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:
48% of the roughly 10,102 homes in Sterling were built in the 1980s and 1990s, the years polybutylene was going into houses across Northern Virginia. Only 9% have gone up since 2000, so almost nothing newer has arrived to dilute that.
Sterling is two places as far as the pipe is concerned, and the first thing we ask on the phone is which one you are in. Sterling Park came out of the ground in the sixties and early seventies. Cascades, Countryside and the development toward Dulles Town Center are a generation behind it. Same postal address, different job.
Polybutylene went into American houses from 1978 until about 1995, a window sitting almost exactly on top of when most of Sterling was built. Grey plastic pipe, usually stamped PB2110, crimped onto brass or plastic fittings. Nobody can tell you from your address whether you have it. What we can tell you is how it fails: not as a warning drip, but as a fitting letting go with the house empty.
So look rather than wait. Pull the access panel at a tub, check the lines into the water heater, look under the kitchen sink, find the main shutoff. If it is grey, get ahead of it. A planned whole-house repipe is a job where you pick the week. The unplanned version arrives with a restoration company attached.
| Built | Share of homes | Plumbed with, typically |
|---|---|---|
| 1960s | 15% | Copper supply, cast iron drains |
| 1970s | 26% | Copper supply, cast iron drains turning to PVC |
| 1980s | 29% | Copper or polybutylene supply, PVC drains |
| 1990s | 19% | Polybutylene until 1995, then copper and CPVC |
About 15% of Sterling's homes date to the 1960s and another 26% to the 1970s, far more old housing than Ashburn has, which is why sewer work is one of the two jobs we do most here. Cast iron stacks in those houses are around sixty years old. Anything laid before about 1972 can have an Orangeburg lateral out to the street, fibre pipe that goes oval and flattens rather than cracking. A line cabled twice a year that clogs in the same spot is not roots.
Sterling is on Loudoun Water, a political subdivision of the Commonwealth rather than a department of the county. Loudoun Water owns the main up to and including the corporation stop, the service pipe, the meter box and the meter. Your side of the meter is yours. You maintain the building sewer, and where it sits in public right of way Loudoun Water has sole control over correcting defects and bills you for faulty materials or workmanship.
Permits come from Loudoun County Building and Development. On the fee schedule effective 1 July 2022, a water service, new or replacement, is published at $70, sewer lines at $70, re-inspections at $30 each. There is no water heater line item on that schedule, whatever you have been told. A heater swap falls under the general plumbing permit for adding, replacing or relocating equipment: $70 for a one or two family dwelling, $105 commercial, two inspections included. Gas work may add a separate $70 gas permit.
Loudoun Water treats Potomac River water, drawing on Goose Creek as needed, at the Trap Rock facility in Leesburg. The utility's published hardness scale, from a July 2011 water quality document, puts the supply at 4.9 to 9.9 grains per gallon, 80 to 170 mg/L, moderately hard to hard.
That band does very little to copper or PEX and quite a lot to a tank. Scale settles on the bottom of a water heater and insulates the burner from the water it is meant to heat, so it fires longer for the same shower. In an eighties house the heater is already on its second or third life, sitting on sediment nobody has flushed. Whether a softener pays for itself depends on the house.
Lead is the worry you can mostly set down. Loudoun Water's service line inventory, accepted by the Virginia Department of Health, contains no lead service lines, and the utility states its sources do not contain lead. Properties not physically verified are designated non-lead by predictive model. Lead solder inside an older house is a separate question.
Two code numbers are worth carrying. The Virginia Department of Health requires a minimum of 20 psi in the distribution system, and the Uniform Statewide Building Code requires a pressure-reducing valve where pressure at the service tap exceeds 80 psi. Loudoun Water notes most houses built after 1972 already have one, and with 15% of Sterling from the 1960s and 26% from the 1970s, that date cuts through the middle of this town. In the older half a PRV was retrofitted by somebody, and a tired one eats fixtures.
Backflow catches Sterling homeowners out. Loudoun Water requires an approved device on all fire suppression and irrigation systems, tested at installation and annually after that by a certified tester, and since 1 January 2023 that tester must hold a Virginia DPOR tradesman certification. Fail, and you have 30 days from notification to repair or replace it and retest, at your expense. We install and replace backflow assemblies. We do not perform the annual test.
Nobody in Sterling is still running the furnace that came with the house. What is in your closet is a second or third system, often chosen by whoever was cheapest the year the last one quit, and the common finding is equipment sized for a different house than the one it is in. Oversized is not generous. It short-cycles and wears out early, and it never runs long enough to pull the humidity out of July air. Where an R-22 condenser is still limping along, topping it up every summer is money that does not come back. We would rather price a heat pump honestly.
One call covers plumbing and HVAC. Talk to somebody who has been doing this for decades.
