Preface

SageWater is the nation’s leading pipe replacement company. With more than 30 years in the business, we have repiped over 100,000 occupied units and replaced more than 35 million feet of pipe along the way. As the largest and only nationwide company focusing exclusively on pipe replacement, we constantly try to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. With many loyal customers who have hired us time and again to repipe various properties in their portfolio, we are always looking for ways to improve and to better serve our clients. Like many companies, part of our innovation strategy involves regularly evaluating new technology, and over the years, we have looked at pipe lining as a potential tool to add to our portfolio of services.

As we went through that pipe lining evaluation process, we encountered a number of concerns that we simply couldn’t ignore, which ultimately led to our decision not to include pipe lining as a component of our core business.

It is our opinion, based on first-hand experience, extensive research, hundreds of hours of due diligence and numerous negotiations with different lining providers and installers, that the risks associated with lining pipes within the building envelope are simply too great for us to consider offering pipe lining to our clients. From health concerns, to quality control issues and invasiveness, to reliability, we cannot in good conscience recommend this solution to our customers for most piping problems.

Despite our conclusions, we continue to encounter properties struggling to evaluate pipe lining as an alternative to repiping due to the scarcity of helpful information. The limited amount of publicly available information about the potential risks of lining solutions has led some owners and property managers to make purchase decisions based primarily on marketing materials provided by the lining vendors.

As a result, we felt compelled to write this paper. In sharing our thoughts and opinions, we hope to shed some light on the limitations and challenges of pipe lining that we have discovered, and to provide insightful considerations that we believe property owners should take into account before deciding to line or repipe their community.

We would like to thank all of those who contributed or have published information we referenced in this paper, including numerous engineers, construction managers, property managers, property owners, lawyers, trade associations, governmental institutions, third party evaluators, and publishers of industry standards as well as the pipe lining manufacturers and installers themselves. In the end, we hope that properties struggling to solve their own pipe problems find this paper helpful as they endeavor to evaluate the pros and cons of various pipe lining and repiping options for their communities.