HOAs & communities
HOA and community leak detection
Common-area irrigation, shared supply lines and the community pool — plus the question that stalls most of these jobs before it is even a plumbing matter.
The real obstacle
Whose pipe is it?
In a condo, townhome or shared-wall community the leak is often found in an afternoon and then discussed for weeks, because finding it does not answer the question everybody actually has. Where the pipe sits does not decide responsibility. The governing documents do that, and reading them is the association manager's job or its attorney's, not ours.
What we can do is put the physical facts in writing so that reading is possible at all. Those facts are what the documents tend to turn on:
- where the line runs, and which side of the demising wall it is on
- whether it serves one home or several
- whether it is upstream or downstream of that unit's shut-off valve
- whether it sits on a common-area meter or a unit meter, and whether it is original to the building or was added by a later alteration
Upstream, downstream, and the shut-off
This is the distinction that usually settles it. A line serving several homes, or one upstream of an individual unit's valve, is a different conversation from a line inside one unit's walls — the same testing either way, a very different sentence in the minutes.
The asset nobody looks at
Common-area irrigation is the longest pipe the association owns
Add a community's irrigation up and it is nearly always more buried pipe than everything else on the property combined: mainlines the length of several streets, dozens of valve boxes, laterals under turf and rock, and a much-rezoned controller.
Age matters here in a way it does not for a newer subdivision. Sun City is the clearest case in the Valley: Census figures put its median housing year at 1973, with about 88 percent of its units built before 1980. An irrigation system installed alongside that housing has had decades of patching, re-routing around later construction and valve replacement by different hands, so the failures are at fittings, glued joints and old repairs — exactly the leak that does not surface where it starts.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2023)
What it looks like before anyone calls it a leak
- One station that will not build pressure while the rest of the schedule is fine
- Turf or a swale that stays dark through June, in a pattern that does not match the head layout
- Common-area consumption that climbed with no change to the schedule
The night-cycle problem
Most communities irrigate before dawn, so a break performs to nobody. A leak on a pressurised mainline also runs every hour of every day, while one downstream of a valve runs only during that station's cycle — a continuous loss against a scheduled one, and knowing which halves the search.
For the board
What a board needs to be able to show
An association decision is made on somebody else's behalf and gets read later by owners who were not in the room. The documentation is not admin; it is the point.
A locate addressed to the association
One document that can go into a meeting packet, to an owner, or to a carrier.
What was eliminated, and how
Each section tested and held is listed, which is what shows the association did not authorise opening ground on a guess.
Photographs, before and after
The marked location before anything was opened, and the pipe once exposed — photographs do what adjectives cannot when the reader was never on site.
The failure in one plain sentence
A pinhole in a copper lateral, a failed glued joint on the irrigation main, a cracked skimmer throat: written the way it should read in minutes.
The route of the line, sketched
So the next board and the next landscape contractor are not starting from zero in a few seasons.
The same format every time
A second report that looks like the first is read in half the time.
On site
The community pool
Most associations own a pool, and it cannot be closed for a week in summer without a notice to every owner. The autofill also means a leaking vessel or return line can run for a season with no visible drop.
We measure with the pool open and take vessel-side testing into the quietest window the community has. The large-vessel page explains the arithmetic.
On site
Working in a place where people live
A community is a neighbourhood, and the association hears about anything that looked careless long after the leak is fixed. So: access arranged through the manager, the pool deck put back and reopened, nothing left open overnight, and a test area on turf fenced rather than left as a hazard. Family owned, bonded and insured, and the ground goes back the way we found it.
The work behind a community locate
Where we work
Communities we work in
Master-planned and age-restricted communities are much of the Valley.
Straight answers
What boards and community managers ask
The owner says it is the association's line and the association says it is the owner's. Can you settle that?
Not as a matter of responsibility — that lives in the CC&Rs, for your manager or counsel to read. We settle the physical side: where the line runs, which side of the demising wall, and whether it is upstream of the unit shut-off.
Can you give us one document for the meeting packet?
Yes, and it is written for that: what was tested and eliminated, what failed, where it is, with photographs and a sketch of the route. Same format every time.
Our irrigation runs at four in the morning. Do you need to be here then?
We would rather not be. It is easier to control the controller ourselves in daylight and test the mainline with everything shut.
Do you look at the community pool as well as the landscaping?
Yes, and often on the same visit, because both sit on the common-area meter and both have to be ruled in or out before the number makes sense.
Send the common-area meter reading and a photo of the wet area
One photo of the green patch, the valve box or the pool equipment and a line about when consumption changed is enough for us to say what it is likely to be.