VIDEO: How to Test Your Home’s Plumbing and Water for Lead

Have you ever tested to see if your home’s water comes through a lead pipe? If not, you should know that more than 9 million lead water lines service properties across the U.S., according to the EPA. Watch the video below to learn all about your home’s risk factors for lead issues, as well as step-by-step tutorials on how to test both your pipes and your water for lead content.

Lead and Water Don't Mix

Considering the fact that there’s no safe level of exposure to lead, particularly for children — and that even if your home’s interior plumbing doesn’t contain lead, the buried water service line leading from the municipal water main to your house still could be — you really should consider testing your home’s water line, and the water itself, for lead content. This is especially true if your home was built before 1988, prior to ​​the Safe Drinking Water Act’s prohibition of lead in pipes in public water systems and indoor plumbing.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, tens of millions of Americans are at risk for health effects of lead exposure including:

• Hearing loss

• Anemia

• Hypertension

• Kidney impairment

• Immune system dysfunction

• And other ailments.

• Even low levels of exposure can interfere with thought processes, resulting in lower IQs and attention and behavioral problems in children.

Figure Out What Your Pipes Are Made Of

A quick and easy way to narrow down what your pipes may be made of is performing the super-simple magnet test:

1. First, find your water service line coming into your house, typically in the basement where your water meter is.

2. Grab a refrigerator magnet.

3. Identify a test area on the pipe between the point where it comes into the building and the inlet valve.

4. Place the magnet on the pipe.

5. If the pipe is made of steel, it’ll stick. But if the pipe is made of copper or lead, the magnet will not stick.

If it doesn’t stick, relax, you’ve ruled out steel, but your pipes may still be made of copper versus lead. Now it’s time to move on to the scrape test:

1. Grab a screwdriver.

2. In your selected test patch, scrape the pipe with the head of a screwdriver.

3. If the scraped portion remains a dull gray, the pipe is steel.

4. If the scraped area is a shiny silver, the line is lead.

5. If the scraped area is the color of a penny, the pipe is copper.

If you determine that the water line leading into your house is steel or copper, that’s promising — but it doesn’t mean you’re done. Your underground pipes deeper into your freshwater delivery systems still could be lead.

How to Test Your Water For Lead

So now you’ll need to test your water:

1. Buy an at-home water-testing kit that specifies lead content, at your local hardware store.

2. Follow the instructions for the test you bought, which for ours are as follows.

3. Wash your hands.

4. Draw water from the cold water tap into a clean cup.

5. Use the provided dropper to take a sample of the water from the cup.

6. Squeeze the water into the provided vial.

7. Gently swirl the vial for several seconds, then place the vial on a flat surface.

8. PLace the testing strip into the vial with the arrows pointing downward.

9. Let it sit undisturbed for 10 minutes.

10. Remove the test strip from the vial and place it on a flat surface with the arrows pointing to the left.

11. Blue lines should now have appeared to indicate your results.

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Reading Your Water Test Results

If the left line is darker than the right line, or if only the left line is visible, your test is negative — meaning measured lead levels are below the EPA action level.

If the right line is darker than the left, or if both the right and left lines are equally dark, your water has tested positive for dangerous lead levels, and you should contact a water treatment professional and find an alternative water source in the meantime.

What To Do if You Have Lead in Your Water

If you determine you have lead in your water, take the following steps recommended by the NRDC:

• Consider having a professionally administered test of your water by an independent lab, which you can find via the EPA website.

• Use only cold tap water for drinking.

• Flush water from the tap if it hasn’t been run in multiple hours.

• Install and use water filters that are certified to remove lead.

• Regularly clean your faucet aerators, as lead particles and sediment can collect in the aerator screen.

• Use only filtered or bottled water to prepare baby formula and food, and for drinking and cooking for children and pregnant or nursing women.

• Call your local city officials and legislators to let them know about your issue and urge them to address it.

If you find our video interesting, educational and/or entertaining, please like, save and share — and don’t forget to subscribe to the HomeServe YouTube channel for new helpful home-maintenance how-to videos every week.