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I am interested in buying a house that says it has copper pipes. I have read about some health risks associated with copper pipes, specifically the body's effects of ingesting too much copper that gets into the water. Apparently Alzheimer's disease is also linked to copper pipes.
How can I find out the age of the copper pipes, and would an inspection tell me the condition of these pipes? Any thoughts about the health risks? Should I consider ripping them all out and having them replaced?
Location: Visitation between Wal-Mart & Home Depot
8,309 posts, read 38,776,945 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kibblesandbits
I am interested in buying a house that says it has copper pipes. I have read about some health risks associated with copper pipes, specifically the body's effects of ingesting too much copper that gets into the water. Apparently Alzheimer's disease is also linked to copper pipes.
How can I find out the age of the copper pipes, and would an inspection tell me the condition of these pipes? Any thoughts about the health risks? Should I consider ripping them all out and having them replaced?
I don't think that copper pipes pose much of a health risk and certainly not enough to justify the expense of replacing otherwise perfectly serviceable pipes. Copper does not dissolve in water or, if there is something in the water that copper does react with or the water is very soft, it dissolves extremely slowly so your exposure through water that you drink or otherwise have intimate contact with is very low. Your body eliminates copper pretty quickly so you would be hard pressed to achieve toxicity by drinking from the faucet... You would almost certainly go toxic on water first.
The soldered joints on very old plumbing systems may have been lead soldered rather than silver soldered and that may be a more legitimate concern. The age of the home is as often as not a pretty good guess for the age of the pipes (I get the sense from your other posts that this home has not been updated so you probably fall in the as often category) and a visual inspection should give you or the inspector a pretty decent idea about the condition of the pipes.
I am interested in buying a house that says it has copper pipes. I have read about some health risks associated with copper pipes, specifically the body's effects of ingesting too much copper that gets into the water. Apparently Alzheimer's disease is also linked to copper pipes.
How can I find out the age of the copper pipes, and would an inspection tell me the condition of these pipes? Any thoughts about the health risks? Should I consider ripping them all out and having them replaced?
If you had your copper pipes ripped out and replaced, the plumber would replace them with copper pipes. Your only other alternative is PVC, and that's not too viable.
If you're this concerned, have some water samples analyzed, and possibly get a water filter.
Location: Visitation between Wal-Mart & Home Depot
8,309 posts, read 38,776,945 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Omaha Rocks
If you had your copper pipes ripped out and replaced, the plumber would replace them with copper pipes. Your only other alternative is PVC, and that's not too viable.
If you're this concerned, have some water samples analyzed, and possibly get a water filter.
I will say that if I were starting from scratch I would want to run PEX set up in the "central manifold" style. That's some of the coolest stuff out there.
One of my neighbors filled a 12" section of PEX with water, sealed the ends, froze it solid in his icebox, beat it mercilessly with a framing hammer, then thawed it. No leaks. Pretty nifty if you ask me.
Copper does not get into the water unless the water is acid. 99% of all municipal and well water is alkaline. The mineral makeup that the body needs is complex and to a certain extent self-adjusting. An excess of one mineral can create and apparent deficiency in another. I don't know what you have been reading, but you need to take a lot of those claims with a grain of sea salt. In other words, this is pretty much a non-issue.
If you have to replace copper, PEX is the way to go, but I haven't seen any long term studies about leachate from the PEX plastic. It SEEMS to be safe, and we have it in our home, but it'll take years for enough data to be gathered for a definitive answer, and we may all be dead by that time anyway.
When I was a kid, there was a concern about getting too much copper in water if water sits in copper pipes for a very long time. We used to run the water for half an hour to wash out the pipes after returning from a long vacation. I do not know whether there is something to that, or it was just some old urban legend.
Copper was the primary type of water supply piping in the United States for about 50 years. Probably 80% to 90% of American homes have copper piping. It is still in use, but it has been pretty well surplanted by PEX. (CPVC is another good option, but PVC got a bad reputation when houses built with regular PVC had pipes or joints burst back around the 1980s, so they do not use it much).
Althoguh I woudl nto use copper in a house today, I would nto remove copper pipe from a house that already has copper. Unless you have corrosive water, copper pipe lasts a long time. It has been in use long enough that if there was a health risk, you would have heard about it.
Copper does not get into the water unless the water is acid. 99% of all municipal and well water is alkaline. The mineral makeup that the body needs is complex and to a certain extent self-adjusting. An excess of one mineral can create and apparent deficiency in another. I don't know what you have been reading, but you need to take a lot of those claims with a grain of sea salt. In other words, this is pretty much a non-issue.
If you have to replace copper, PEX is the way to go, but I haven't seen any long term studies about leachate from the PEX plastic. It SEEMS to be safe, and we have it in our home, but it'll take years for enough data to be gathered for a definitive answer, and we may all be dead by that time anyway.
I'm not sure of every municipality but my former municipality -- Mecklenberg County in NC -- actually change the CSI for it's water from Summer to Winter. Temp. changes alone can change the CSI on water so even though it may be coming into the home balanced or not it can change with just temp. changes like you would see with a water heater.
Not that that matters much -- I don't see copper being a problem at all -- of a difference because with an increase in temps. you get water more scale forming. Just an FYI...
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