Plumbers in Nepean and Bells Corners

Older Nepean, meaning Bells Corners, Centrepointe, Arlington Woods, Crestview and the streets around Baseline, is a different job from Barrhaven because the housing is a generation earlier. A great deal of it went up between 1955 and 1975, and that era's plumbing is now at or past the end of its service life.

The specific issues are predictable and worth knowing before you buy in the area. Galvanised steel supply piping, which corrodes internally until the bore narrows and the upstairs shower loses pressure whenever a tap runs downstairs, and which is worth replacing wholesale rather than section by section. Cast iron drain stacks, which are sound for decades but corrode at the base where they meet the floor. Clay tile sewer laterals in the oldest streets, which root intrusion finds through the unsealed joints. And original main shut-off valves that have not been turned in forty years and will not close when you finally need them.

One Bells Corners specific. Many of the 1960s bungalows here have a single bathroom with the fixtures in a line, plumbed through one wet wall, and any renovation that moves a fixture becomes permit work under the City's rule that alterations, additions or extensions to a plumbing system require a permit, with replacing existing fixtures as the exception (City of Ottawa, Do I need a building permit). That is worth establishing before design rather than after. These houses also mostly predate any requirement for a backwater valve, which makes them candidates for the City's protective plumbing subsidy.