Understanding Service Line Failures
The corridor's service lines are a museum of plumbing eras: lead in the oldest stock — still present in parts of Elizabeth and Newark's oldest streets — galvanized steel in the next generation, copper after that, and modern plastic in the newest work. Each fails in its own dialect. Galvanized corrodes through. Copper pinholes, and suffers where soil chemistry attacks it. Joints of every era loosen as decades of freeze and thaw work the ground.
Because the line is pressurized, its leaks are constant — day and night, whether the house uses water or not. That constancy is the diagnostic gift: a meter that moves with the house at rest, on a line isolated from the house's own plumbing, proves the service line guilty before a single shovel enters the yard.
- The meter creeps overnight with everything in the house off
- A soft, green or sunken stripe along the line's path in the yard
- Pressure that has thinned across the whole house at once
- Water surfacing in the yard or at the curb with no rain to explain it
- A known lead or galvanized service line in an older home
- Discolored water at every tap that flushing does not cure
