I’ve got a 70 space park I’m putting under contract that has old galvanized water line leaks. Park was built in the mid 50’s. Some spot repairs have been made over the years but it sounds like about 2/3 of the park still needs redone. The leaks are costing the community about $15K per year.I thought NuFlow might be the answer I was looking for until I got a ballpark quote of $225k-250K. That seems like a staggering amount of money.I’ve not got a quote yet on actual replacement of water lines with pex. I would like to know what other park owners experiences and thoughts are.
Call in American Leak Detection. That’ll cost you under $1,000 to find the leaks. You can then repair just the water leaks where they occur, rather than trying to do something to all the pipes. This will be a more economical solution, provided there are a reasonable number of leaks. If ALD indicates you have leaks ‘everywhere’ then you may have little choice but NuFlow or complete replacement. It seems calling ALD might be a cheap ‘second opinion’ if you are otherwise being told you have a six-figure problem.My 2 cents worth,-jl-
We have used ALD and generally they find the problem within 3 hours. All our systems are sch 40 including our sewage system. If they are over 70 years it its time to PLAN to replace all the lines and when you sell that will be a plus instead of a big negative.
We also received a quote from NuFlow and it was a staggering $500K. The replacement cost was around $150K. NuFlow will unfortunately not work for us.
For reasons I’ve previously stated, I seriously doubt the NuFlow system would be very reliable, or a long term fix.
We’ve only replaced one water system in over 200 parks, and I don’t think you need to go where you’re headed. Use ALD and fix the leaks. If the park loses $600 per month in leaks (I’m assuming a quick ALD find and fix will more than half your current amount), you are still way ahead paying that then replacing the water system. That $600 per month at a 10% cap rate is only $72,000 in punishment for having those leaks – far lower than the cost to replace.But why do you think you have leaks to begin with? Where did you come up with $15,000? Is that the difference between the master meter reading and the sum of the sub-meters? If so, it may just be that the sub-meters are not working properly, or the manager is not reading the meters correctly. Before you do anything, get the facts on where the water is really going devoid of human error. The seller’s numbers are normally massively off and they have given no scientific thought to anything.