If you are considering buying an older, lived-in house I recommend that while you are in the option period, you spend the money and have a hydrostatic test performed. It is a lot cheaper to pay $350 to gain valuable information about the house now, while it is still thiers, rather than drop as much as $15,000 after it becomes yours. If the lines fail and do not hold pressure you will have a powerful bargaining chip to renegotiate a lower sales price.
A hydrostatic test is one in which a professional leak detection company gains access to the sewer pipes under the slab with a high tech pipe camera. It is much like a sewer snake with an eye ball on its head. They go in through the clean out. If the house you are interested in buying is like many older homes and has no clean out, then they will remove the toilet or go in through a roof vent. Once into the sewer system they will plug it off and fill all the pipes with water. If it does not hold water pressure then the system fails.
At this point you are either rejoicing or sweating bullets depending on whether or not you have already closed. Now comes isolation testing where they plug, test and repair their way one section at a time from upstream all the way to the city tie in. The pipe snake has a trasmitter on it for mapping and locating root intrusions, major breakages and improper sloping.
Once a break is located they must get to it. This is where the cost escalates because remember, it is under the slab. If it is just one break in the middle of the house they can jack hammer a hole in the concrete for access, but most often there are several breaks on these old houses. So they tunnel and tunnel and tunnel. It kind of reminds me of the Vietnam tunnel rat stories. The tunnels have to be large enough for a small man to walk in hunched over. They will rip out the corroded, gunk-filled cast iron pipes and replace them with new schedule 40 pvp pipes.
As of this writing in April, 2009 I have a crew at work on a rehab in the Meyerland subdivision of Houston, Texas which is notorious for foundation and under-slab plumbing problems. I thought I would have my cheap foundation man do the digging for the hydrostatic guys and save some money. A package deal. Heck, he just put in 58 piers. NOT! After things kept getting more and more complicated I threw in the towel and had Avalon do the whole job, tunneling and all. And I'm sure glad I did. Managing that little underground project would have cost me more than his $8,000 fee and been one big headache.
So let this be a lesson for you. Learn from my mistake and get a hydrostatic test on the under-slab plumbing before you buy. If you already own a house in Houston with these problems and don't want the grief and hassel of repairing them before you sell, or you don't have the money to repair them, give me a click. I will make you a fair offer and close quickly.
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