Plumbers in Sun City

Del Webb opened Sun City in 1960 on farmland northwest of Phoenix, and the idea of a retirement town built around golf courses and recreation centers more or less took shape here. The homes from that first wave, and from the long build through the 1960s and 1970s, were plumbed the way houses were plumbed then: galvanized steel supply lines, with early copper creeping in toward the end.

Galvanized rusts from the inside. After sixty years, corrosion and the Valley’s hard-water scale have built up on the pipe walls until a ¾-inch line carries water through something closer to a drinking straw. The first symptom usually isn’t a leak at all. It’s weak flow: a shower that dribbles, a toilet that takes forever to refill, pressure that vanishes when the washer runs. Rust-tinted water after the house sits overnight is the second clue. The leaks come later, typically at threaded joints, and typically inside a wall.

Patching galvanized buys time, but not much, because every joint you don’t touch is the same age as the one that failed. For most Sun City homes the real decision is when to repipe, not whether. The repipe decision tool walks through the tradeoffs, and financing can spread the cost. A few miles west, Sun City West has a different pipe problem entirely.