Somebody Painted the Waste Stack

I was in the basement of an older Weymouth single family, looking at the plumbing. The waste piping in this house is the original cast iron.

It was leaking. There was active leaking in the floorboards around the main stack, rust blobs on the pipe, and somebody had spray painted the whole thing.

The leak is somewhere along the vertical main waste stack. I could not pin the source down and said so in the report. What I could see was wet floorboards at the base of the stack, rust blobs on the iron, and fresh paint over all of it. The paint is what tells you the condition was known to somebody before I got there.

The stack as it runs, painted multiple times, multiple colors. The prolonged leaking has all but destroyed the floor structure here.

Cast iron waste pipe deteriorates from the inside out. Corrosion, scaling and thinning walls progress inside the pipe well before anything shows on the outside. So a leak on the exterior surface is not the beginning of the problem. It is the point where an internal process that has been running for years finally came through the wall.

What I recommended is that the entire cast iron waste line be scoped by a qualified licensed plumber before closing, to assess the interior condition and plan for repair or replacement. Replacement of cast iron can be a significant expense, particularly for buried or concealed lines, which is exactly why it is worth knowing the scope before the deal closes rather than after.

Corrosion crusting through the pipe wall and paint then bleeding onto the floor.

My opinion is about the paint. Painting a leaking pipe does not slow it down and does not buy anybody anything. All it does is cover the true condition until the next person finds it the hard way, and in this case the next person was a buyer who now has to price a job nobody warned them about.

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