Plumber in South Riding, VA

We run Route 50 east through Aldie and into the Dulles South corridor to reach South Riding, and it is a drive we make often. South Riding is one of those master-planned Loudoun communities that went up fast, mostly in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, so the homes here are a different animal than the century-old farmhouses we work on closer to home. These are big single-family colonials, townhomes, and a handful of newer builds, packed tight along curving streets with names like Tall Cedars and Riding Center. The bones are young, but young does not mean trouble-free, and we have seen plenty of it.

When a whole neighborhood is built in the same five-year window, the plumbing ages in the same five-year window too. The water heaters that were installed when these houses sold are now well past the point where most tanks give out, so we get a steady stream of South Riding calls for rusty hot water, popping and rumbling tanks, and the puddle on the basement floor that means the bottom finally rusted through. The polybutylene scare missed most of South Riding because of when it was built, but the early-2000s copper and the first wave of PEX are both reaching the age where the fittings and the pressure-reducing valves start acting up. That is bread-and-butter work for us.

South Riding runs on Loudoun Water, not wells, so the water pressure coming into these homes is strong, sometimes too strong. We see a lot of pressure-reducing valves that have failed and let 90 or 100 PSI into the house, which chews through fixtures, hammers the pipes, and shortens the life of every appliance hooked to the line. If your faucets bang when you shut them off or your toilets run for no reason, that is usually where we start looking.