Cypress at 70: What Your Home's Age Says About Its Plumbing

By Cypress CA Plumber · October 16, 2026

From Dairy City to today's Cypress, every building era left different pipes behind the walls. Here's a quick guide to yours.

Cypress turned 70 this year. It was incorporated on July 24, 1956 as Dairy City, a town created by dairy farmers who wanted to protect their land from developers, and sometimes nicknamed "Waterville" for its artesian wells. Within a year residents voted to rename it Cypress, after the local school and the cypress trees planted around it as a windbreak against the Santa Ana winds. The dairies didn't last, and over the following decades Cypress filled in with homes, schools, Cypress College and the Los Alamitos Race Course.

Because the city grew in waves, the age of your house says a lot about the plumbing hidden in its walls and under its slab.

Late 1950s and 1960s: the first tracts

• Water lines: mostly copper, sometimes with galvanized steel sections, frequently laid under the slab
• Drains: cast iron under the slab and inside the walls
• Sewer lateral: often clay pipe out to the street
• What to watch for: slab leaks, pinhole leaks in copper, low pressure from galvanized pipe, cracked or scaled cast iron drains, roots in the sewer line

Many of these homes have been partly repiped already. If yours hasn't, and you've had more than one leak, it's time to think about it. See PEX repiping.

1970s: the big building boom

• Water lines: copper, still commonly under the slab
• Drains: a mix of cast iron and, increasingly, ABS plastic
• Sewer lateral: clay or early plastic
• What to watch for: slab leaks in 50-year-old copper, failing original shutoff valves, aging water heaters in garages

Late 1970s to mid-1990s: condos, townhomes and newer tracts

• Water lines: copper, and in some homes gray polybutylene plastic, which was used from roughly 1978 to 1995 and is known for failing
• Drains: ABS plastic
• What to watch for: polybutylene fittings, shared plumbing in condo and townhome walls, original toilets and fixtures that predate California's water-saving standards

Our post on polybutylene pipes explains how to spot it.

Newer homes

Homes built more recently are more likely to have PEX or newer copper, plastic drains, modern shutoff valves and water-conserving fixtures. They still face hard water scale and normal wear, but the big structural plumbing problems are less common.

How to tell what you've got

1. Look at the water heater. The pipes coming off the top are often the easiest exposed section. Copper is orange-brown or green with age; galvanized is dull gray metal with threaded joints; polybutylene is gray plastic; PEX is red, blue or white plastic.
2. Look under the sinks at the pipe coming out of the wall to the shutoff valve.
3. Check the garage or the side of the house where the main line comes in.
4. Look at your disclosure documents if you bought the home - repipes are often mentioned.

The one-hour plumbing check

• Do a water meter test for hidden leaks - see slab leak detection
• Find and test your main shutoff valve
• Locate your sewer cleanout
• Check the water heater's age, strapping and base
• Look under every sink for drips and corrosion
• Run every drain and listen for gurgling

Seventy years on, a lot of Cypress homes are on their second or third set of plumbing upgrades. Knowing which era your house belongs to helps you plan for what's next.