Sixty Years of Hard Water, One Set of Pipes

The city’s own measurements put local water at 93 to 134 milligrams per liter of hardness, the top of the moderately hard range crossing into hard, and the USGS Water Science School explains what that does over time: minerals deposit as scale inside the pipe, gradually closing its diameter and lowering pressure, with heated water depositing fastest of all.

Run that process for six decades and you get the local pipe biography, lines narrowed by scale, joints worked by corrosion, and hot-side plumbing aging ahead of everything else because heat accelerates the buildup. None of this is a defect. It is a working life reaching its natural end, and the honest question on every call is how much of that life remains.