Plumbers in Promontory, for houses with more plumbing than average

Annually on Greeley water. Scale builds inside the heat exchanger, insulates it, and forces the unit to work harder until it starts reporting temperature or flow errors, usually around year five in a house that has never had it done. Annual descaling is the difference between a twenty-year unit and a seven-year one.

Usually not. The two most common causes are a scaled heat exchanger and a clogged inlet filter screen, and both produce faults that look like a failing unit. The filter screen takes two minutes to clean. A descale takes a service visit. Genuine component failures are much rarer than the error codes suggest.

A softener removes hardness minerals, calcium and magnesium, and stops scale. A filter removes particulates, chlorine, taste and odour. Neither does the other job. Many Promontory homes sensibly have both, and a good deal of confusion comes from systems sold as doing everything.

Check the brine tank: if the salt has bridged into a solid crust or the tank is empty, it is not regenerating. Beyond that, hardness testing before and after the unit gives a definitive answer in a minute. A softener that has quietly stopped working is extremely common and produces no obvious symptom until scale reappears.

It depends on the media and your usage, but most sediment and carbon cartridges want changing every six to twelve months. A cartridge left in for years is worse than no filter at all, it becomes a restriction and a place for growth. If you cannot remember the last change, it is due.

In a large house with a bathroom far from the heater, it genuinely helps, hot water arrives in seconds instead of after a minute of waste. The trade-off is standby energy and, on an uninsulated loop, real heat loss. A timer or on-demand button rather than continuous running is the sensible middle ground.

The west side of the city generally runs high, and newer houses were built with a pressure reducing valve to handle it. Those valves fail silently after ten to fifteen years, at which point the house is back on full street pressure. If your house is over a decade old, it is worth a five-minute gauge check.

Multi-zone residential systems of any size, including drip zones in beds, which are the part most often neglected because a failed emitter produces no visible symptom. Spring startup, zone-by-zone repairs, controller programming, the annual backflow test and autumn blowout are all handled.

That is the most common assumption in this neighborhood and it is the reason we get called. The building is new; the equipment inside it is on service intervals that started the day it was commissioned. A tankless heater, softener and irrigation system in a ten-year-old house are all several services overdue if nobody has touched them.

Yes, and it is how we would recommend owning a house with this much equipment. Tankless descale, softener and filter check, pressure reading, heater relief valve, irrigation backflow test and startup. One appointment, one invoice, and a written note of what was found.