Plumbing

Hard water, and what it quietly costs

Water hardness here depends on which system serves you, and the groundwater-fed systems run genuinely hard.

Horsham's water authority publishes hardness of 200-350 mg/L, averaging 275 — about 16 grains per gallon, which is classified very hard. Buckingham Township, drawing entirely from wells, reports 100-150 mg/L, or 7 to 10 grains. If you are on a private well the number is whatever your well is, and nobody knows it until it is tested.

The practical effect is on equipment life rather than on any single repair. Scale accumulates in tank water heaters and shortens them; it is harder on tankless units, which is why most manufacturers require periodic descaling and some make it a condition of warranty. It furs up fixture cartridges and shower valves. When a water heater here fails noticeably earlier than the number on the sticker, hardness is usually a large part of why.

Lead service lines — an active programme, not a historical note

This is live work happening right now in parts of Bucks County.

Aqua Pennsylvania has replaced close to 3,000 lead and galvanized service lines since 2024, roughly 470 of them in Bucks County, at no direct cost to the customer, under federal and state requirements. Around 2,100 test holes were scheduled in Bristol alone. If you are an Aqua customer in one of those municipalities, this is worth knowing before you pay anyone to investigate your service line.

The Levittown area is the interesting exception. The Lower Bucks County Joint Municipal Authority states its system is lead free because its rules have required Type K copper or cast iron since 1952 — the year the development started going up. Different vintage, different problem.

Wells and septic are a county matter

Building permits come from your township. Sewage and well permits do not — those come from the county health department, which catches people out.

This affects more households than you might expect. Doylestown Township reports that over half of its 6,000 households rely on private wells, and its Ordinance 299 requires septic pumping and inspection every three years by an approved hauler, plus coliform and E. coli testing every three years on private-well properties. Those are enforced obligations, not recommendations.

How old your house is changes the job

Bucks County's housing stock is roughly 9.8% pre-1940 and another 19.8% from the 1940s and 1950s; Montgomery County is broadly similar in age but with considerably more multifamily. What that means in practice depends on where you are standing.

• The older boroughs. Doylestown's historic district alone has 1,055 contributing buildings and Norristown's around 1,900, with construction starting in 1800. Cast iron waste stacks, galvanized supply lines and decades of partial repairs are normal here. Access is usually the cost driver, not the part.

• Levittown. The 17,311 homes built between 1952 and 1958 span four municipalities and were built slab-on-grade with no basements. That single fact changes almost everything about plumbing work there — there is no crawlspace to run a new line through, and a repair under the slab is a different job from a repair in a basement.

• The 1960s-1990s suburbs. The largest share of both counties. Generally straightforward, with the usual questions about original water heaters and whatever the last owner did themselves.

When you need a permit

Pennsylvania's code requires a permit for the installation, alteration, repair, removal or replacement of any plumbing system. "Ordinary repairs" are exempt — but the regulation specifically excludes adding to or relocating water supply, sewer or drainage piping from that exemption. So swapping a failed water heater for the same thing in the same place may be treated differently from moving it, and any project that relocates a fixture needs a permit.

There is an emergency provision worth knowing: equipment may be replaced before the permit is issued as long as the application is filed within three business days. Nobody has to sit without hot water waiting for an office to open.

Permits here are municipal, not county. Pennsylvania's Uniform Construction Code sets the floor, but over 90% of the state's 2,562 municipalities administer and enforce it themselves, each with its own office, fees and inspection scheduling. Every municipality in Bucks County has opted in. Municipalities that opted in before 1999 may also carry local amendments that exceed the state baseline — and the state openly says it has no record of what those amendments are, so there is no central place to look them up.

One thing worth knowing in advance: the sewage and well permits go the other way. Those are issued by the county health department, not your township. A project that touches both — a bathroom addition on a septic system, say — needs two offices rather than one.

Pennsylvania requires anyone doing more than $5,000 a year of home improvement work to register with the Attorney General's office. Registration numbers start with "PA", carry minimum insurance requirements, and are searchable on the state's public register. Contracts for work over $500 must also give you three days to cancel. Asking for the number is reasonable and every registered contractor expects it.