Home › Polybutylene: 1978 to 1995
Polybutylene: 1978 to 1995
This is the one plumbing material with an exact date window and a court record attached to it, and it is also the one people are most often told something misleading about.
The summary
Polybutylene supply pipe was installed in American homes between about 1978 and 1995 and was the subject of a class action, Cox v. Shell Oil, settled in 1995 and administered for roughly fifteen years. That claims program has ended, so there is no fund left to apply to.
Source: Public Justice, on Cox v. Shell Oil Company; the court-approved class notice, Cox v. Shell Oil Company, administered by the Consumer Plumbing Recovery Center.
The date window
The class notice in Cox v. Shell Oil Company covers polybutylene plumbing installed between 1 January 1978 and 31 July 1995. Judgment in the case was entered on 17 November 1995.
That window is unusually precise for a plumbing material, and it means the age of a house is genuinely informative here in a way it is not for anything else on this site. A house plumbed in 2001 does not have polybutylene. A house plumbed in 1986 might.
The scale of it
Several million homes were plumbed with it during that period, and the settlement was administered under court supervision for roughly fifteen years by a body created for the purpose, the Consumer Plumbing Recovery Center.
It is one of the largest residential construction defect programs in American history, which is why the material still turns up in conversations about houses thirty years later.
Source: Public Justice, on Cox v. Shell Oil Company; the court-approved class notice, Cox v. Shell Oil Company, administered by the Consumer Plumbing Recovery Center.
The claims program has ended, and we are not lawyers
The court-supervised program ran for about fifteen years and it is over. Offers to help you claim under it should be treated with the suspicion that any offer to help you claim under a closed program deserves.
We are not going to tell you whether you have any claim of any kind, against anybody, or when any deadline fell. We are a referral service for plumbing work and that is a question for a lawyer. If somebody tells you otherwise while quoting you for pipework, that is worth noticing.
What it actually looks like
Flexible plastic pipe, usually gray but also found in blue, black and white, typically half-inch or three-quarter-inch, joined with fittings and crimp rings. It is most often visible at the water heater, at the main shutoff, or where pipe emerges through a wall under a sink.
It is easy to confuse with modern PEX, which is also flexible plastic. Telling the materials apart matters enough to be worth a careful look rather than a glance.
Why it comes up in repiping specifically
Because it is the clearest case of a decision about the whole system rather than about one joint. Where a material is the subject of a defect finding across an entire era of installation, fixing the leak in front of you answers a smaller question than the one being asked.
What turns a repair into a repipe is the page that follows from this one.
Photograph the printing on the pipe before you call.It names the material and often the year, and it is the single most useful thing you can have ready. We route to contractors who do this work in your area, picked on the ZIP code you give, and you are never charged. Repiping is just what we write about — any plumbing work at all can be routed.
Call (888) 834-6040