How old are Tempe pools?
The oldest here. The American Community Survey puts the median Tempe home at 1984 — a year older than Phoenix, five years older than Mesa and nineteen older than Gilbert.
That age changes the whole conversation. A pool from the early eighties has been resurfaced several times, has original main-drain and return plumbing under a deck that has moved, and has almost certainly had equipment replaced piecemeal by different people over four decades. When something fails on a pool like that, the failed part is often not the actual problem — it is the part that gave up first under a load created by something else.
It is worth being concrete about what forty years does to the parts nobody looks at. Underground return lines, the main drain run, the skimmer throat and the pipe penetrations through the shell are all original on most pools of this age, and none of them is inspectable without either digging or pressure-testing. They are also the components that fail slowly and expensively rather than suddenly and cheaply. When an old Tempe pool starts losing water, the odds that the cause is one of those rather than a visible fitting are considerably higher than they would be on a newer pool.
It also means the pool has a history nobody has written down. Four decades of different owners, different service companies and different fixes leaves a pad where the plumbing does not necessarily match the drawings, valves have been repurposed, and at least one previous repair was a bodge that has been holding fine for fifteen years. That is not a criticism of anyone; it is just what forty years looks like, and it is why a first visit to an old Tempe pool takes longer than a first visit to a new Gilbert one.
It is also the age at which water loss stops being unlikely. Forty years of ground movement, four decades of brutal summers, and old plumbing joins add up. Pool leak detection in Tempe is the job that ends the argument about whether it is evaporation.
