern. Note that this does not say anything about your interior plumbing, and homes plumbed before lead solder was banned in the mid 1980s can still have lead at the joints of copper pipe.
Galvanized. Worth acting on for two separate reasons. If it was ever fed by lead, it can hold and release lead. Independently of that, galvanized pipe corrodes closed from the inside over decades, which is why houses on original galvanized supply have poor upstairs pressure and discolored water after sitting.
Lead. This is the case to move on. Tell your water authority what you found, because it improves their inventory and it puts your address in the right category for their replacement program.
Who owns which half of the service line
This is the detail that catches people out, so it is worth being precise.
A service line runs from the water main in the street to your house. Ownership splits at the curb stop, the shutoff buried near the curb or sidewalk. The utility owns the run from the main to the curb stop. From the curb stop into the house, the pipe belongs to the property owner.
That means the section under your front yard is very often yours. Utilities replace their own half either way. What happens on your half is not the same across this county, and it is the part worth getting right before anybody digs.
Who supplies your water, and who handles your half
Lebanon County has a number of separate public water systems and they do not agree on this. Your water bill names your supplier, which is the reliable way to check, because supplier boundaries here do not follow municipal ones.
| Supplier | Where | Who handles the customer-owned half |
|---|---|---|
| Pennsylvania American Water | Palmyra borough, the Annville and Londonderry townships, and the Campbelltown system | The utility replaces it under a signed agreement, with a two-year warranty, and you keep ownership of the new line. Approved by the Public Utility Commission in October 2019, consistent with Act 120 of 2018. |
| City of Lebanon Authority | Lebanon city and a number of surrounding municipalities | The property owner arranges it. No equivalent published program was found. Tell us your address and we will check what applies before anything is booked. |
| Borough and township authorities | Myerstown, Cornwall, Fredericksburg, Richland, Newmanstown, Schaefferstown | Set by each system. Each is a separate system inventorying and notifying on its own timetable, and each sets its own policy. There is no county-wide answer, so we check it address by address. |
| A private well | Most properties outside the boroughs and the city | Not applicable. No public main, no service line, no letter. On a well the issue is corrosive water dissolving metal out of your own plumbing, which is a water test rather than a pipe replacement. |
If Pennsylvania American Water supplies you, their program handles the customer-owned half under a signed agreement, so arranging the work privately first would give that up. Call us and we will tell you which row of that table your address falls in before anybody commits to anything.
That program is also why somebody may knock. Pennsylvania American Water has been canvassing door to door in parts of this county, trying to identify the lines its records cannot account for. If that happens at your address, what the visit is and how to tell it is genuine covers it.
What each material means
The letter puts your line in one of these categories. They are not equally urgent.
| Material | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | The records show a lead service line | Replacement is the answer. Check who handles it using the table above |
| Galvanized requiring replacement | Galvanized steel that sat downstream of a lead line and can hold lead deposits | Treated as lead for replacement purposes |
| Unknown | No record survives of what the pipe is | Verify it. The magnet-and-coin test above settles the visible end in a minute |
| Copper | Records show copper | Nothing to do on the service line |
| Plastic | Records show plastic | Nothing to do on the service line |
Why partial replacement is discouraged
There is a tempting shortcut here: replace the visible bit inside the basement, leave the buried run, save the excavation.
Public health guidance advises against it. Cutting into a lead line disturbs the scale that has built up inside it over decades, and that disturbance can release lead into the water at higher levels than before, sometimes for weeks. A partially replaced line can leave a household worse off in the short term than leaving it alone would have.
The recommended approach is full replacement, both halves, ideally on the same day. In practice that means coordinating with your utility, and we check when their side is scheduled before a date is set for yours.
Reasonable steps while you wait
Replacement takes scheduling, and in the meantime the usual guidance applies. Use cold water for drinking, cooking and preparing formula, because hot water picks up lead more readily. Run the faucet for a while before drinking if the water has been standing for hours. If you use a filter, choose one certified to NSF/ANSI Standard 53 for lead reduction and keep to the cartridge replacement schedule, because an expired cartridge is not doing the job.
Getting the private side replaced
When you are ready to deal with the customer-owned portion, that is ordinary plumbing work. Our service line replacement page covers how the line is put in, whether it can be pulled through without a trench, what happens to the yard, and how to flush the house once the water is back on.
Tell us your ZIP and what you found on your pipe, and we’ll get a licensed plumber out to look at the line.
This guide is general information for homeowners, not legal, medical or engineering advice. For what applies at your own address, call us.