Plumbers in Tucson, AZ

The desert city that freezes

Tucson sits about a thousand feet higher than Phoenix and runs several degrees cooler, and the difference shows up in the plumbing every winter. The city sees many more nights at or below freezing, and its homes were built for the summer: supply lines in exterior walls, hose bibs and backflow preventers in the open, evaporative cooler lines climbing the outside of the house. The February 2011 freeze split pipes across Tucson on a scale that showed up in the city’s water demand, which jumped by tens of millions of gallons a day as the leaks ran. Smaller versions of that night happen most years somewhere in the city. Our plumbers spend every fall insulating exposed runs and every January repairing the ones that were missed.

Old pipe in old neighborhoods

Tucson’s historic core is full of homes from before 1960: Armory Park, Barrio Viejo, El Presidio, Sam Hughes, West University, Jefferson Park, Feldman’s and Menlo Park. Many still carry galvanized steel supply lines that have rusted from the inside for seventy years. Pressure has faded to a trickle, the cold tap runs rusty in the morning, and the thinned pipe walls are exactly what cracks on a freeze night. A repipe in PEX solves both problems. Some of these homes are adobe or burnt adobe with thick walls and plumbing routed in unexpected ways, and our plumbers who work the central neighborhoods have been inside them before.

Water that varies block by block

Tucson Water recharges Colorado River water into the aquifer and pumps it back out blended with native groundwater, and the blend differs by delivery area and season. One neighborhood may see eleven grains per gallon and another twenty. Water heaters fill with sediment everywhere, but a softener has to be sized for the actual hardness at the tap rather than a city average, and evaporative cooler float valves clog with scale on a schedule that depends on where the house is.

Under the slab, copper supply lines in the 1960s to 1990s homes of Catalina Vista, Broadmoor, Miramonte and the foothills pit through from hard water and show up as warm floors and unexplained bills. Slab leak detection and attic reroutes are as routine here as in Phoenix.

Coolers, monsoon and permits

Evaporative coolers are more common in Tucson than almost anywhere, and each one is a small plumbing system on the roof that needs a spring startup and a fall winterization. The monsoon, stronger here than in Phoenix, sends the Rillito and Santa Cruz washes running and surcharges older sewers, backing up floor drains in low-lying homes. Whatever the season, water heater replacement, repipes and drain changes in Tucson and unincorporated Pima County require a permit pulled by an Arizona Registrar of Contractors licensee, and every plumber we dispatch here holds one.