Santa Teresa’s 1970s and 80s homes climb the foothills, and with elevation comes the neighborhood’s most common plumbing issue: high and variable street pressure. The pressure zones serving the hillsides can push well past 80 PSI, and when a home’s regulator wears out, every fixture downstream starts taking the hit.
If you are replacing flapper valves and supply lines more often than seems reasonable, or pipes bang when the sprinklers shut off, have us put a gauge on it. A regulator swap and a couple of hammer arrestors usually calms the whole system down.
We also see the standard 40-year-old-home lineup here: original water heaters due for retirement, worn shower valves, and the first pinhole leaks in copper runs. One visit can triage all of it with a written plan.
Because the pressure runs high on these hillside zones, the wear shows up first in the cheapest parts. Toilet fill valves, braided supply lines to sinks, the hoses behind the washing machine. If you have replaced two or three of those in the last couple of years, the parts are not the problem. Put a gauge on a hose bib before you buy another one.
The 1970s and 80s housing stock here is also at the age where original angle stops and the main shut-off have not been turned in decades. Those seize. It is worth finding out on a calm Tuesday rather than during an emergency, and swapping a tired main valve for a quarter-turn ball valve is one of the cheapest bits of insurance in the house.
If you are not sure whether your pressure is the problem, the cheapest diagnostic in plumbing is a gauge that screws onto a hose bib. Buy one, or ask us to check it on any visit. It takes ten seconds and it settles the question before anybody spends money on parts.
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Phone consultations are free. Describe what it is doing and we will tell you whether it needs a visit, and roughly what it will take.