Repiping, start to finish
Whole-House Repiping Denver
PEX & Copper Repipes for Older Homes
Repiping is the one plumbing job that touches every room in the house. It's also the one homeowners put off longest, usually because nobody explained the scope, the mess, or the difference between a five-day job and a two-week one. Here's the honest version.
- What a repipe includes
- PEX vs. copper, honestly
- Phasing that actually works
- Living through the mess
What a repipe replaces, and what it doesn't
A whole-house repipe replaces the pressurized water piping inside your house. That means the trunk line coming off the main shutoff, the vertical risers feeding upper floors, every branch running out to a bathroom or kitchen, and the stub-outs behind each fixture. Hose bibs, the laundry box, the ice maker line, and the connections at the water heater usually come along for the ride.
What it doesn't include is what catches people off guard. The service line from the street meter to your foundation is a separate job involving a trench or a pull, and it gets priced separately. Drain, waste, and vent piping stays exactly where it is; that's a different system with different failures. So does the sewer lateral out to the street, which is its own category of problem entirely. Fixtures stay too, unless you ask for new ones.
Read every bid against that list. Two quotes that look thousands apart often differ only in where each contractor drew the boundary. One included the hose bibs, the heater connections, and closing up the drywall. The other stopped at the fixture stubs and left everything else for a change order you'll sign in week two.
Get the boundary in writing.
PEX, copper, and the jobs that use both
The material argument gets loud online and stays pretty calm in the field. PEX is cross-linked polyethylene, flexible enough to snake through joist bays and stud cavities with a fraction of the fittings copper needs, and every fitting you don't install is a joint that can't leak. It also survives a freeze better than metal, because the tubing can stretch instead of splitting. That matters more up on the Palmer Divide, where Monument sits at 6,961 feet and typically takes its first freeze right around the start of October, than it does down on the plains.
Copper's case is real too. It handles heat without complaint, doesn't degrade in sunlight, and no rodent has ever chewed through it. In a mechanical room where pipe runs exposed and gets bumped by a snow shovel every winter, copper is the better answer. Plenty of good repipes run PEX through the concealed spaces and copper for the visible work near the heater and the main.
The other decision is layout, and it gets less attention than it deserves. Trunk-and-branch copies what your house already had: one main line with branches teeing off along the way. A home-run manifold gives every fixture its own dedicated line back to a central distribution block, so you can shut off one bathroom without shutting down the house, and hot water arrives sooner because each line is smaller. Manifolds use more tubing and need somewhere to live.
| Material | Where it earns its keep | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| PEX-A, expansion fittings | Long concealed runs, retrofits through finished walls, freeze resistance | Needs a proper expansion tool; degrades in sunlight |
| PEX-B, crimp or clamp rings | Budget-conscious repipes and exposed basement work | Stiffer to route, and the fitting bore is a little narrower |
| Type L copper | Mechanical rooms, heater connections, anything exposed to bumps | Costs more, needs skilled joints, and splits when it freezes |
| CPVC | Small repairs and tie-ins to existing CPVC | Gets brittle with age, and fewer local crews still install it |
What a repipe costs and whether to stage it
Repipe pricing keys off four things: the number of bathrooms, the number of floors, what the walls are made of, and whether anybody can get above or below the work. A single-story ranch over an open basement, one bathroom, a plumber standing upright the whole time, is the cheap end of this job and still lands solidly in the thousands. A two-story with plaster walls, two and a half baths, and slab under part of it climbs from there and can reach well into five figures.
Two line items tell you whether a bid is honest. Drywall repair: included, patch-only, or taped and textured and painted? And access cutting: who opens the walls and ceilings, and roughly how many holes are we talking about? A repipe that leaves twenty open rectangles behind is a legitimate product. It just isn't the one most people think they bought.
Phasing works when the house cooperates. The usual sequence is to do everything reachable first, meaning the basement or crawlspace trunk plus anything in an unfinished utility area, then handle the upstairs branches whenever a bathroom gets remodeled. That's a fair way to spread cost across a few years. What kills it is a house where old and new sections have to keep talking through a transition fitting buried in a wall you just closed.
If the existing pipe is galvanized steel, lean hard toward doing it all at once. Restoring good flow to half a system pushes higher velocity and loosened scale into the half you kept, and the calls that follow are tedious for everyone.
- If it's single-story over a basementthe whole job is reachable from below and phasing saves you very little
- If pinholes keep appearing in 1980s copperreplace the run, not the hole; the rest of that pipe is the same age and thickness
- If a bathroom remodel is already scheduledrepipe those branches in the same window and pay for one round of drywall
- If you're selling within a yearget the system looked at and documented first, because buyers price uncertainty worse than known work
Need this handled this week?
Start a quoteLiving here while the walls are open
A straightforward single-story repipe runs a few days of active work. Two stories with finished ceilings takes more like a week to ten days, plus whatever the drywall crew needs afterward. Water goes off in stretches, not for the whole job. A decent crew tells you the night before which day you'll want buckets filled.
The holes land where you'd expect once you start thinking like a plumber: the ceiling under upstairs bathrooms, the back walls of closets, above vanities, and along the baseboard line where a branch turns a corner. Ask for closet walls whenever there's a choice. Nobody photographs a closet.
Dust is the part people underestimate. Cutting plaster in a 1920s Englewood bungalow releases a century of lath dust into the air, and it finds every room that doesn't have plastic taped across the doorway. Move what you love out of the work zone. Keep pets somewhere else on cutting days.
Before anyone closes a wall, the new system gets pressurized and watched. That test is the entire reason to do this work in order, and it's worth being home for. Walk the open runs with the plumber, photograph where every line sits, and keep those photos somewhere you'll find them. The next person who hangs a picture on that wall is going to want them.
A repipe is disruptive for about a week and then invisible for forty years. The mistake isn't spending the money, it's spending it twice because the job got scoped to the visible half of the house. Map the whole system, decide once, and open each wall a single time.
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Questions we actually get
Whole-House Repiping: quick answers
How long does a whole-house repipe take?
A single-story home over an open basement is often a few days of plumbing plus drywall time afterward. Two stories with finished ceilings run closer to a week or two. Access drives the schedule, not the pipe itself. A crew quoting a single day for a multi-bath house is quoting the pipe and not the patching, so ask what happens on days two through five.
Can I stay in the house during a repipe?
Most people do. Water gets shut off in stretches during the workday and restored by evening on a well-run job. Plan for dust, noise from roughly eight to five, and at least one day where you'll want water stored ahead of time. Households with infants or anyone on home medical equipment should ask for a day-by-day water schedule before work starts.
Will new pipe fix my low pressure?
If the old pipe was the restriction, absolutely, and the difference is dramatic on the first shower. If a failed regulator is choking the whole house, new pipe changes nothing at all. Check static pressure at a hose bib before you commit to a repipe. It's a ten dollar test that has saved people five-figure mistakes.
Thinking about a repipe?
Send us the house: age, stories, bathrooms, and what the walls are made of. We'll tell you what to expect before anybody quotes it.
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