Repiping in Long Beach, CA

Long Beach issues plumbing permits online and can issue one automatically, in a single step, outside regular business hours. There is a condition attached, and it is the reason to ask a bidder about it before you ask about pipe.

The city restricts online permitting to registered, licensed California contractors who hold a pre-authorized personal identification number issued by the department. A contractor with that number can apply and be issued a permit in one step, even when City Hall is closed. A contractor without one, and a homeowner in every case, goes to the permit counter downtown during business hours.

On a repipe, that difference is a schedule rather than a formality. The work is inspected before the walls close, so the permit has to exist before the pipe is covered, and a bid that assumes a counter visit is assuming a day that has to come out of somewhere.

The second thing to understand is what the permit line on an estimate is made of. Long Beach charges a minimum permit fee that is well above the per-fixture rate, adds a processing fee to every application, and applies percentage surcharges on top of that. A bidder who has priced the permit off the per-fixture line in the fee schedule has priced a fraction of it. The published schedule is the place to check, and the arithmetic is not difficult once you know it has three parts rather than one.

There is a way to use that on a bid already in front of you. A permit line, based on the per-fixture rate multiplied by your fixture count, has been built from one part of a three-part schedule. Ask what the other two came to.

Which raises two questions with real weight. Is the permit inside this number, and are you registered to pull it online here? The answers separate the companies that work in Long Beach from the ones that will be learning the process on your job.

PEX is flexible, so it can usually be threaded through framing that copper would have to be cut around, and every opening avoided is an opening nobody has to patch. Patching is a substantial part of a repipe scope. Copper is rigid, familiar to every inspector and every future plumber, and it takes heat without complaint, which matters around a water heater. Both are permitted materials here. Anyone presenting one of them as simply correct is describing their own habits.

The choice usually comes down to the building. A single-story house with an accessible attic favors PEX because the runs go overhead and the walls are barely touched. A two-story with finished ceilings below the upstairs bathrooms is a different calculation, and so is a slab foundation where the old lines are under concrete, and the new ones will go overhead regardless of material. We walk the building before recommending. The recommendation includes the reason.

One thing to be clear about: a repipe does not fix a drain problem, a sewer problem, or pressure at the property. It replaces the supply piping inside the building. If someone has told you a repipe will solve a symptom that lives outside that boundary, get a second opinion before anything is signed.