Learn About The Most Common Reasons For Water Leaks & Protect Your Home

Some leaking water might not seem like a huge threat to your home and your plumbing, and in truth it isn’t. If you enact some water leak detection and find a tiny bit of water escaping somewhere, what can this actually do to your home? In small amounts, not much.

But a leak is usually not a problem itself; it’s a sign of a bigger problem that’s on the way. You should take water leak repair as your sign to contain a problem while it’s smaller, rather than allowing it to grow into a more expensive issue. So what causes leaks? Some of these factors do.

The Age Of Pipes

Nothing is immune to time, not even the hardest substances like metal. So in the same way that you have to be more aware of deficiencies in your own body as you age, the same is true even for plumbing that has zero moving parts.

Think about older Victorian homes. They may still be using the original cast iron drainage pipes they were built with. If that’s the case, these pipes may have been in use for a century or more.

Metal fatigue is a definite concern for anything over 50 years of age, and in this case, could lead to a break in the pipes that will require water leak repair.

Rust Or Corrosion

Related to issues of old pipes, there are the structural defects that arise out of chemical interactions between pipes and the air or water.

Metal pipes can rust, through contact with moisture, even humid air can do it, weakening the metal layer by layer and possibly leading to leaks. Even plastic is not immune to this type of corrosion.

Modern drainage pipes are made of PVC plastic, but this can dissolve when exposed to acidic substances. People that are overzealous with using drain cleaning products are inadvertently exposing their pipes to high amounts of acid on a regular basis. Don’t go too crazy with drain cleaning products, or you can damage your pipe and cause a leak.

Water Pressure Set Too High

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to take a shower at high pressure. However, setting the water pressure throughout your entire home to a high level is not the way to do it.

What you’re doing is applying higher than recommended force to every plumbing pipe in your home, just to make sure it’s high pressure coming out of your showerhead.

This strong force can, over time, damage pipes and lead to a leak. Instead of keeping your entire plumbing system at high pressure, turn it down, and buy a showerhead that pressurizes the water for you.

Water Quality

This isn’t something that most homeowners will be able to actively control, by the time the water has arrived in your home, it’s already in your pipes, so filtration and other mechanisms at the exit point do no good.

But water quality such as pH level, or calcium content can affect the safety of your pipe, and may eventually lead to leaks.

Fortunately, if you need water leak repair in Allentown, PA it can easy enough to fix yourself if it’s just on a faucet or other fixture. But if the leak is on a pipe, get professionals to do the job and find out what the leak is hinting at for the health of your plumbing system.