How to tell whether your Ottawa home has Poly B

You do not need a plumber for the first pass. Ten minutes with a flashlight is usually enough to know whether this is your problem or someone else’s.

What Poly B looks like

Poly B — polybutylene — is a flexible plastic supply pipe, almost always grey in Canadian homes, though blue, white and black were also made. It is soft enough to bend by hand in a wide arc. The giveaway is the fitting: a metal insert with a crimped copper or brass ring squeezed over the pipe, rather than a soldered joint or a modern plastic clamp.

Some pipe carries a stamp along its length reading PB2110, or a CSA B137.8 reference. Plenty of it carries nothing legible after thirty-odd years in a basement. Grey, flexible, crimped copper ring is enough to act on.

Five places to look, in order

The water heater and the main shut-off. The most exposed pipe in the house, and the section that has taken the most heat.
Under the basement stairs and along the rim joist. Even in a finished basement, builders left service gaps here.
Under every sink, at the shut-off valves. Open the vanity doors and look at what the stop valve is attached to.
Behind the laundry tub and washer box. Often the only spot upstairs plumbing shows itself.
The ceiling access hatch or a pot light. If the basement ceiling is drywalled, dropping one light fixture reveals the joist bay.

If the basement is fully finished and nothing is visible, stop looking. A plumber who does this weekly will find it in minutes, and the identification visit is normally free when replacement is on the table.

What it is not

Modern PEX is also plastic and also flexible, which causes most of the confusion. PEX is stiffer, usually red, blue or white, and its fittings use a stainless clamp or a copper crimp ring on a clearly modern brass insert. PEX in a house built in 1985 usually means somebody already repiped part of it.

Kitec is orange and blue, with heavy brass fittings, and shows up in Ottawa homes built from roughly 1995 to 2007 — a newer wave than Poly B and, in this city, arguably more common. Here is how to tell them apart.

Grey ABS or drain pipe is rigid and much larger in diameter. Drain lines are not part of this conversation.

What to do once you have found it

Take two photos: one close enough to read any stamp, one wide enough to show the fitting. Note the year the house was built and how many bathrooms it has. That is all a contractor needs for a first useful number, and all our form asks for.

Then, before you do anything else, check where you stand with your insurer — that is usually what sets the deadline. What Ontario insurers do about Poly B.