When the Town of Middleburg inventoried its service lines, it found no lead anywhere, the Town’s side of the meter or yours. In a ZIP where 333 of 1,416 homes went up before 1940, the question is age: often galvanized supply narrowing inside, cast iron or clay drains, joints shifting for close to a century. Past the Town’s main, under a street or not, the pipe belongs to the homeowner, so before anybody digs, a sewer camera goes down it for $89 on top of a visit.
Winters here are hard on pipes: the Purcellville station, 12 miles north, averages close to 115 nights at or below freezing to Dulles Airport’s 102, and about a dozen days that never thaw. The Town’s list of causes for a high water bill includes running taps to keep pipes from freezing. A pipe that needs a dripping faucet every cold night sits in an outside wall, a crawlspace or over an unheated porch; moving or insulating it costs less than the night it splits.
Rain finds the low spots here too. On September 30, 2015, the Goose Creek gauge at Middleburg climbed past its 13 foot flood stage to 14.46 feet, and the co-op station at The Plains, five miles south, averages about 46 inches of rain and melted snow a year. Storms bring wind with them: on June 22, 2022, hundreds of trees and wires came down between Middleburg and Upperville, and a sump pump with no power and no battery backup does nothing while the water keeps coming.
If the pump ran without a pause through a night like that and the water still rose, it’s undersized or worn out, and a new one is a single set price on our sump pump page. Past the town limits most homes have their own well and septic system, like the rest of rural Loudoun. Those, and well pumps, aren’t work we do; from the pressure tank inward, the supply lines, faucets, toilets, drains and the water heater are.