Are you thinking about an upcoming water pipe installation project? People who are renovating or moving old pipes or installing new ones, often have to consider whether they should hire a professional for a project or try to tackle it themselves.
For water pipe installation, it often makes sense to seek a professional plumber. Plumbing experts know a lot more about how these projects work and can bring some considerable resources to the table. By contrast, DIY plumbing for foundational and fundamental systems like water pipes can have disastrous consequences!
Here are some reasons why it often pays to have a professional plumber handle water pipe installation.
Up to Code?
One problem with DIY plumbing is that the property owner doesn’t always know everything there is to know about local and state municipal building codes.
Ignorance is not an excuse to be in violation of code, especially in the eyes of insurance. Professionals, though, make a practice of knowing how to make sure every part of a job is done so that the building is up to code and compliant with all relevant laws and standards.
Appliance Connections
Think of the water pipes as the ‘skeleton’ of your hot and cold water system. The appliance connections all run into this central network. With that in mind, it makes sense to have a professional work on the water pipes themselves, which are sort of like your body’s core.
So, you can perform a DIY project for connecting an appliance, which wouldn’t affect the home as severely if you mess up.
Expect the Unexpected
Here’s another great reason to use professional plumbers when handling water pipe installation.
Whenever you tap into a plumbing system on a property, you run the risk of disturbing something that requires even more intervention.
Experts in various fields call this process the “cascade of interventions.” You change something and something else changes. Then you have to address that other new change. So if you only study a very small part of a process, unexpected changes throw you for a loop. You’re just not ready.
Professional shops, though, have more skills and experience, so that they can anticipate these other unexpected possibilities. When something happens “out of the blue,” so to speak, they can tackle it quickly, whether it’s a water leak somewhere else on the property or the need to reconfigure a system because of a particular installation change — or something else entirely.
With water pipes, this whole thing can be explained fairly easily. It starts with the issue of water shut-offs.
A significant portion of property owners don’t know where the main water shut-off is for their property. They may also not know how to handle individual appliance shut-offs. Professionals do know — because, unlike the DIY plumbing person, they have extensive knowledge of what all of these residential systems look like. So no matter what type of system is on your property, they’re probably already familiar with it, and that goes a long way toward a good permanent fix.
Guarantee on Work
Here’s another very important part of why you should hire a professional plumber to install water pipes, sewer pipes, or anything major on a property.
It has to do with being able to guarantee the labor that’s put into a system.
Professional plumbing companies will offer you these guarantees, either for a particular period or indefinitely, on the labor that they’ve done to secure your system and make it measure up to a particular standard.
With DIY, you don’t have any of that. You may have gotten a good result, but will your workmanship prevail over the long term?
There is a very important reason why this issue pertains to your home’s plumbing system. It’s because water pipes can be maddeningly hard to install, and leaks can stop and start seemingly spontaneously, without any evident reason at all.
For example, it’s common for some piping to leak immediately after soldering and then stop leaking as it cures. There’s also the possibility that moving a particular fastener or coupling, even in a small way, will either stop or start a leak that may be intermittent or continuous.
For that reason, people feel confident when they hire professional plumbers to do work on a property. At the first sign of trouble, they put in a follow-up call to a shop that has guaranteed the initial work. Then they don’t have to diagnose that particular part of the building from day to day.
Time and Tools
There’s another simple reason why most people call professional plumbers for this kind of work in the first place — it’s an issue of convenience and prioritization.
Most customers of plumbing companies have their own daily work or their own families or responsibilities. Even if they had a basic knowledge of plumbing, they don’t have the specialized tools or the time to do a project well.
With that in mind, let’s look at a list of projects that homeowners might be more likely to tackle on their own. A DIY plumbing job might commonly consist of:
- Fixing a toilet flapper or pump
- Troubleshooting an appliance connection
- Unclogging a toilet or shower/sink drain
Then there are those big jobs that are often best left to a professional:
- Installing or moving water pipes
- Sewer pipe repair
- Installing a water heater
With these larger jobs, having professional installation is well worth the cost.
