by Randy Christie, CuraFlo British Columbia

All water is corrosive to some degree, but Vancouver’s drinking water is especially aggressive in attacking copper water pipes --the result is corrosion, pitting, pinholes, and ultimately copper pipe failure. Telltale signs of corrosion, including green stains (in sinks, tubs or showers) and leaks, can occur in as little as six years after installation. Since many of British Columbia’s homes, offices, and commercial buildings utilize copper plumbing systems, pipe corrosion, failure and repiping are a harsh reality of local building maintenance.

Most building owners start by treating the symptom of pipe corrosion - arranging for the repair of recurring pinhole leaks.  Soon costs mount and building owners face a much more serious and costly reality: total replacement of their copper pipe system. Pipe replacement, or repipe, means cutting out sections of the walls, floors, and possibly ceilings, to gain access the pipe system replacing the pipe, and then the repair and restoration of the damaged walls, floors, and ceilings.

In recent years, spurred on by a rash of plumbing system failures, engineers, plumbing experts, municipal inspectors and GVRD officials have been trying to answer the question of how long owners can expect new, carefully installed, oversized, thicker walled (type "K") copper pipes to last in a multi-tenant building. The GVRD has made and partially implemented plans to reduce the aggressive nature of local water through filtering and treatment in the hope of lowering the high rate of pipe failures around the Lower Mainland. Corrosion experts have given the plans mixed reviews, many believe the soft/low dissolved solids nature of the local water is the major cause of these problems not the acidic nature of our water most often mentioned.

Greater Vancouver's surface collected water supply has three primary characteristics that make it extra aggressive towards copper pipes.

•    Soft water (low in dissolved solids)
•    High level of dissolved gasses  (carbon dioxide and oxygen)
•    Low pH (acidic water)

Soft water dissolves minerals, copper especially. To compound the problem, the addition of oxygen and carbon dioxide gases, highly acidic local water, and higher water volumes and temperatures used in multi-tenant buildings, all provide just the right combination to promote corrosion. Large building’s domestic water delivery systems not only go through extreme temperature fluctuations, but sometimes the system is poorly constructed (possibly of inferior components and materials) adding the possibility of stress and crevice corrosion, and cracking to further the breakdown of Vancouver copper water pipes.