Plumbing in Buffalo, NY: Older Homes and Combined Sewers

Emergency plumbing in the city of Buffalo

Buffalo has the oldest and most varied housing stock in Erie County, and that shows up in the plumbing more than in almost anything else. A 19th-century wood-frame house on the West Side, a 1920s double in Black Rock and a post-war ranch out towards the University District are three different plumbing systems with three different failure patterns, and they can sit within a couple of miles of each other.

That is the practical reality of working here. There is no single typical Buffalo house, so there is no single typical Buffalo plumbing emergency. What there is instead is a set of recurring problems tied to age, density and the way the city drains.

Common local problems

A backup that happens only in heavy weather and clears once the rain stops points at surcharge in the public sewer rather than a blockage on the property. Our sewer line backup page covers how we tell the two apart.

Two-flat properties

The upper-and-lower two-flat is one of the most characteristic building types in the city. From a plumbing point of view the important thing is that both units usually share a single water service and a single sewer lateral. A blockage in that lateral affects both households at once, and the question of who is responsible for the repair depends on ownership rather than on which unit noticed first. It is worth establishing that before there is an emergency rather than during one.

Freeze and thaw

Western New York delivers a reliable freeze-thaw cycle every year, and it works on buried pipe as much as on the pipe inside the house. Ground movement through repeated freezing shifts joints in older clay laterals and opens the gaps that roots then find. Above ground, unheated basements and uninsulated exterior wall cavities are where frozen pipes turn up.

Shutoff valves in older houses

This deserves its own note, because it is the single thing that most often turns a contained problem into an expensive one in older city housing.

The main shutoff in a pre-war house is usually an old gate valve, a round handle rather than a lever, sitting on the incoming service near the meter in the basement. Gate valves seize. A valve that has not been turned in thirty years may not close, and worse, may snap or start weeping if it is forced. That is a genuinely common discovery at two in the morning with water coming through a ceiling.

Two things help. First, find your shutoff now, while nothing is wrong, and make sure everyone in the house knows where it is. Second, if it will not move under reasonable hand pressure, do not lever it, tell us when you call, and we will come prepared to isolate the supply another way. Individual fixture shutoffs under sinks and behind toilets are worth the same check, since those are often the older chrome-plated type that seize just as readily.

Winter in the city

Dense housing brings one advantage in a cold snap: attached and semi-attached properties lose heat more slowly than a detached house standing alone in the wind. It also brings a disadvantage, which is that a lot of city housing has plumbing running through unheated basements, enclosed porches and attic spaces that were never designed to be kept warm.

The pattern we see through a hard freeze is fairly consistent. Calls start a day or two into the cold, cluster around exterior wall runs and outside taps, and then spike again as the thaw begins and splits that formed under the ice start to leak. A property standing empty between tenants, or a room with the radiator turned off, is over-represented in both waves.