Plumbers in Desert Ridge

Tankless water heaters don’t wear out so much as clog up. That’s the part the sales brochure tends to skip, and it’s the most useful thing to know about plumbing in Desert Ridge. The master-planned neighborhoods around Desert Ridge Marketplace and the Loop 101 in far north Phoenix were built from 1999 on, and a large share of the homes have tankless units and hot-water recirculation loops.

Both are good technology. Both dislike hard water. A tankless heater pushes water through a narrow heat exchanger, and at Valley hardness, scale coats that exchanger quickly. Efficiency drops, flow drops, and eventually the unit throws an error code or shuts down mid-shower. A recirculation loop compounds it by keeping hot water moving for much of the day, which means more heating and more scale. The copper and PEX supply in these homes is generally in good shape; the equipment bolted to it is where the work is.

The fix is dull and inexpensive: flush the heat exchanger with a descaling solution on a schedule, commonly once a year in water this hard, and clean the inlet screen while you’re there. Pair it with a softener and the interval stretches. If a unit is already throwing codes, tankless service can often bring it back, and if you’re weighing a replacement, the tankless-versus-tank numbers are worth ten minutes. A maintenance plan puts the flush on the calendar so nobody has to remember it.