What are your pipes made of? Well, we don’t actually mean your pipes, just the ones in your Toronto home. When it comes to your plumbing pipes, you want strong, resilient, and reliable pipes to rely on. There are a various different pipes used during drain repair in Toronto and it’s important to understand all of your options.
There are 3 major types of pipes used: clay, metal and plastic. Within each group there are different types of pipes used for different purposes all over Toronto.
Vitrified Clay Pipes
Clay pipes are not actively used anymore. They are however, all over Toronto homes because of how popular they were for houses built before 1985. However awesome clay is, the lifespan of clay pipes is significantly shorter and can cause all kinds of issues for you. Due to cracking, soil can get in as well as tree roots and cause low draining pipes and eventually blocks. This is a very common reason for needing drain repair in Toronto.
Metal Pipes
Metal pipes come in three kinds of metal, which are:
- Copper Pipes
These shiny pipes are truly wonderful but are more expensive. They’re incredibly durable, corrosion-resistant and light making them ideal for plumbing. They are commonly used for water pipes, carrying cold and hot water throughout your home.
- Stainless Steel Pipe
Stainless steal doesn’t exactly come to mind when picturing your house’s pipes and there’s a good reason for that. Despite being highly resistant to corrosion, especially salt caused corrosion, it’s a lot more expensive and harder to find.
- Galvanized Pipe
Most commonly, the galvanized pipe is used to take water away from the house since it is thicker, heavier and underground. It’s sleek coating makes it ideal for fighting rust. Overall, contractors try to actively move away from using galvanized pipe and instead prefer using PVC since it’s easier to get, easier to work with and it doesn’t rust.
Plastic Pipes
As with metal pipes, there are a few different kinds of plastic used for drain repair in Toronto. These include:
- Polyvinyl Chloride Pipe (PVC)
This is the most common pipe used. It’s fantastic for high-pressured water, inexpensive, it doesn’t rust and it’s easy to get your hands on. Chances are, your home has a lot of this kind of piping and most drain repairs performed will be done using PVC.
- Polyethylene Pipe (PEX)
This pipe is actually designed specifically to be used as a hot water pipe. Since it is so resistant to heat, it makes it ideal for showers, sinks and washing machines and because it’s so flexible, it makes it easy to work with.
- Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene Pipe (ABS)
Now when it comes to the more unsavory side of plumbing, ABS is the pipe for the job. It’s tough and definitely up for the job of playing bouncer in the bathroom drains!
- Chlorine Polyvinyl Chloride Pipe (CPVC)
No mystery here, CPVC is jut PVC pipes that have been made more chlorinated. This is a great replacement for copper pipes since it’s just as strong and it also has the same outer diameter of copper pipes.
There are so many different types of pipes in the plumbing world and it isn’t always easy to identify which ones have been used in your home. However, metal and plastic pipes tend to be pretty durable, it’s those clay pipes that you’ll want to look out for.
Find out when your home was built, see if you can scrounge up any information about how it was built and consult a plumber. The last thing that you want are your pipes to break and have sewage backing up into your basement!
