Toilet & Faucet Replacement in Tempe, AZ

Tempe's meters send hour-by-hour readings to the city's WaterSmart portal, which is free to Tempe water customers; the city finished installing the hourly meters citywide in the spring of 2019. The city says alerts go to a single-family home automatically “if the meter registers continuous usage of six gallons per hour for at least 72 hours.”

The portal shows use hour by hour, so the hours when nobody was home or awake, such as the middle of the night, are the ones worth studying. It also has a check-and-resolve leak module, and your meter readings can be downloaded from its settings menu, which is handy to have open during the visit.

The city is careful about the next step: “receiving one of these alerts does NOT mean that you have a leak. This alert is simply letting the resident know to review recent water usage and check for leaks at the earliest time convenient.”

The city's method starts at the meter box. With every tap and appliance off, find the small red dial, take a photo, wait at least a minute, and take another. If anything has moved, water is flowing somewhere. The city even gives the math: one full turn of the red dial is a tenth of a gallon, so gallons divided by seconds, times 60, times 60, gives gallons per hour. Closing the house shutoff then shows whether the flow is inside the house or out in the yard.

Inside the house, each toilet is isolated at its stop valve and given a dye test. Tempe's own list of water-saving habits includes testing a toilet with a few drops of dye in the tank at least once a year. Color that appears in the bowl without a flush indicates the tank is leaking. A leak not at a fixture, such as one inside a wall, is located by our leak detection partner.

Tempe's Certified Water Efficient Home program asks for WaterSense toilets, which the city describes as using under 1.28 gallons a flush if bought after 2005, while “Toilets upgraded 2005 and earlier may flush up to 1.6 gallons of water per flush to be considered efficient.” So a 1.6-gallon toilet that is leaking gets a repair price first; replacement is your choice.

Tempe's leak guide warns that “Shut-off valves may fail or break if they are old or corroded,” and says gate valves “corrode easily,” recommending that a gate valve be replaced with a ball valve. In practice, the stops under toilets and sinks get a gentle turn during the check, and a stop or main valve that will not hold is priced separately.