Exposure to lead can have serious, long-term health consequences, and yet there are still some 10 – 13 million lead service lines bringing water to homes across the United States. Worse, the location of as many as half of these lines is unknown and sending technicians to find the unknown lines is slow and costly, hampering efforts by cities and utilities to replace them with safer pipes.  

In an effort to find more efficient ways to identify these pipes, some cities are encouraging residents to send in photos of their pipes for the city to check for lead remotely. The Energy & Environment Lab is partnering with New Jersey utility Trenton Water Works to test the effectiveness of this new approach at overcoming barriers to identifying service lines, specifically among the hardest-to-reach residents that have been missed by previous efforts.  

In this randomized control trial, some residents will receive information on the new self-inspection option alone, while others will also be offered a financial incentive for completing a self-inspection. The responsiveness of these different groups, combined with interviews and discussions with residents about their experiences, will help Trenton Water Works understand how to improve program participation and will inform approaches to lead pipe identification across the country.