Lead is poisonous. But human exposure to lead can occur through the air, dust, soil and diet. Lead has historically had widespread commercial use, including the production of car batteries, paints and in pipework for water mains connections supplying properties, and inside the properties themselves.
Public exposure to lead has been substantially reduced since the mid 1960s, including restricting its use in petrol and therefore its airborne transmission by motor vehicles. Houses built in the UK since 1970 won’t have lead pipework but older houses may still have lead in their plumbing. Having lead water pipes does not automatically mean exposure to lead poisoning, but in terms of guarding a family’s health and ensuring an uncontaminated supply of drinking water, it makes sense to replace them.
Many people are unaware that a water company’s responsibility for the water supply will only go as far as the stop valve on the communication pipe. Beyond this, the individual customer has responsibility for the supply pipe feeding a property. This means that if you’re concerned about having lead pipework in your home, it’s up to you to have it replaced. The good news is that this doesn’t have to cause you a great deal of cost and inconvenience because it’s something that we can carry out with a minimum of fuss.
We can replace your lead pipework with industry standard polyethylene pipes. These are clean, environmentally safe and very durable. We can usually do this with trenchless technology and impact moling, whereby we drill boreholes and pull through the replacement pipe.
You’ll benefit firstly from knowing that our methods will minimise disruption to your home and surrounding when carrying out the work, and secondly because once our work replacing lead pipes is complete, you’ll have fresh pipework that will help to ensure that you and your family have a healthy, uncontaminated water supply.
