Plumbers in Encanto

Before the freeways, before refrigerated air, Phoenix grew north from downtown along the streets that now make up the Encanto and Palmcroft historic districts. The homes went up in the 1920s through the 1940s: Spanish colonials, Tudor revivals, and bungalows with plaster walls and original trim. Few of them have ever sat empty for long. That’s good for the neighborhood and hard on the plumbing, which has been working without a break for close to a century.

The supply side is usually galvanized steel, which rusts from the inside until a half-inch pipe carries water through an opening closer to a drinking straw. Weak pressure at the back bathroom and brown water after a week away are the two classic complaints. Below the floor, the drains are often cast iron, and cast iron that old tends to rot along the bottom of the pipe, where water sits and nobody looks. A camera down the main line settles in one visit what would otherwise take a shovel and a guess.

The part owners worry about most is the house itself, and they’re right to. A careful whole-home repipe in a house like this is planned around the finishes: runs through the attic where possible, small access openings where not, and patching that matches old plaster. If you’re weighing a full replacement against fixing what leaks, the repipe decision lays out when patching stops paying. Either way, we photograph what we find and tell you plainly what can wait.