Guides for Las Vegas homeowners

Why these eight, and not a blog

Most plumbing content exists to rank for something. These exist because a Las Vegas homeowner keeps hitting the same eight questions, and the honest answer to each one is a number somebody official has already published rather than an opinion a contractor has.

Four of them are about water. The Las Vegas Valley Water District publishes tap water hardness at 280 parts per million as calcium carbonate, which is 16 grains per gallon, and tells customers to set a softener to that figure. The US Geological Survey calls anything above 180 milligrams per liter very hard, so the valley runs at roughly 1.6 times that line. That one number explains failed water heaters, crusted fixtures, stiff laundry and most of the softener conversation in this county.

Two are about the pipe behind the wall, because in Clark County the build year decides it. About 16.7 percent of homes here went up before 1980, roughly 36 percent between 1980 and 1999, and about 47.3 percent in 2000 or later, and each of those eras has its own failure mode. Galvanized steel corrodes from the inside out where you cannot see it. Polybutylene, made between 1978 and mid 1995, flakes apart from the inside because disinfectants in city water react with the plastic.

One is about permits, which genuinely differ street by street here. Five incorporated cities and a large unincorporated county each run their own building department, and the office that issues a water heater permit in Enterprise is not the office that issues one in Henderson.

The last one is about finding a leak before it finds you, which matters more in a valley where homes sit on concrete slabs rather than basements because of caliche under the desert soil.

What these guides will never do

None of them publishes a step by step procedure for anything that can injure you or wreck your equipment. No gas line work, no water heater burner or thermostat adjustment, no opening a sewer cleanout under pressure, no electrical connection.

The reason is not caution for its own sake. A plausible procedure and a correct procedure read identically to someone who does not already know the difference, and the liability for a wrong one runs to the homeowner standing in front of the appliance. So these guides diagnose, and they say plainly when the next step is a phone call.

What they will happily walk you through: reading your water meter to check for a hidden leak, running a dye test in a toilet tank, checking a brine tank for a salt bridge, finding the PB2110 stamp on a length of pipe, and locating your main shutoff before you need it at two in the morning.

Every number here carries its source

Each guide ends with the list of bodies its figures came from: the Las Vegas Valley Water District, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the US Census Bureau, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Clark County, the Nevada State Contractors Board, and the manufacturers who publish service intervals for their own equipment.

Click through and check any of them. That is the whole point of printing them.