How to Fix Low Water Pressure in Your House | Re-pipe the house and cheaper solutions!

hi i'm jordan this is my dad jim the grumpy plumber we asked this question a lot i have low pressure on my house what causes it and then how do i fix it hi my dad jim has been a plumber for 48 years he's a master plumber in michigan and a c-36 licensed plumbing contractor in california usa my wife and i thousands of dollars but you just gotta watch out he gets a little bit grumpy when he's giving advice so don't piss him off [Music] so dad how do you fix low pressure in a house probably re-pipe the house you know if it's a major problem but what how it works is you either have a well or you have city water pressure okay so and and what it is is you have two things you have volume that is the size of the pipe how much water it can serve to your house and you have pressure okay the volume is how much can go through the pipe and the pressure is how much a pump or the city can give you in pressure normally a city will give you 40 pounds of pressure is probably the average when you go to the midwest and you see those water towers out in the middle of fields that look like mushrooms that's what creates a pressure in the flatter areas of the country okay in the mountain areas where they have big uh reservoirs up in the mountain that creates a lot of pressure when it comes to a house they can have some houses in my area can get as much as 250 pounds of water pressure my water pressure is incoming about 140 pounds i have to reduce that down to 60 pounds okay or else it's going to wreck my faucets and stuff but if you if you live in the midwest and you've got a low flow problem and you're on a well sometimes it could be a small well and doesn't put out the water okay but you can check that by taking a garden hose and a five gallon bucket and see how long it takes to fill that up so if it takes a minute you've got a a flow of five gallons a minute okay on it if it takes you know takes a half a minute to fill that bucket that means you have a 10 gallon flow which is is really not too bad but if you have less than that it could be the well problem or you know the distribution problem just don't say five gallons a minute or less than 10 gallons less than five gallons a minute 5 gallons a minute's pretty good float your faucet in your house nowadays are less than a gallon a minute flow your toilet flushes on one point two gallons now okay now you think if you were to buy anything new in the united states in california and vermont have these laws on fl water flow well once they make a law they're going to make it for everybody they're not going to make you a faucet that's going to float 10 gallons a minute they're going to make that faucet that's going to flow on that gallon flow so another way you can sometimes tell is to take the aerator off that's where the water comes out see if you get any better water pressure flow there or you can go to your shower fill the bathtub take up that five gallon bucket fill that bathtub up with water and see how much volume water you got coming from there but you know it's expensive to re-pipe a house so another thing when you buy a house walk in and turn the shower on let's see if the water pressure is good or jump in the shower you're gonna be paying for that house give it a try what the heck so what do you do if the water pressure is low in a house well you can make the decision either i'm gonna re-pipe it or live with it so it can be fixed but a lot of times the older houses we only used to plum houses and they were only one and two bath houses which you can do it on three quarter inch copper pipe uh used to be everything was done in half-inch copper pipe sometimes three-quarter excuse me half a lot of it was half inch pipe years ago then they went made sure they had different piping sizes and there's houses that are done on galvanized pipe and it's getting old you have an old house you got galvanized pipes so if you have a half inch pipe going into your house you they'll be two two six too small too small a little too small usually a city will have mandatory at least three quarter inch or one inch either if you have a well if it's fairly new well they're gonna make sure it's a one inch pipe and it depends how much water you need could be as much as an inch and a half and if you have a galvanized piping it could be an inch or an inch and a half but it could be corroded that could be causing your pressure could be crowded if you have an older house that'll slow the water thing copper pipe doesn't corrode yeah you might get holes in it but the inside of it you know i really haven't seen much of that so if someone's saying they have low water pressure it's probably because they're turning on the faucet no water is coming out or they're turning on the shower and there's no water pressure your shower head can be low flow too you know if it's a new shower take the take all those aerators off or take the shower head off and see what kind of flow you get so you're looking for like things plugged in the aerator or the shower head like lime things like that yeah you can clean that up so that's an easy fix that's an easy thing but if you take piping's not if you take the aerator off and you soft low flow then it's a piping problem right and sometimes if you go to one faucet and you got good flow and you go the other faucet and you don't have good flow then you've got a problem with the faucet either either the supply lines going to it might be crowded then maybe that pipe is is uh you know a lot of times people will turn on the cold water and they have good flow and then they turn on the hot water and they don't have good flow that's you know usually you got good flow there's a problem with sometimes at the water here you can get electrolysis and it can start blocking off the flow of water on the hot side so that's the thing to check so but if you got we got that reminds us yeah hot water we lost flow in the hot water and you found a bunch of stuff plugging the pipes plugging the pipes so that's what you there's a lot of things you can do by yourself without hiring somebody to come in and doing it trying to relieve this the plug stuff like taking apart the supply lines trying to clear the lines well they might not want to do that but they can take the aerators off and screw them back on buy new aerators to them they can go by showerhead sometimes you look at a showerhead and you go oh i can take the plug out of this showerhead and get better water pressure so you know because that's what you like you know some people claim that the low flow water uh women complain because when they wash their hair in the shower they can't get the soap out on it so there's a lot of things you could have a water softener in house and it could be getting old and that could be slowing down the water flow but there's a lot of in but you can bypass the water softener if you bypass the water softener and all of a sudden you got a good water pressure there's your problem right there there you go or mineral has gone bad or something in the in the uh water softener nice cool well there you go there's a lot of you know causes of low flow or low pressure in your house and then also ways to fix it and troubleshoot yourself before you call a plumber yes so hope that helps thanks for watching clip subscribe for more updates from the grumpy plumber hey if you don't believe me ask your burrito barista in the morning [Music]

Channel: The Grumpy Plumber

Views: 111,201

Keywords: plumbing, plumbing advice, plumbing DIY, low water pressure, how to fix low water pressure, how to find the source of low water pressure, troubleshooting steps low water pressure, causes of low water pressure, fix low water pressure in your house

Id: TT_xbZZheSA

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021