Supply and drain piping, inside and under the house
Aurora pipe repair, from a pinhole to a whole run.
Old galvanized, tired copper, polybutylene, freeze splits, and slab leaks. A licensed master plumber finds where the water is actually coming from and tells you straight what the pipe needs.
Western Plumbing Solutions & Remodels works Aurora out of Littleton, day or night, every day of the week.
What Aurora houses were plumbed with, and how it fails.
Aurora is not one housing stock, it is four or five stacked on top of each other, and the pipe tells you which era you are standing in. The blocks around Fitzsimons and central Aurora went up in the 1950s and 60s with galvanized steel supply lines. Steel rusts from the inside, so the wall of the pipe thickens with scale years before anything drips. What the homeowner notices first is not water, it is pressure: the shower goes weak when someone starts the laundry, the tub takes forever to fill, and the upstairs bathroom never quite keeps up. That is a pipe closing off, and no amount of cleaning fixtures fixes it.
Push out toward the late 70s and 80s tract neighborhoods and we run into polybutylene, the gray flexible line with the plastic fittings. It ages badly. The failures come at the fittings and they are rarely polite about it. If we find it in your walls, we say so plainly and lay out what a staged replacement looks like, because that is a different conversation from patching a copper joint.
Where we usually find the problem
- Galvanized supply lines rusting shut behind mid-century walls
- Pinhole leaks in copper, hot side first
- Polybutylene fittings letting go in late-70s and 80s builds
- Split hose bibbs and garage runs after a hard front-range freeze
- Drain and supply lines strained by clay soil movement
- Under-slab leaks located before anything gets opened up
Cold snaps and clay
Two things Aurora does to pipe that mild climates do not.
The front range can drop forty degrees between lunch and midnight. The pipe that pays for that is whatever sits outside the heated envelope: hose bibbs, the run through an unconditioned garage, the line crossing a vented crawl space. Water expands as it freezes and splits the pipe wall, but the flood almost always waits for the thaw. If a fixture went dead in the cold and came back later with a stain underneath, we want to see it.
Then there is the ground itself. Aurora sits on expansive clay that swells with moisture and shrinks when it dries out. That movement works on buried supply and drain lines season after season, pulling at joints and putting bends where the pipe was never meant to bend. It is slow, it is invisible, and it is why a house can go thirty years quiet and then start leaking in two places the same spring.
What we do about it
- Thaw frozen lines safely, then inspect the whole run for splits before the water goes back on
- Reroute vulnerable pipe out of unconditioned space where the framing allows
- Insulate what has to stay out there, and replace failed hose bibbs with frost-proof stops
- Locate under-slab leaks with listening and pressure equipment, no exploratory demolition
- Free up seized shutoff valves so the next problem has an off switch
Call (303) 883-9075 or send us the details. Photos of the wet spot help more than you would think.
The honest version
Repair the section, or repipe the house?
Most calls are a repair. A joint gave up, a nail found a line during a remodel, a hose bibb split. We cut in a new section, pressure test it, and you are done. What we will not do is patch the same run four times and let you pay for it four times.
The conversation changes when the pipe itself is the problem. Widespread galvanized corrosion, pressure that is low everywhere instead of at one fixture, leaks showing up in unrelated parts of the house, or polybutylene throughout: at that point spot repairs are just installments on a repipe you are going to do anyway. When we see it, we tell you, and we tell you what we would do if it were our house. For a repipe we run PEX or copper depending on the layout and what you want. PEX handles Colorado’s temperature swings well and goes through joist bays with fewer connections, which means fewer places to leak later.
Aurora work sits alongside everything else we do in town. See the rest of our Aurora plumbing services, or if your trouble is a heater instead of a pipe, start with water heater installation in Aurora. Recent jobs are in the gallery.
How a pipe repair call goes
Find it, fix it, prove it holds.
Find the water
We isolate the leak before we open anything. Pressure testing, meter checks, and acoustic location on slab and buried lines, so the hole in your drywall is the smallest one that does the job.
Fix what failed and look at what is next to it
The bad section comes out. While the wall is open we read the pipe on either side and tell you its condition, so you are deciding with the whole picture instead of one wet foot of it.
Pressure test, then restore
System back under pressure, joints watched, fixtures run and checked. Water goes back on when the repair has proved itself, not before.
Straight answers
Aurora pipe questions we get asked most.
My water pressure is weak all over the house. Is that a pipe problem?
Usually, yes, especially in older Aurora neighborhoods with galvanized steel supply lines. Steel rusts from the inside and the buildup narrows the pipe long before anything leaks. If pressure drops everywhere rather than at one fixture, the piping is the first place we look. Call (303) 883-9075 and we will check it.
A pipe burst. What do I do right now?
Shut off the main water supply, then call (303) 883-9075. Stopping the flow keeps the damage from spreading while we are on the way. If the main stop is stuck, which happens on old valves, shut it at the meter if you can reach it safely and tell us when you call so we bring a replacement stop.
How do you find a slab leak without tearing up my floor?
We isolate the line first with pressure testing, then locate the leak acoustically and with line tracing. Once we know where it is, we talk through options. In a lot of Aurora homes rerouting the line above the slab is more durable and less invasive than breaking concrete, and we will tell you which way we would go. Send us the details and we will take a look.
Does my house have polybutylene, and does it have to come out?
If it was built in the late 70s or 80s, it might. Polybutylene is a gray flexible line, usually visible at the water heater or under sinks. It fails at the fittings and it does not warn you first. We will identify it, show you where it runs, and lay out a staged replacement so you are not doing the whole house at once unless you want to.
My hose bibb split over the winter. Is that the whole repair?
Often the bibb is just where the ice found the weak point, and the split runs back into the line behind the wall. We replace the bibb with a frost-proof stop and check the run behind it before we call it finished. Same goes for any line in a garage or crawl space that froze.
Why does copper get pinhole leaks?
Decades of water chemistry working on the inside of the pipe. The hot side usually goes first because heat drives the reaction along. We solder in a fresh section, and while the wall is open we look at the pipe either side of it so you know whether you are fixing one spot or looking at a bigger run.
When is a repipe the right call instead of a repair?
When the pipe itself is finished rather than one section of it: widespread corrosion, low pressure throughout, leaks in unrelated parts of the house, or polybutylene everywhere. At that point repairs are installments on a repipe. We say so plainly instead of selling you the same patch twice. Call (303) 883-9075.
Do you work in Aurora at night and on weekends?
Yes. We are open around the clock, every day, and Aurora is a short run from our shop in Littleton. Burst lines do not keep business hours, so neither do we.
Something leaking in Aurora?
Call and talk to a master plumber. We find the source, tell you what the pipe actually needs, and hold to the number we gave you.