My Copper Pipes Keep Getting Pinhole Leaks (Bremerton, WA)

What usually causes pinhole leaks in copper in Bremerton

Start with velocity erosion. Undersized hot lines or a recirculation pump wear the pipe at elbows and tees. Around Manette and Illahee the housing dates from the shipyard boom of the 1940s, which makes this the likeliest answer to pinhole leaks in copper.

Then contact corrosion. Copper against concrete, fill, a steel hanger or a nail plate corrodes at the contact point. We've seen it near Illahee more than once, usually on wartime-era service lines.

And water chemistry: slightly aggressive water dissolves copper from the inside over decades. Less common on narrow Charleston and Manette grid lots, but we've found it near Kitsap Lake.

First steps on a Bremerton property

On the East Bremerton ranch homes it's copper that has pinholed under a driveway, and those often make more sense to re-route than to patch under the slab.

First steps for pinhole leaks in copper near Jackson Park: look at exposed copper in the crawlspace for green-blue staining or earlier patches. Count the pinhole repairs the house has had and where. Note whether the pinholes are all on the hot side. Then call; the rest is a locate through wet clay seams on the Narrows side, not guesswork.

How we fix it

When it's the buried line, the fix in Bremerton is whole-house repipe: we run new lines, survey through cobbles packed in glacial till at the marked spot on short service runs on the city grid, and abandon or remove old lines. Quarter-turn fixture shutoffs and the mini excavator ride on the first trip so it's finished the same visit.

Kitsap Lake, Jackson Park, Rocky Point: near any of them, pinhole leaks in copper gets the same crew and the same equipment. A few minutes from our base, day or night, with the mini excavator on the trailer for sloped lots above the Narrows.