Rust After Copper Repiping Los Angeles Homes… Really?

Being Miranda’s plumber Los Angeles, I get a lot of questions from customers and soon-to-be-customers about copper repiping Los Angeles homes; and a lot of those questions center around the problem of rusty water.  The aggressive water found in the Los Angeles area, coupled with an overabundance of outdated galvanized piping, makes eventual rusty water inevitable.

For instance, I recently spoke to a woman who was getting rusty water from her tub faucet for 10 seconds after turning it on, followed by clear water.  She swore that her plumbing was copper…her plumber had repiped the home years earlier and she checked inside the access panel herself, only to find all copper piping.

This case was puzzling at first, because as any plumber knows, after copper repiping Los Angeles homes, rust should never again be present.  You see, the galvanized piping that we often replace is made from iron and coated with zinc.  As the zinc coating erodes, the iron rusts and that rust feeds off into the home’s water supply.  But after copper repiping Los Angeles homes, that should never happen again.

Turns out this woman’s plumber did repipe in copper.  But what he also did was use a galvanized nipple to convert from soldered copper piping to the threaded copper going to the faucet.  That single fitting was causing her rust problem. 

You’ll never find a galvanized fitting on a Miranda Plumbing truck.  The end result is always the same:  rust in the water.  The nice lady’s plumber should have used a brass nipple, which is exactly what I replaced that old outdated galvanized fitting with.