Kitchen Plumbing Updates

Replacing the Pipe Before the Kitchen Hides It Again

A kitchen remodel exposes the sink wall for a few days. After that it disappears behind a cabinet box, a countertop and a tiled backsplash for another twenty or thirty years. In an older Riverside house, what is inside that wall is often original galvanized steel pipe, and the remodel is the one sensible chance to deal with it.

This service covers the plumbing half of the kitchen: the supply lines that feed the sink, dishwasher, refrigerator and any pot filler, the drain and vent that carry water away, and the valves that let you shut it all off.

What We Usually Find

Galvanized pipe was the standard supply material in a lot of houses built through the middle of the last century. It is steel pipe with a zinc coating, joined with threaded fittings. The zinc protects the steel for a long time, but not forever. Once it wears through on the inside, rust and scale build up and the effective diameter of the pipe shrinks. Hard Riverside water adds mineral deposits on top.

When we open a kitchen wall in the Wood Streets or in an Arlington ranch house, the common findings are:

• Restricted supply lines. A half inch pipe that passes water like a quarter inch one. This is the usual cause of a slow kitchen faucet.
• Corroded threads at the stub out. The short nipple coming through the wall is thinner at the threads than anywhere else, and it is where a leak starts once the angle stop is disturbed.
• Mixed metal joints without isolation. Where a previous repair spliced copper directly onto galvanized, the steel next to the joint corrodes quickly.
• Seized gate valves. Old multi turn valves that either will not close or start dripping at the stem the moment you try.
• Galvanized or cast iron drain arms. Scaled inside, sometimes cracked at a fitting, often pitched poorly after decades of small repairs.

Not every house has all of these. Some have none, because a previous owner already repiped. That is exactly why we look first.

How the Work Is Done

The sink base comes out during demolition, or earlier if you want an inspection before you commit to a design. We trace the supply back to where it meets sound pipe, whether that is copper, PEX or a main line in good condition.

Replacement supply lines are PEX or type L copper. PEX is usually the better fit in plaster walled bungalows because it can be pulled through with fewer wall openings, and fewer openings means less plaster to patch. Where the new line connects to remaining galvanized, we use a proper transition fitting rather than threading copper straight onto steel.

At the sink we set new quarter turn angle stops for hot and cold, and a separate stop for the refrigerator or a filtration system if you have one. Drain arms are replaced in ABS or cast iron to match what the rest of the system can accept, with the trap arm length and slope checked and the vent confirmed. Dishwasher drains are routed to a high loop or an air gap as the inspector requires.

Permits and Inspection

Replacing supply and drain piping inside walls generally needs a permit from the City of Riverside and a rough inspection before the wall is closed. We pull the permit and schedule the inspection as part of the job. If your house sits in a designated historic district, interior plumbing is not usually what triggers review, but a new exterior penetration can be, so we check before anything is cut through an outside wall.

When Not to Repipe

If the galvanized we find is limited to a short section already isolated from the kitchen, or the house was repiped years ago and only a single nipple remains, we replace that piece and move on. If the main line from the meter is galvanized and badly restricted, a new kitchen branch alone will not restore pressure, and we will tell you that before you spend money expecting it to.

Get a Look Inside the Wall

Call (951) 423-3890. An inspection before your cabinet order is the cheapest way to turn the biggest unknown in an older kitchen into a known cost. See also our sink and faucet replacement service, which is usually done in the same visit.