What's Your Pipe Type? Program

Helping Homeowners Go Lead-Free 

Welcome to What’s Your Pipe Type. Our goal with creating this program is not only to comply with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) enhanced Lead and Copper Rule, but to truly partner with you, our customers, to ensure your drinking water is safe and free of lead. We can’t do it alone – we need your help. That’s because water leaving our filtration is lead free. So where does lead come from and what can you do to reduce your exposure? Lead can dissolve into the water from plumbing materials. That’s why it’s so important to know your pipe type! Please take a few minutes to explore the information on this page and learn more about what you can do to go lead free. 

Developing a Comprehensive Inventory of Water Service Line Material 

As part of this effort, we have extensively reviewed plumbing records dating back more than 100 years to create an inventory of the materials used for utility- and customer-owned water service lines. A water service line is the pipe that carries water from WSSC Water’s water main to your property. Great news: Our records indicate more than 96 percent of water service lines in our service area are not lead. So our focus is on verifying the pipe type for the less than 4 percent of our customers that are either lead, unknown or defined as Galvanized Requiring Replacement. If we find a service line that contains lead – either on the utility or customer-owned portions – our goal is to replace them all ahead of EPA’s 2037 deadline. 

More Than a Century of Protecting Public Health  

For more than 106 years, WSSC Water has taken proactive steps to ensure water quality and safety. In 1954, we banned the use of lead as a water service line construction material. And for the past several decades, we’ve been adding a corrosion inhibitor to the water supply to create a protective coating on the inside of pipes to minimize the risk of lead dissolving into the water from plumbing materials. These public safety measures are showing clear results. Our water continuously meets all standards of the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act. In fact, we have never had a drinking water quality violation in our history. Additionally, in our latest round of Lead and Copper testing from homes throughout our service area, our results were well below the action levels set by the EPA.  

If you have any questions, please contact us at PipeType@wsscwater.com.