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:
McLean CDP holds about 17,833 homes, and the 1960s built more of them than any other decade. Thirty-nine percent predate 1970, eighth highest of the 26 areas we cover, and that number hides more than it tells here.
Plenty of McLean houses have been stripped to the studs or taken down and rebuilt, and a Census share cannot show you that. A 1962 house with a 2015 kitchen reads as new from the inside, then behaves like 1962 the first time you ask it to do two things at once. New fixtures on original piping is what we find.
Nineteen percent of McLean's housing went up in the 1960s, another 17% in the 1970s. Those are the years when copper supply was becoming standard, galvanized steel was still common early on, and cast iron was what everybody used for waste. Build era is not material and we will not guess at your walls. It tells us what to check first. Our pipe materials by decade page has the rest.
Galvanized steel fails from the inside out. Rust grows inward until the bore is a fraction of what it was, and the symptom is not a leak, it is pressure that has been quietly getting worse for fifteen years. Sixty years is a fair life for a cast iron drain, and McLean's 1960s stock is at that mark.
Here is the specific trap. Somebody ran new copper to the primary bath and tied it into the original trunk in the basement. The new branch is perfect. The trunk feeding it is not. All that did was move the bottleneck upstream, and it got harder to diagnose because half the system is obviously new. We have been in McLean houses where successive remodels each replaced a section and nobody touched the choke point.
A partial repipe is right when you know where the restriction is and the rest is sound. It is wrong when it gets chosen because it is cheaper and nobody put a gauge on anything first. If the trunk is the problem, a whole-house repipe is the only version that works.
Size changes the failure mode rather than delaying it. Long runs put more pipe between meter and fixture, so a given amount of corrosion costs more pressure, and more bathrooms crowd one trunk. A restriction a small rambler would shrug off shows up in a large house as a shower that dies when the washing machine fills. Two gauge readings and some leak detection locate it.
Hot water is the subject that keeps coming back in our McLean work. Long runs to distant bathrooms, recirculation loops installed and never balanced, gas lines sized for an earlier house, and a real case for tankless that comes up here more than elsewhere. We will also say when tankless is wrong. Feeding one off a gas line that cannot carry it is worse than the tank you own.
Fairfax Water has published something about this area specifically. Because of pressure zone changes from its Second-High Pressure Zone Expansion Project, the utility says some customers in the area may experience water pressure greater than 80 PSI, which may create a need for a pressure reducing valve. The area it names is McLean and Falls Church. That is the utility's own note, not our guess, and it is the only published pressure statement we know of that points at this corner of the county rather than the whole system.
Everything else published is about design rather than your house. The 20 psi minimum at the main is a state health regulation and the 35 psi residual figure is a design criterion for new subdivisions. Neither is a household number, and no household number is published. A PRV is required in new construction at 80 psi or more, and for an existing home Fairfax Water says plainly it is not required.
The water is hard enough to matter. Fairfax Water's own FAQ calls it "moderately hard to hard (5 - 10 grains per gallon, or 84 - 170 mg/l)", a published range rather than a reading for your address. You notice it as scale in a tankless heat exchanger and aerators closing up. With a dozen fixtures that multiplies, so treatment is worth asking about.
Renovation changes the duct system too. Add a wing, raise a ceiling, close off a stair, and the return path stops working. Rooms that will not hold temperature are usually an air problem, not an equipment problem, and a new condenser does nothing for them. Heat pumps suit these houses, but no equipment fixes a balance problem a wall came down for.
Fairfax County requires annual testing of testable backflow assemblies by somebody who is both DPOR-certified as a Backflow Prevention Device Worker and on the county's Authorized Vendor List. Both, not either. We are not on that list, so we will not take your annual test here. Better you read that now than after the call. Installation and replacement are separate, need a permit even like for like, and we do those.
Home base is Woodbridge, about forty minutes out, and Langley, Chesterbrook, Salona and the Tysons edge are regular ground. Plumbing and heating and air sit under one Class A licence, #2705131990, so a water heater swap that becomes a venting question stays with the same crew.
One call covers plumbing and HVAC. Talk to somebody who has been doing this for decades.
