Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/28/inside-a-100-year-old-drainpip.html
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A little safe?
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A century old, and it still looks mоist inside.
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Gotta love the galvanized piping. I have a junction in my 140+ yo house where iron drain is fed by galvanized, copper, PVC, and PEX. Kind of a microcosm of plumbing history, that.
A century old, and it still looks mоist inside.
That’s what he said.
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Welcome to galvanized pipe. Any galvanized over 50 years is beyond it’s functional life and should be replaced. When re-plumbing my in-laws house I had 1950s vintage galvanized fall apart in my hands. Multiple joints were completely rotted out (vent joints thankfully).
It always amazes me that old galvanized supply lines actually run clear. Take them apart and they appear effectively blocked.
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Clay drain pipes FTW! Other than the occasional tree root creeping into a joint and needing to be rooted, they basically last FOREVER.
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Agreed. I’ve re-piped one house and am getting ready to finish a semi-repiping a previous owner did. I can’t believe there’s water pressure anywhere that the galvanized still exists.
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Damn. That looks like Trump’s carotid arteries.
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I have an irrigation business, and was once shocked to find that a customer’s supply line was cast iron. I couldn’t tie into it of course so I came off one of their hose bibbs instead. I put a filter on it, and the water is FILTHY, full of metallic particles (the horrors I see when filtering water in areas with old piping, ugh). I warned them, then they went and replaced their driveway last year with pavers and didn’t replace the supply line at the same time 
I can only imagine how constricted that line is inside…
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I’ve yet to live in a house with plastic drain pipes. It seems like an unspeakable luxury.
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Is that it? A picture of one end of the pipe, slightly under-exposed so it mostly looks like… just black? (Is it Vantablack?) Come on, @beschizza we need to see the gunk in all its gore! 
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Yup. The house I’m in at the moment was built sometime before 1885, but the indoor plumbing was quite a bit later (this was territorial New Mexico, after all.) Curious collections of plumbing, with iron feeds, copper feeds, PVC feeds, and the new PEX all mixed (yes, the iron is corroding with the copper in the same lines.) The drains? Anything we can reach from above is PVC now, but once you get below the floor it’s … well, I’m not sure. A ways from the footings there’s a PVC section, then there’s more PVC where we replaced a section of (broken) clay pipe and a (barely intact) tarpaper section on its way to the sidewalk, which is still the 1936 WPA concrete.
The PVC is certainly an improvement, no two ways about it, but that WPA concrete is a wonder and it’s a shame when the city has to replace any of the sections that remain because they’re good as new more than 80 years after they were placed while the newer sections are already looking older than them after only a few years between the moderately hot summers (up to 108F) and hard-freeze winters. Don’t let anyone tell you that government workers don’t do quality. That sidewalk outlived just about every person who built it and is good for another stretch if we give it the chance.
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In keeping with the standard format of the “look at this old gunk I found” internet post, you’re supposed to cook and eat some of it.
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