Lead and Galvanized Service Line Replacement

Before anything is booked, we check who handles each half of your service line. On Pennsylvania American Water the utility replaces the customer-owned half under its own program, so tell us your address when you call.

Once that is settled and the customer-owned run is yours to arrange, this is what the work involves.

Pulled through, or dug out

There are two ways to get a new line in, and the difference matters to you mostly in what it does to the ground above it.

Pulling the new pipe through needs a pit at the house and a pit at the curb rather than a trench along the whole run. A new line is drawn along the path of the old one, and the lawn between the two pits is largely left alone. It is quicker, there is less to put right afterwards, and it is the first option worth testing.

Open trench means excavating the length of the run. It is the fallback, and sometimes it is the only answer: a line that has collapsed, a route with other utilities crossing it, a path that turns sharply, or ground too shallow or too obstructed to pull through.

What decides it is the condition and path of the existing line, the depth it sits at, what else is buried near it, and what the ground is doing. That is a looking job, not a guessing one, which is why the method gets chosen after seeing the run.

What the day looks like

The water goes off at the curb stop. The pits or the trench go in. The new line is run, brought through the foundation, and connected at the meter. It gets pressure tested before anything is covered back up, because finding a problem after the hole is filled is the bigger job. Then the water goes back on.

Most of a day for a straightforward run. Longer where the ground, the access or the weather argues with it.

Where the utility is replacing its half as well, both halves ideally go in together. Ask when their side is scheduled before fixing a date for yours, because coordinating once is easier than digging twice.

The yard, the sidewalk and the driveway

This is the part people ask about last and care about most.

A pull-through leaves two working areas rather than a scar across the lawn. An open trench leaves a strip that will need backfilling, compacting and reseeding, and grass takes a season to stop showing where it was. Where the run crosses a sidewalk, a driveway apron or the strip between the sidewalk and the street, you are into municipal permits and a reinstatement specified by whoever owns that surface.

Say up front if there is anything in the way worth protecting: a mature tree, a septic field, an invisible fence, irrigation, a retaining wall. It is far easier to route around something than to put it back.

Why it is both halves or neither

A lead line does not get cut into with the rest left in the ground.

Disturbing the scale inside an old lead pipe can raise lead levels in the water for weeks afterwards, so a partial replacement can leave a household worse off than doing nothing at all. If only half the line can be done right now, the honest answer is to wait and coordinate rather than to take the job today.

Flushing when the water goes back on

Replacing a pipe disturbs it, so the job is not finished the moment the water returns.

Take the aerators off the faucets, then run every cold faucet hard for several minutes, starting with the one nearest where the line comes into the house and working away from it. That pushes the loosened sediment out before it settles in a cartridge or a screen. Clean the aerators before refitting them. If you keep a lead-rated filter, change that cartridge after the flushing rather than before, and having the water tested afterwards is a reasonable last step.

Had a letter, or found something you did not like on your own pipe? Call us with your address and what you found, and we’ll get a licensed plumber out to look at the line.