Plumber in Citrus Heights, CA

Auburn Boulevard runs straight from our North Highlands shop into Citrus Heights, and the drive is short enough that we are here most days of the week. 

That proximity shows up in the work. We are on these streets often enough to recognize the tract, the builder, and the vintage of pipe before we open the truck.

When we scope a lateral in this city, we usually know what the camera is going to show before we send it in. We send it anyway, because you should see it too.

Citrus Heights is a young city with old bones. It only became a city in 1997, but most of the houses in it went up between the 1950s and the 1980s. That gap explains a surprising amount, including where your permit records are and why your sewer line keeps backing up.

One City, Two Water Districts, and Water That Changes

Ask two Citrus Heights neighbors whether the water is hard, and you will often get two different answers. They are both telling the truth.

Most of the city is served by the Citrus Heights Water District, which has been here since 1920. About 94 percent of what CHWD delivers is treated surface water from the San Juan Water District, drawn from Folsom Lake. That water tests at roughly 17 ppm hardness, about 1 grain per gallon, which is the softest tap water anywhere in the Sacramento region.

The other 6 percent comes from CHWD’s own local wells, and that water is a different substance entirely: 98 to 160 ppm, averaging around 134. That is hard water, roughly eight times the mineral content of the surface supply.

On top of that, parts of Citrus Heights are served not by CHWD but by the Sacramento Suburban Water District, which runs on groundwater from its own wells and is harder still.

What this means in practice is that hardness in Citrus Heights is not a fixed number. It depends on your address and on which sources are running. That is why some homes here show scale on a shower head and others never do. Before anyone sells you equipment based on Citrus Heights water, they should be able to tell you which district you are in.

Sixty-Year-Old Pipe Under Sixty-Year-Old Trees

This is what actually drives our work in Citrus Heights, and it is not the water.

The housing stock here is uniform in a way that Roseville and Elk Grove are not. Street after street of post-war tract homes, most of them built between 1950 and 1980, and almost all of them still running the sewer lateral they were built with. That lateral is now somewhere between forty-five and seventy-five years old, and it is likely cast iron or vitrified clay. Homes from the middle of that window may have Orangeburg, a bituminous fiber pipe that was common in tract construction and that fails by slowly collapsing into an oval.

Now add the trees. Citrus Heights has a mature urban canopy, and those root systems have had sixty years to find the one thing they want, which is the water inside a cracked clay joint. A recurring main-line backup in this city is almost never a coincidence and almost never fixed permanently by another cabling.

We camera-scope before we quote, because on a street like this, the difference between a spot repair, a hydrojet, and a full lateral replacement is thousands of dollars, and you cannot tell which one you need from the cleanout.

Your Pipes by Era

1950s and early 1960s tracts.
Galvanized steel supply lines, now sixty-plus years old and closing up from the inside. Cast iron drains at the end of their life. If your pressure has been quietly dropping for years, this is why, and a repipe is the only real fix.

Late 1960s and 1970s.
The transition to copper. Many homes are a patchwork of galvanized and copper, and dissimilar metals corrode where they meet. Cast iron drains are still common.

1980s and later infill.
Copper supply, ABS drains. Sounder, but the water heaters, the angle stops, and the pressure regulators from this era are all past due.