Poly B Replacement in Vancouver, BC
If your Vancouver home was built between 1978 and 1995, the grey pipe behind the drywall is very likely Poly B. We replace it in PEX-A and hand you the paperwork your insurer asks for.
If your Vancouver home was built between 1978 and 1995, the grey pipe behind the drywall is very likely Poly B. We replace it in PEX-A and hand you the paperwork your insurer asks for.
Poly B is the grey plastic supply pipe stamped PB2110 that went into Canadian homes from 1978 until roughly 1995. It was designed for about 25 years of service, which means every system still in the ground in Vancouver is past it.
Vancouver is the city where we most often get called out to a house that turns out not to have Poly B — plenty of the detached stock is old enough to have skipped it entirely. It is the 80s and 90s condos, townhomes and basement-suite conversions where we find it.
It fails from the inside out — chlorine in the municipal supply makes the pipe wall brittle, and the original grey acetal fittings are the weakest point in the whole system. Nothing about that is visible until water appears somewhere it should not.
We replace the lot in PEX-A, plan the routes first so we open as few walls as possible, and finish with the permit, the inspection record and photographs.
Kitsilano · Dunbar · Kerrisdale · Mount Pleasant · Marpole · Renfrew-Collingwood — and everywhere else in Vancouver.
Permitted work in Vancouver goes through the City of Vancouver. We pull it and book the inspection as part of the job — you do not deal with the city.
The full rundown: why Poly B fails, what replacement involves, how long it takes and what it costs.
How Poly B replacement works →Much of Vancouver’s detached housing predates the Poly B window entirely — which is why we also find plenty of original galvanised and early copper here. The catch is the 1980s and early 90s: the condos, townhomes and rebuilds from those years sit squarely inside it, and so do a lot of basement suites added in the same period.
Older Vancouver homes tend to have unheated crawlspaces and long runs against exterior walls, which is where the cold snaps find them.
We will confirm whether it is Poly B, what condition it is in, and what replacement would cost in Vancouver. No charge.