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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Bavaria, and I was absolutely furious when I learned a few months ago that, living in San Francisco now, there is a real chance of lead exposure through pipes and paints. Our house was built in the 50s, so that increased those chances. And California has one of the better regulations.

Even so called "lead free" pipes were allowed to have significant lead content just a few decades ago!

What you can do is, for $75 per faucet, get your water sampled and tested by the SF water department. We did that and got back the result that there was no lead in measurable quantities. This was a great relief. Our house looks fairly renovated, so they seem to have gotten rid of those pipes, too.

This is the kind of thing that you just don't think about when moving to the US.

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CA is always weird about this stuff. I constantly see signs and warning labels basically telling me that my apartment and the containers that my groceries are packaged in are giving me cancer. If it's such a big deal why not go further than just having a sign? What is the common person supposed to do with this information? Just live outside? Is it just so that everyone can say "well, we let them know."?

Those warnings are a result of an initiative petition. An initiative petition can do anything. It doesn't have to make sense and the legislative government thereafter has relatively little power to fix it.

Lead paint is everywhere still, its not uncommon to be found on children's playgrounds still, on the equipment, not in the ground

They closed 2 in Philadelphia, PA in 2019 for remediation https://www.inquirer.com/health/philadelphia-lead-playground...

I hope you are aware of how we handled asbestos as well.

I am not. Wasn't it just ripped out?

I remember in Germany in the 80s our elementary school got closed for a while, and the classes relocated temporarily, to rip out all the asbestos.

I went to a school which just had a stark warning on every wall not to disturb the asbestos

guess i should check into if i'm eligble for cashing in one of those mesothelioma cheques at some point

Anyways now you know why Americans seem a little 'off'

Nope, unfortunately it was largely left and covered up, its still found in a a lot of products as well

https://www.mesothelioma.com/asbestos-exposure/products/talc....

My rule of thumb is generally anything the EU deemed unsafe, we rounded up by %20 and said it's fine

> Wasn't it just ripped out?

No. My apartment in CA was required to disclose to us that our apartment had asbestos in the ceiling. (And lead in the paint. $2,700/mo for the privilege!)

The disclosure is standard in CA. They don’t test they just assume.

I don't know about CA, but PA its generally a pretty safe guess whats gonna have it

Sure, but I've moved into newly renovated places in CA. If it was built before a certain date, you get a "lead notice". Even if the walls were all torn down and repainted.

It is worth mentioning that it’s straightforward to get paint tested for lead content too. Here in an older part of the US there are many companies that do testing. It costs a couple hundred dollars for a typical single family house and you can see the results immediately. Anyone in a house in the US built before the late 1970’s or so that has children should consider it.

Thanks, we will do that. My wife thinks it's unlikely since we have no flaking paint anywhere, the windows are fairly new etc., but I think it's worth the peace of mind.

Focus on the wear spots, like door jams and window sills. Lead paint is fine as long as you keep it in good condition, but its hard to keep it in good condition if parts are rubbing against eachother.

Also, the standard for contractors is to assume your paint has lead in it if the house was built before the late '70s. Even testing a whole house for lead paint is extremely expensive, and there's no central registry of lead results, so you're gonna have to test over, and over, and over.

For water, just to add some extra safety, we installed a reverse osmosis water filter system for our refrigerator hookup, and removed the standard refrigerator one.

Testing a whole house for lead paint isn’t expensive. Testing is done with handheld analyzers that give results in seconds, a whole house takes maybe a couple hours.

And some states do indeed have a central registry of lead results. Mine does. I went online and easily found test results from the 1990’s for places I’ve lived.

Oh geez. What does that mean in practice? If we see no flaking paint anywhere, are we safe? I am not sure about the basement. Is pulverized lead paint in the air a concern?

Get a company to come out and do lead testing. They will give you the results, recommend abatement contractors, and maybe give you some tips and recommendations.

Where I live the people that do the testing are required to be different from the people doing abatement. (And once the abatement is done you can get the people that did the testing to come back out again and officially verify that the housing unit meets lead safe standards.) But US states differ in some of the details here.

Condition and rubbing is the problem. If you have no rubbing or condition problems then you should be OK.

If you're concerned about tracking it in from outside, or improper renovation, you can apply the tests to dust too, which is where any pulverized lead in the air would come from.

At risk of compromising your relief slightly, from what I understand the lead measurements may change depending on the water chemistry flowing through the pipes (i.e. the lead may stay put wherever it is in the system but leech if the right water chemistry (which may still be within regulations) flows through).

House pipes being changed is probably 90% of the worry anyway. If it was recently enough, you might be able to pull the original permits and get a better idea of what was replaced.

Would you expect the lead to be completely undetectable if that was the case? We did wait for more than 8 hours without using the lines, as instructed, before taking the sample.

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