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:
Forty-three percent of the roughly 80,844 housing units in Alexandria were built before 1970, and the most common decade built is the 1970s. Six of the 26 areas we cover have a higher pre-1970 share, and none of them have a sewer rule as strange as this one.
That count takes in every apartment and condominium in the city, so read it as a city-wide profile rather than 80,844 single-family basements. Nine percent of the stock predates 1940, another ten percent went up in the 1940s, and 22% has arrived since 2000.
| Built | Share of homes | Plumbed with, typically |
|---|---|---|
| pre-1940 | 9% | Galvanized supply, cast iron drains, sometimes a lead service line |
| 1940s | 10% | Galvanized supply, cast iron drains |
| 1950s | 10% | Galvanized supply turning to copper, cast iron drains |
| 1960s | 14% | Copper supply, cast iron drains |
| 1970s | 17% | Copper supply, cast iron drains turning to PVC |
| 1980s | 10% | Copper or polybutylene supply, PVC drains |
| 1990s | 9% | Polybutylene until 1995, then copper and CPVC |
| 2000s | 11% | Copper, CPVC and early PEX |
| 2010s | 10% | PEX supply, PVC drains |
This is the most useful thing on this page, and we have not seen another contractor here put it in writing. Responsibility splits by installation date, and the City publishes both halves. Installed before 1 July 1955, the owner maintains and repairs the lateral from the curb to the property. Installed on or after 1 July 1955, the owner maintains and repairs everything from the property to the sewer main.
Read that twice, because the older house carries the smaller obligation. In a 1960s or 1970s build the pipe is yours out to the main under the street, and that is where the money sits when it fails. So we ask about installation date before quoting a lateral replacement.
Roughly 540 acres of the Old Town area sits on a combined sewer, where sewage and stormwater share one pipe that discharges through four outfalls in wet weather. The rest of the city is fully separated. A 2017 state law required remediation by 1 July 2026, which the RiverRenew tunnel to AlexRenew was built to deliver.
Why that matters: on a combined-sewer block, a backup that only happens in heavy rain may be the main surcharging and pushing back up your lateral rather than roots or grease. Cabling will not fix that. Outside those 540 acres, the same symptom points at groundwater getting into your own lateral through failed joints.
If your home has had a basement backup after heavy rain, the City offers 50% of the cost of installing a backflow preventer on the sewer side, up to a maximum of $2,000, installed by a licensed plumber. We hold Virginia Class A licence #2705131990, and we will tell you where the valve has to sit relative to your lowest fixture to do anything at all.
With 43% of the stock predating 1970, the materials we meet most are galvanized steel on the supply side and cast iron on the drain side. Galvanized corrodes inward and the bore closes up over decades, so a pressure complaint in an older house here is almost never the fixtures. New fixtures on a closed-up line do nothing. A repipe does.
Heating and air has its own signature in the older half of the city. Whatever replaced the original system was fitted into a house never designed to carry ducts, so the air went where there was room rather than where it was needed. The room that will not hold temperature is usually a duct and return problem, and a new condenser buys an expensive version of the same complaint. Radiators are common here, which is boiler work.
Virginia American Water serves the Alexandria District as a consecutive system, PWS ID VA6510010. It owns the pipes but treats nothing, buying finished water from Fairfax Water's Corbalis plant on the Potomac and Griffith plant on the Occoquan Reservoir. The blend moves, which is why the hardness range is so wide. The 2025 water quality report shows a highest total hardness result of 191 ppm, with results running from 78 to 191 ppm. No grains-per-gallon figure is published here, so we will not convert it for you. At the top of that range you get scale in a water heater and crusted aerators. Whether that justifies treatment is your call.
Be careful what you have been promised on pressure. The tariff guarantees a minimum of 20 psi under normal operating conditions and explicitly does not guarantee sufficient or uniform pressure, with booster pumps in low areas and regulators in high ones at your expense. No typical figure is published. On lead, the utility publishes that it has no lead mains and that around 2,641 utility-owned service lines here were identified in 2018 as lead, presumed lead or unknown, since reduced by 25%. No replacement deadline is published, and the utility holds no records on customer-owned lines.
Connecting to a city sewer main needs a sanitary sewer lateral connection permit from Transportation and Environmental Services. One application covers the connection, the excavation and any lane or sidewalk closure, and the work must conform to city standard details CSLC-1A and CSLC-1B. No separate fee is published for it. The fee schedule effective 1 July 2025 sets a $95.00 minimum, with appliance and equipment replacement at $19.50 per $1,000 of construction cost, or that minimum, whichever is greater.
Now the honest part. Nothing the City publishes states plainly whether a straightforward water heater replacement in a house needs a trade permit. The only clear mention covers building permits in condominium units, which does not generalise. We confirm it with the Permit Center for your address rather than guessing.
We are about twenty-five minutes up from the shop in Woodbridge, and Old Town is its own discipline: narrow streets, parking restrictions, buildings old enough that nothing is where the drawings say. We plan access before the day rather than turning up and discovering it. Del Ray, the West End and Eisenhower Valley span the whole age range. If you have a testable backflow assembly, its annual test is reported through BSI Online.
One call covers plumbing and HVAC. Talk to somebody who has been doing this for decades.
