69 communities inside a 35-mile circle.

Phoenix grew outward in rings, and its plumbing did too. The older neighborhoods near the core, Encanto and Arcadia among them, often still have galvanized steel in the walls, rusting shut from the inside. Much of what went up between roughly 1978 and 1995 used polybutylene, the gray plastic behind a great many whole-home repipes. The newest builds out in Buckeye and Queen Creek run PEX and mostly fight hard-water scale instead.

The ground changes, too. Parts of the Valley sit on caliche, a cement-hard layer of calcium carbonate. Other parts sit on expansive clay that swells when the monsoon arrives and shrinks when it leaves. A slab leak in north Scottsdale caliche is a different diagnostic problem from one in a Tempe postwar tract, and treating them alike is how leaks get missed. How water line leaks become slab damage walks through the mechanics.

We cover all 69 communities within 35 miles of Phoenix, 24/7, with the same flat pricing and the same habit of photographing what we find. Find your city below. Each area page covers what is actually common there: the housing stock, the water, and the failures we see most.