Finding water leaks in Goodyear

It is unusual for a city to name a leak-detection company’s two main service lines in its own published guidance, but Goodyear does. The City of Goodyear’s water utility tells homeowners that the most common area of water waste on a property is outdoor irrigation, and that indoor leaks and pool problems can also create invisible water consumption.

It goes further and identifies the pool auto-fill and the landscape irrigation system as the most common sources of hidden leaks at a home, and tells homeowners that the pool auto-fill shutoff is usually near a hose bib on the exterior wall. If you do nothing else before calling anyone, find that shutoff.

Goodyear is one of the fastest-growing places we cover and one of the newest: the median year of construction is 2007, with more than three quarters of the housing built since 2000 and very little predating 1980.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2023). Geography: Census place.

Why the auto-fill hides everything

A pool auto-fill is a small float valve doing a helpful job: it keeps the water level where the skimmer needs it. The side effect is that it also erases the single most obvious symptom of a leak. A pool can lose water steadily for months and never look any different, because it is being topped up automatically from the same supply the meter is counting.

So the first move is to turn the auto-fill off — Goodyear’s own guidance tells you roughly where to find the shutoff — and then run a bucket test. Bucket on a pool step, filled to the pool level, both levels marked, compared after a couple of days. Same drop in both is evaporation and the pool is fine.

Then run it again with the equipment off. If more water disappears while the pump is running, the leak is more likely in the plumbing than in the shell of the pool. If the loss is the same either way, attention moves to the structure, the light niche, the skimmer and the fittings.

Related: pool and spa leak detection and pool and spa leak repair.

Winter water use can follow you all year

Here is the Goodyear-specific trap that catches people out. Several Valley cities work out a sewer charge from how much water was used in winter and then apply that figure to every bill for the following year, and Goodyear uses January, February and March. Goodyear’s own guidance tells residents not to fill a pool during those months for exactly this reason.

Which means an auto-fill quietly running in February does not just show up in February. It can lift a line on every bill until the following spring. If your winter water use looked wrong and you never found out why, that is worth a conversation now rather than next summer.

Related: high water bill investigation.

Estrella, and community-scale water

Estrella, in Goodyear, is organised around three residents’ clubs — Starpointe, Presidio and Cantamia — each with resort-style pools, alongside a community lake. That is a lot of water in shared hands, and shared water has the same problem as common-area irrigation everywhere: nobody lives above the pipe, so nothing gets noticed until the account does.

On community pools and shared landscape we work the same way as on a house, with one addition: everything is written down. A board or a manager needs the test, the finding and the location on paper before authorising work, and often needs it in a form that can go to an insurer.

Related: commercial, HOA and community work and irrigation and drip system leaks.