Service area · Scottsdale

Finding water leaks in Scottsdale

Scottsdale Water publishes the best pool-leak guidance of any city we work in. This page starts there and goes further.

Scottsdale is the one city in the Valley where the water utility has already done the hard part of explaining pool leaks. Scottsdale Water tells homeowners that a four-hundred-square-foot pool loses roughly nineteen thousand six hundred and sixty-five gallons a year to evaporation, peaking in June, and it publishes a bucket test that lets a homeowner tell a pool leak from ordinary evaporation.

Crucially, it says to run that test once with the equipment on and once with it off, because losing more water with the pump running points to the plumbing rather than the pool shell. That is the step most people skip, and it is the one that decides how the whole job is approached.

Pool and deck with the equipment pad and returns visible — Shell, skimmer, light niche, returns and buried plumbing are all tested separately.

Scottsdale stretches a very long way north, and the housing ages as you move south. Overall the median year of construction is 1990, with close to three in ten homes built before 1980, a quarter built since 2000, and only about half the housing single-family.

Housing in Scottsdale city, Arizona	Share
Median year housing was built	1990
Built before 1980	29 percent
Built since 2000	26 percent
Owner-occupied households	68 percent
Single-family homes	53 percent

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

The city’s own pool guidance, and what we add to it

Start where Scottsdale Water starts. Turn the auto-fill off, stand a bucket on a pool step filled to the same level as the pool, mark both levels and compare after a couple of days. Same drop in both means evaporation. Then run it again with the equipment off and compare the two results.

Scottsdale Water also lists white crusty mineral deposits on pool pipes as a sign of a slow leak — a genuinely useful tell that costs nothing to look for at the equipment pad. And it asks residents not to drain pool water into the street, directing it onto their own landscape once the chlorine has dissipated and the pH has settled, which is worth knowing before anybody suggests emptying a pool to find a leak.

What we add is the locating. Once the bucket test says water is genuinely going missing, we pressure-test the lines, dye-trace at the structure, listen acoustically and image thermally until the loss has an address — without draining the pool.

Two Scottsdales, two kinds of pipe

The southern neighbourhoods are the older ones, and close to three in ten Scottsdale homes predate 1980. Copper of that era usually fails where it was bent or where it rubs against a rebar chair, so the leak is rarely where the damp flooring is. North Scottsdale is newer and sits on rockier, more sloping ground, where PEX and newer copper mean a fittings problem and the terrain means water can travel before it surfaces.

Half the housing in the city is not single-family, which adds a third case: shared and attached buildings, where the first task is isolating which line and which unit the loss belongs to before anyone opens a wall.

Landscape, overseeding and where the water really goes

Scottsdale Water estimates that overseeded winter grass needs roughly eight thousand gallons a season for every thousand square feet. That is a lot of deliberate water, and deliberate water is what makes an accidental leak so easy to hide: a system that is supposed to be using a great deal can absorb a failure without anyone noticing.

The way through that is to test the irrigation rather than watch it. Zones get isolated and pressure-checked, laterals get traced, and emitters get inspected for the difference between a trickle and a squirt. Scottsdale Water is the city’s own utility, so the bill you are comparing against comes from the same people publishing the guidance.

Straight answers

Questions we get in Scottsdale

How much evaporation is normal for a Scottsdale pool?

More than most people believe. Scottsdale Water tells homeowners that a four-hundred-square-foot pool loses roughly nineteen thousand six hundred and sixty-five gallons a year to evaporation, peaking in June. That is why the old quarter-inch-a-day rule is useless here: judge the pool against a bucket of water sitting in the same weather instead of against a number.

What does it mean if the pool loses more while the pump is running?

It points at the plumbing rather than the shell — and this is Scottsdale Water’s own guidance, not just ours. Run the bucket test once with the equipment on and once with it off. More loss with the pump running moves attention to the pressurised lines and returns; the same loss either way moves it to the structure, the skimmer, the light niche and the fittings.

I have white crusty deposits on the pool pipes. Is that anything?

It can be. Scottsdale Water lists white crusty mineral deposits on pool pipes as a sign of a slow leak, because water escaping and evaporating leaves its minerals behind. It is one of the few leak signs you can check in a minute at the equipment pad with no equipment at all — photograph it and send it over.

Areas near Scottsdale

Arcadiaflood-irrigated lots, 1970s slabs Paradise Valleylarge lots, four water providers Temperentals, city-run flood irrigation Mesaevery build era, three irrigation systems All service areasevery area we cover, with its own page Valleywide Leak Detectionhow we work, and what we do not do

Pool or irrigation losing water in Scottsdale?

Run the city’s bucket test, then text us the result and a photo of the equipment pad.

Call (602) 830-9717 Text us a photo