The First Pipe the House Ever Had

Plenty of these homes still drink through galvanized steel laid in the fifties and sixties, and galvanized has one career arc: it rusts inward, year after year, until a pipe that started at three-quarters of an inch is passing water through a bore the width of a pencil. The symptom is unmistakable once you know it, weak pressure at every fixture, hot and cold alike, because the choke point sits upstream of the whole house. Indoor pipes get blamed first and replaced sometimes, and the shower still whispers, because the real culprit never entered the building. Testing at the meter and at the house entry reads the line directly, and when it has finished its working life, copper or PEX takes over and the pressure comes back like a utility upgrade.