Pick one and we will keep it short. Three taps and you are done.
We run calls seven days a week, and we answer the phone around the clock.
Last step. We will call you back to confirm the window.
An emergency deserves a person, not a web form sitting in an inbox. Call the shop and we pick up.
No heat, no water, an active leak, or a backed up main. These move to the front of the line, day or night, weekend or holiday.
Your request is in and somebody will call you back to confirm a window. Here is what we have:
Most fixture problems are one worn soft part, and most are cheap to fix. Whether the fix holds for years or six months depends on whether anybody looked at what killed the part.
A toilet that refills itself at two in the morning. A shower valve that gives you forty seconds of warm water and then makes its own decisions. Nearly all of it is one small soft part that has given up, and most of it is cheap to put right. The part worth understanding is that the soft part rarely failed on its own.
Almost nobody connects this to a dripping toilet. Every public water system here disinfects with chloramine, which is chlorine combined with ammonia, rather than free chlorine. Fairfax Water treats the Occoquan supply that most of eastern Prince William drinks, and Prince William Water names Fairfax Water and the City of Manassas as its suppliers, both on chloramines. Loudoun Water explains the appeal: chloramine breaks down far more slowly, so a residual survives further out in the mains. That staying power is also why it sits against the rubber in your fixtures for longer.
Then the utility says the consequence out loud, which saves us having to claim it. From Loudoun Water’s customer water quality guidance, verbatim: “Both chlorine and chloramines will degrade elastomer materials (rubber materials) over time, however chloramines will typically degrade them at a faster rate than chlorine. Customers will periodically need to change their rubber gaskets in their homes, such as in the sinks, faucets and toilets.” A water utility, in its July 2011 manual, telling homeowners that flappers and faucet O-rings and supply-line gaskets are consumables.
Two limits on that. Loudoun Water publishes no replacement interval and we could not find an independent one, so anyone quoting you a number of years for a flapper is guessing. And it says gaskets. It does not mean your copper or your PEX is dissolving.
There is a seasonal version too. Each spring the suppliers run free chlorine instead of chloramine for several weeks to flush the mains, and free chlorine is the more aggressive oxidant. Fairfax Water published its 2026 window as 23 March to 26 May. The dates move annually, so check your utility rather than this page. A gasket that was nearly done often picks that window to quit.
The china is almost never the problem. InterNACHI’s life expectancy chart puts toilets, bidets and urinals at 100 years or more, and the tank components inside them at five. One fixture, two different clocks. EPA WaterSense agrees from the other side: the flapper “should be checked periodically and replaced at least every five years.”
| Part | Published figure | Who published it |
|---|---|---|
| Toilet tank components (fill valve, flapper, flush valve) | 5 years | InterNACHI life expectancy chart |
| Toilet flapper specifically | Check periodically, replace at least every 5 years | EPA WaterSense |
| The toilet itself | 100+ years | InterNACHI, listed as toilets, bidets and urinals |
| Faucets and spray hose | 15 to 20 years | InterNACHI |
| Hose bibs | 20 to 30 years | InterNACHI |
| Faucet cartridge, mixing valve, aerator | No figure published at any water hardness | Nobody. We looked |
| Braided stainless supply line | No published service life | IBHS documents the failure modes but gives no interval |
| Washing machine hoses | Replace every 3 to 5 years | State Farm, as an insurer’s recommendation, not a code rule |
| Pressure reducing valve | Rebuilt with a service kit, not swapped on a schedule | Watts, the manufacturer, calls it a life-of-mortgage part |
The blank rows matter as much as the filled ones. Nobody publishes a service life for a faucet cartridge or a fill valve at a given hardness, so we will not print one. The braided supply line is the part most people read wrong. IBHS describes it properly: a plastic hose inside a stainless braid, with threaded connectors and internal rubber gaskets. The braid is abrasion protection, not the thing holding pressure. What kills the inner tube and gaskets, per IBHS, is wear, handling damage, excess pressure, heat and water quality.
Those connectors do most of the damage. In the insurance institute’s brochure, hosted by the Connecticut Insurance Department, 78 percent of water damage incidents involving toilets traced to faulty supply lines, flanges, fill valve assemblies or overflows. For sinks it was 44 percent down to supply lines. For icemakers, 73 percent. The fixture takes the blame and the connector did it.
People buy a good fixture, have it fitted, and feel cheated when it performs like the one it replaced. Usually nothing feeding it changed. A stop valve that has not been turned in twenty years. An angle stop that weeps the moment you touch it. An aerator packed with scale. We would rather change the stop and the line while the fixture is off than come back for them. Where the piping itself is the limit, the decade the house went up tells you most of it, which is what pipe materials by decade is for.
Scale is real here without being dramatic. Prince William Water publishes East and West system hardness at 3.5 to 7.0 grains per gallon, classified moderately hard, with Bull Run Mountain, Evergreen and Hoadly Manor in the harder band above, so which system your street sits on is worth checking. EPA says homes with significant hardness may see mineral and scale formation on plumbing fixtures, which is what you find when you unscrew an aerator here. The same utility page states there is no primary or secondary standard for hardness at all. A nuisance, not a contaminant.
None of which turns a worn cartridge into a treatment problem. A softener reduces hardness and carries no chloramine claim, so it does nothing about what is actually working on your gaskets, and EPA lists filtration as not removing dissolved minerals. Our page on softeners and treatment covers where equipment does earn its place.
Watts, which manufactures pressure reducing valves, treats anything above 60 psi as generally high and names dripping faucets among the symptoms. The Virginia Residential Code sets the ceiling: static pressure shall be not greater than 80 psi, and above that a pressure reducing valve is required at the service connection. Prince William Water uses the same 80 psi trigger. If a house runs high, you can replace every cartridge in it and the drips come back.
A pressure reducing valve or a check valve also makes the house a closed system, and the code then requires a means of controlling the pressure thermal expansion creates when the water heater fires. Usually an expansion tank, though the code says a means, not a tank. It matters here because those spikes are absorbed by whatever is weakest, and on our calls that is a fill valve or a faucet seal.
Worth knowing, so here it is straight. The 2021 Virginia Uniform Statewide Building Code, in effect since January 18 2024, lists ordinary repairs needing no permit and no inspection. Item 14.2 of Section 108.2 covers “Replacement of plumbing fixtures and well pumps in all groups without alteration of the water supply and distribution systems, sanitary drainage systems, or vent systems.” The second half is where it ends.
Same firm price agreed before we start, same drop cloths down, same clean-up, same people. Plenty of outfits treat a faucet swap as a nuisance between real jobs. It is how a lot of our long-standing customers first met us. Office hours run 7 to 5, and after that Jon takes the calls himself. We will not pretend a truck is coming at 3am for a dripping tap.
One call covers plumbing and HVAC. Talk to somebody who has been doing this for decades.
