What Does a 40-Point Plumbing Inspection Check?

A 40-point plumbing inspection is a room-by-room check of every part of your home's water, drain and gas system that can leak, fail or cost you money, written up in a report you can keep. It takes about an hour in a typical Phoenix house and covers water pressure, the water heater, every shutoff valve, every fixture, the drains, the visible pipe material and the sewer cleanout.

We already covered timing in our post on how often you should get a plumbing inspection. This post is about what is actually on the clipboard, so you know what you are getting and what the report means.

Water pressure and the regulator

The first thing we do is screw a gauge onto a hose bib. Phoenix water comes in hot and hard, and a lot of neighborhoods see street pressure well above what fixtures are built for. We check the pressure regulator, make sure it is holding a safe range, and look for a pressure spike at night when the city system is quiet. High pressure is the quiet cause behind a surprising number of flex line failures and running toilets.

The water heater, top to bottom

The heater gets more points than anything else on the list because it fails more than anything else. We record the age, check the temperature and pressure relief valve and its discharge line, look at the flex connectors, gas line, venting and expansion tank, and look for rust, scale or weeping at the fittings. On an older tank we talk about the anode rod. Our water heater repair and installation team handles most of what we find on the same visit.

Valves, supply lines and every fixture

This is the section that saves people from floods. We find and exercise the main shutoff, then every angle stop under every sink and behind every toilet. A valve that has not turned in twenty years will not turn when the supply line bursts at 2 a.m. We check:

• Supply lines under sinks, behind toilets, and at the washer and fridge
• Toilet flappers, fill valves and the seal at the floor
• Faucets, shower valves and aerators for drips and hard-water scale
• Hose bibs and the irrigation connection
• The washing machine drain and standpipe

Drains, hidden leaks, pipe material and gas

We run every drain and watch how fast it clears. Slow drains in more than one room point at the main line, not the sink. We note the visible pipe material in the garage, attic and under sinks. Gray polybutylene in a 1978 to 1995 house or old galvanized steel goes in the report as a watch item. We locate the sewer cleanout and tell you whether a camera inspection makes sense for the age of the house and the trees in the yard.

Then, with all the water off, we watch the meter. If it still moves, something is leaking, and in a slab home that often means a hot water line under the floor. Our leak detection and repair crew follows up on anything the meter test flags. We also check the softener for salt bridging, test the backflow device if the house has one, and sniff-test every gas appliance connection.

A Glendale house that passed on the surface

A family in Glendale called us for a tune-up before putting the house on the market. Everything looked fine to them. The pressure read high, three angle stops were seized, and the meter kept creeping with the house shut down. We traced it to a pinhole in a hot line under the hall slab. They fixed it before listing instead of hearing about it from the buyer's inspector, and the new pressure regulator stopped a toilet that had been running on and off for a year. None of that showed up by looking around.

What a plumbing inspection will not do

An inspection finds problems. It does not fix them, and it does not see inside walls or under the slab without more work. The report is a prioritized list, and we will be straight about which items are urgent, which can wait and which are just notes. You see the price for any repair before we lift a wrench, and you can say no. Some houses get a clean report, and that is a good outcome, not a wasted hour.

Book your Phoenix plumbing inspection

A plumbing inspection costs less than almost any repair it prevents, and it gives you a written baseline for your house. Phoenix Plumbing Co. has been family-owned since 2012, with a live Phoenix dispatcher and trucks stocked to finish most jobs on the first visit. Schedule a plumbing inspection and maintenance visit by calling 602-834-1208.