Plumbers in Cave Creek

A water softener is the wrong first purchase for a lot of homes around Cave Creek. Inside the town’s service area, the water is the usual Valley supply, very hard and well suited to a properly sized softener. Outside it, on the large desert lots where many of the area’s 1990s and 2000s custom homes were built, private wells are common, and well water brings iron and sediment along with the hardness.

Iron is the trouble. It stains fixtures orange and coats softener resin, the beads inside the tank that trade hardness minerals for sodium, until they stop working. Sediment scores valve seats and settles in the bottom of the water heater. Put a softener on untreated well water and it performs nicely for a while, then gradually doesn’t. The fix is sequence: sediment filtration first, iron removal if the test calls for it, then softening, and possibly reverse osmosis at the kitchen tap for drinking water. Our piece on hard water in the Valley covers what the minerals do once they get inside.

Start with a water test, not a sales pitch; proper softener service begins by finding out what is actually in the water. The homes themselves, plumbed mostly in copper and PEX, are generally in good shape. The maintenance lives at the wellhead and in the garage. Next door in Carefree, it is the ground, not the water, that runs up the bill.