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Plumbing Issues In A Large Apartment Building

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Forth Worth Commercial Plumbers

The history of plumbing is nothing like the tidy, immaculately-tiled bathrooms of some of today’s luxury residential properties.  Even though an apartment building or complex satisfies the concept of “home”, a Fort Worth commercial plumber is responsible for maintaining a complex system with high demand.  Just a few generations ago, the city water and sewage systems were extremely primitive. In the 1890s, wealthy residents may have had septic systems to handle waste, but most homes were still using outhouses. Around that time, the freshwater supply was brought into the residences through wooden and copper piping.

Some of the iron and copper sewer pipes used for those earliest city systems are still in use today.  As large metropolitan areas, cities, municipalities and townships renovate, replacement of sewer pipes that are more than 100 years old is made a priority.  They’re made of extra-heavy cast iron and some old sewer pipes are made of wood.  The old wooden pipes are actually wooden blocks that had a cylindrical hole drilled through them. But these days, by law, modern pipes which are installed to bring water into city homes must be made of copper or plastic.

By carrying fresh water into our homes and taking waste water away, the pipes in our buildings are a system that almost magically distances us from our not-too-distant urban past.  When it comes to  plumbing, a co-op or condo resident’s knowledge should go at least a little bit beyond “jiggle the handle until it stops.” Telltale signs of plumbing problems in a building often appear weeks or months before full-on disaster strikes, ending in a very messy cleanup of a burst pipe, according to the commercial plumbing of Fort Worth experts.

Commercial Plumbing Fort Worth

Who Is Responsible?

In many buildings, maintenance of all of the plumbing visible outside of the walls inside an apartment is the responsibility of the apartment owner. Often in such buildings, upkeep of all of the plumbing that is located literally within the walls of the apartment is the bailiwick of the building’s management. Every unit owner should check the building’s bylaws and other governing documents to determine who is responsible for the various parts of the plumbing system.  Repairs of plumbing inside and outside of an apartment can be costly.  The responsibility for plumbing repairs depends upon the building’s governing documents, which vary from building to building.

PLUMBING TRADE SECRET:  The larger a building is, the more intricate the plumbing system will be. A  marked difference between plumbing in an average single-family home and a  multi-family building is the multi-unit system’s vertical risers. Vertical risers are large pipes that carry away waste and water from the building. An average single-family home’s vertical riser is a 3-inch pipe compared to a six-story multi-units 6-inch diameter vertical riser or the 8-inch diameter pipe of a 20-story building’s vertical riser.

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