ᐅ Replacing surface-mounted water pipes

Good morning everyone,

My husband and I were recently chatting and – just hypothetically – wondered if it would be possible to renew all the water and wastewater pipes as surface-mounted installations. So, the old pipes would be disconnected in the basement but would otherwise remain inside the walls throughout the house, while the new pipes would simply be installed on top and then covered. Is this feasible?

Disadvantages:
- The room would not be fully utilized and would become smaller
- For the next generation, it would probably mean double the work...

Advantages:
- Less mess
- Cheaper
- Faster

We would really appreciate your thoughts on this.

Best regards

You will need to cover the surface-mounted wiring; otherwise, it will always look like a construction site. This will create a small, unattractive wall projection in the room.

In our existing house, two soil stacks are currently set up this way, and changing this will be a priority during renovation because it is annoying.

I wouldn’t do it—that’s “saving in the wrong place.”

Do you have options to route the pipes differently than surface-mounted? When my parents renovated the ground floor bathroom, the water pipes also needed replacing unexpectedly (copper corrosion just before the final stage). They routed the pipes for the ground floor along the basement ceiling, and the pipe for the upper floor bathroom goes up through the chimney. You can’t see any of it.

Should the wastewater pipes also be replaced?
Exposed pipes obviously require significantly more space than the thinner supply lines.

In our case, the pipes run in the basement (which, on our sloped site, is partially living space) on the surface, under the ceiling (and can be covered there, although they are not yet). From there, the runs above are shorter, and those are all installed concealed within the walls.

What I mean is:
Maybe it makes sense to take a different approach for each?

Yes, all the pipes, including the wastewater system, need to be replaced. There is actually an old chimney running from the basement through the kitchen and then up to the bathroom. It would of course be ideal if that could be used for the piping.

As I said, these are just initial thoughts. The house still needs to be purchased.

And of course, the whole thing needs to be covered. But not just the base; the entire wall should be built as a drywall partition in front of the existing wall. So, the old wall with tiles, then the new water and wastewater pipes, construction timber or aluminum profiles, followed by a gypsum fiber board, and finally plaster or tiles.

This is not fully thought through yet because I’m not sure if it generally makes sense. I mean, what happens to the old pipes over time? Will they become outdated somehow? Could this weaken the wall over the course of 30 to 40 years?

I am not a professional, but I have 50 years of hands-on experience and would NOT worry at all about the old pipes inside the walls. Nothing will happen!

What seems less ideal about the idea—aside from the loss of space—is that drywall is not very strong. If you want to hang something on the wall, it either won’t work at all or it has to be done properly (knowing where the studs are and so on).