Our newbuilds don’t tend to have copper plumbing any more, and instead use something similar to hosepipes. Just wondering how durable they are

28 comments

  1. Installed correctly they should last as long as copper.

    The key phrase is installed correctly

  2. I’ve dismantled plastic joints made over 20 yr ago and they’ve all been as new

    Plastic is more prone to rodent damage – but rodents are bad news in lots of ways anyway

  5. Bath leaked all over the floor on the second day cause they didn’t connect it to the pipes, not sure if that counts

  6. From my experience it’s anything connected to the hot water cylinder that always goes first. 3-way valves, any filters. Half of them leak from day 1 anyway. (If it is not a combi boiler)

    Then there’s the issue that they spec the heating as low as humanly possible in order to hit energy ratings. Our back room ( redrow 8 years old) needed a BTU of 11,000, and they put 5000 btu radiators in. Joined to a boiler that’s 15kwh. This is a 200square M property…

    We are talking about a 4-metre by 10-meter room with ceilings at 2.5m with sliding doors and 2 sets of windows. And it had two tiny radiators in (0.4kwatt and 1.2kwatt), but the piping is only 10mm, so technically we could only go to a max of 1.5kwatt.

  7. A value for central heating corroded and started leaking after 6 years. Water went through the floor and left patches on the ceiling underneath. Annoying, we had the house redecorated less than a year before -_-

  8. The big problem with plastic pipes is UV damage. But that simply is not a problem when installed under floorboards etc.

    Plastic doesn’t corrode, so if there’s no UV to damage them, the pipes themselves will last longer than copper pipes.

    The failure will be in the seal between pipes where they are joined to e.g. radiators. They should last at least 25 years.

  9. 5 years, and no issues aside from the toilets starting to constantly refill after a few years and needing a part replacing.

  10. My last two new builds (5 years in the previous, 4 years so far in the current) have had upvc wastes but copper water feeds.

    Or do you mean the microbore for heating?

    Anyway – never had a leak I didn’t cause.

  12. 7 years and nothing that wasn’t a washer or a cheap connector.

    Thankfully got most fixed for free.

  14. My flat was built in 2014 and recently one of the water copper pipes started leaking from the joint.

  16. I lived in a new barratt flat for 5 years and there were no problems with the construction (only problems with the management)

  17. First house was 5 years old when we bought it. The seal linking the toilet cistern to the toilet bowl corroded and leaked.

    Second house was new. Lived in 9 years, no problems except for a radiator that started leaking when I bumped into the pipe quite hard with the hoover.

    Current house is new build, been in for just over a year and no problems yet touch wood

  18. Had a few 15mm push fits pop off in a new workplace toilets as person who installed them did not lock the collar. Was not installed correctly though so no failure of parts.

  19. I’ve been in this house six and a half years, one of the main sewage pipes that runs under our garden backed up and filled out of a manhole cover in the garden. Sewage everywhere!

    That was about a month or two after moving in.

    Turns out a neighbour was flushing nappies and it had blocked the pipe. The developer took care of everything as the estate was still a building site and their responsibility.

    I also had an issue where all the cold taps in the house had hot water coming out of them. I got that fixed as part of our snag list.

  20. Lived in it 5 years, house is about 7-8years old.

    First plumbing failure was a couple years ago when I drilled through a wall into a pipe 😬

    Otherwise, only failure was quite recent with a leak coming through the kitchen ceiling.

  21. Not really a plumbing fail.

    Before I moved into my house I had a visit with the site manager to do a snagging and I took my dad.

    The site had been a school that had been left to go derelict and my great grandad had been a caretaker at the school when he semi-retired. My dad had spent some time with him there when he was a child.

    The site manager made a big song and dance about how he was making sure everything on the site was perfect because he’d actually bought and moved into one of the houses. My dad asked him about what they were doing about the underground stream that runs under part of the estate, and the site manager knew nothing about it. Turns out they’d not done their checks properly and building work was suspended from part of the site for a while. Some of the houses had to have new foundations and one garden wall collapsed causing a mini landslide.

  22. I lived in a new build for six years and the boiler pipes exploded and flooded the flat I think four times. Once in the first or second year then relatively regularly. Everyone in the building knew the repair guy. He was in all the time.

  23. Shoddy plumbing in new builds is more about the use of unsupervised and unreliable sub contractors, than using plastic piping.

  24. In ours for 3 years. First plumbing issue was pretty much day 1. Very small, but annoying. It ended up with water pissing down the walls and an incorrect diagnosis of the shower not being fittes correctly. After 3 visits, a big hole cut out in my ceiling, and no progress over 5 months, a young plumber quickly discovered the issue in that a pipe wasnt secure enough.

    Thanks Barratts.

  25. We lived in a rental newbuild. The plumbing started to fail at 10 years and 2 months but it was things like showers, the boiler (and its uphill condensate pipe) and the hot water tank diverter valves which went first. The first plastic pipe to fail was at 11 years but was installed incorrectly, none of those which had been fitted properly failed whilst we were there.

  26. 3 years. No issues at all, except the sink plug gradually got it self unscrewed. They put enough silicone on that kept it attached until I realised and screwed it back on.

    Not pipe related but – bath was siliconed down empty. So the first time I stood in it for a shower the whole thing detached. Housing Association fixed that really quickly to be fair to them.

  27. Our house is 15 years old, we’ve been here 9 years. So far replaced the mechanisms in 2 toilets, found out the shower cubicle was held up by 2 out of 6 supports so fixed that, had to replace one toilet because it was so badly fitted it leaked and was held together by sealant, had to get an electrician out to re-do the kitchen because it was dangerously wired, had a major leak through the living room ceiling when the pipe from the bath cracked, found out the hall was only mist-coated it was never properly painted, found our front door lock was so ineffectual we might as well have left it unlocked (we lost the keys and had to get new locks done), had the garage door spring fail, numerous issues with bad plastering, cracks in joints, and none of the doors fit properly

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