We are in the process of moving. The new house (like our current house) has galvanized plumbing. We are planning to gut and redo both upstairs bathrooms. Is it possible to just replace that piping with PEX and not do the entire house.

Hoping to do upstairs plumbing while we gut the bathrooms and then do the downstairs at a later time, rather than having to do the entire house. Just not sure if its an all or nothing type of project.

Since you're going to be paying an actual plumber and not a company that just specializes in repipes, I would be surprised if they had any issue with doing a partial job.

One thing I would say is that, if you're going to have a plumber in your house and a drywall finisher, I would suggest you get a price to do as much of the repipe as you can easily. Unless you have pipe running behind tile finishes that they can't get to, the marginal cost of adding a couple more drops and patching up the resulting holes will probably be cheaper now than any time in the future.

i am sure a plumber would do partial, but if you can swing it financially change them all at once, now, you'll be pissed if you have to do the rest later and wish you did earlier. it's rusting even if its towards the end of the era it was installed (early 90's was the end). the process makes a good amount of holes and is a decent mess...

You can definitely do partial. We replaced galvanized with PEX throughout most of our house in 2020, but probably 20% remains that was more difficult to access/change within the scope of what we were doing at the time. We'll replace that in a future construction project.

That said, I agree with the other posters that if you don't have realistic plans for a follow-up phase, I would definitely explore replacing it all now.

DRE06 said:

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We are in the process of moving. The new house (like our current house) has galvanized plumbing. We are planning to gut and redo both upstairs bathrooms. Is it possible to just replace that piping with PEX and not do the entire house.

Hoping to do upstairs plumbing while we gut the bathrooms and then do the downstairs at a later time, rather than having to do the entire house. Just not sure if its an all or nothing type of project.

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Age of new house? If old, do it all now. You are just asking for new leaks in old galvanized pipe. Plus doing it all now, you can skip any retrofit or tearout of the old by just running new pex. Pex is extremely easy to work with and jobs running them are much faster than traditional old piping.

I had a leak develop in 50 year old galvanized about 1 month after the big freeze. Outstanding timing considering all the repipe shops were booked 6 months out and the plumbing aisles at the box stores looked like bombs went off in them. I managed to piece together some sharkbite fittings and pex to get my leak fixed and water running again. I say all that to say that once you start taking out old galvanized don't be surprised if things snowball. I tried cutting the leaking pipe and had elbows and tees break on either side. The old stuff gets brittle so don't think it'll go exactly to plan even with a plumber working on it!

I did a partial(all horizontal), with a plumber.

After they left I went up and tore out most of it, and there was no corrosion at all(45 year old)

Do you really want to drink the water coming out of the corroded galvanized pipe? Kids?

Picard said:

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Do you really want to drink the water coming out of the corroded galvanized pipe? Kids?

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Who doesn't like a little extra seasoning lol??

I forgot to mention in my previous post, when trying to remove some of the old stuff, the torque resulted in leaks elsewhere in my system. I ghetto engineered a bucket and hose under the leak and siphoned every 3-4 days for 5 months while I waited for repipe folks to show up.

I agree with everything so far. Don't do a partial repipe by design. If there are a couple of drops that you can't get to without major issues such as a hose bib or a laundry room, you can connect the pex to the old pipe. My approach going in though would be to replace everything.