Mesa, Arizona — the East Valley city built on ancient canals

Mesa is the third-largest city in Arizona and the biggest city in the East Valley — more than half a million people spread across roughly 139 square miles of Sonoran Desert, from the Salt River on its northern edge to the Superstition Mountains on the horizon. Underneath the modern city is a much older one: Mesa was farmed through canals dug by the Hohokam a thousand years ago, resettled by Mormon pioneers in 1878, and built out in waves ever since, so a 19th-century farm settlement, a 1970s lake community, and a master-planned neighborhood from 2013 can all sit inside the same city limits. This page is our guide to the city itself — how it started, what it's like to live here, and what Mesa's age, heat, and water do to the plumbing inside its homes. City Plumbing and Rooter AZ LLC serves Mesa from our San Tan Valley service area, 24/7.

A short history of Mesa

Water made Mesa — twice. The Hohokam people lived in the Salt River Valley for hundreds of years and built one of the largest canal systems of the ancient Americas: channels up to 90 feet wide at their head gates, delivering water to more than 110,000 acres by 1100 CE. The Hohokam left the valley in the 1400s, but their canals remained in the desert, waiting. The platform mound at today's Sce:dagĭ Mu:val Va'aki — long known as Mesa Grande — was occupied between about 1100 and 1400 and is one of only two Hohokam mounds left in the metro Phoenix area.

The second founding came in two parties. In March 1877, Daniel Webster Jones and Henry Clay Rogers led Mormon settlers to the north side of the present city; their settlement became Lehi, named in 1883 and annexed into Mesa in 1970 — it's still a distinct, historic corner of the city. On February 14, 1878, a second group of Mormon colonists from Utah and Idaho — the First Mesa Company — climbed onto the flat-topped bluff above the Salt River instead. "Mesa" is Spanish for "table," and the name fit the land. The settlers cleaned out an abandoned Hohokam canal for their first irrigation project; by April 1878 water was flowing through their fields, and the Mesa Canal was completed that October. Mesa City was registered as a one-square-mile townsite on July 17, 1878 — laid out on the Mormon "City of Zion" plan of broad streets and big garden lots, a grid you can still see downtown — and incorporated in 1883 with a population of 300.

Farming built Mesa for its first eighty years; as late as 1960, half the city's residents still made a living from agriculture. Then airfields, air conditioning, and the Valley's growth turned the farm town into a suburb, and the suburb into a city. Downtown kept its anchors and added new ones: the Mesa Arts Center, the largest comprehensive arts campus in Arizona at over 210,000 square feet, opened on Main Street in 2005, and in 2014 the Chicago Cubs opened Sloan Park — at 15,000 seats, the largest spring training stadium in baseball.

Living in Mesa today

Mesa is a true desert city. Summer afternoons average 104–106°F from June through August, winters are mild with overnight lows around 40°F, and the whole year brings only about 11 inches of rain — much of it in the winter storms and the summer monsoon season, which runs June 15 through September 30. Life leans outdoors the rest of the year: hiking among the saguaros at Usery Mountain Regional Park, floating the Lower Salt River, paddling Saguaro Lake, and looking east to the Superstition Mountains, with downtown Mesa's arts center, museums, and Main Street in the middle of it all.

Because Mesa grew in waves, its neighborhoods read like a timeline. Lehi, in the north, is the oldest ground in the city, a former farming settlement of older homes and large lots. Downtown Mesa is the original 1878 townsite. Dobson Ranch, in the west, was one of Arizona's earliest large master-planned communities — established in 1973 around five lakes and a golf course, with homes mostly from the 1970s through the early 1990s. The Superstition Springs area grew up around its 1990 mall in the east. Las Sendas climbs into the Usery foothills in the northeast, built from the mid-1990s onward, and Eastmark — 3,200 acres in the southeast with 15,000 homes planned — opened its first neighborhoods in 2013 and is still growing. Which wave built your Mesa home matters, because each one plumbed differently.

What Mesa does to your plumbing

The water is hard — and it depends on your zone. Mesa's water comes from three sources: Salt River Project water from the Salt and Verde Rivers, Central Arizona Project water from the Colorado River, and groundwater wells. The City of Mesa's own water quality report puts average hardness at about 12 grains per gallon in the City Zone and about 16 grains in the Eastern and Southern Zones — firmly hard water either way. That mineral load builds scale inside water heaters and on fixtures year after year; a heater that rumbles, runs longer, or delivers less hot water is often carrying Mesa's water in the bottom of the tank. Regular flushing is basic upkeep here.

Summer works on everything. Months of 100-degree-plus afternoons bake the ground and everything buried in it, and the City notes that groundwater in some areas — especially east Mesa — is naturally warm, so summer tap water can come out surprisingly warm. Then the monsoon arrives: short, intense storms drop a large share of the year's rain in a few weeks, and every weak drain, cleanout, and low spot on a property gets tested at once.

Housing era is the quiet factor. Mesa's oldest homes, in Lehi and around the original townsite, have been standing for well over a century of rebuilds and remodels. The big suburban cohorts — Dobson Ranch and the 1970s–90s subdivisions — are now 30 to 50 years old, right in the window where the galvanized and cast-iron plumbing materials common in their era reach the end of their typical service life: drains narrow from the inside, pressure fades, and small leaks start in walls and under slabs. Newer homes in Las Sendas and Eastmark don't have age problems yet — they have size, with more bathrooms, longer water-heater runs, and irrigation lines working in desert soil. In every era, the pattern is the same: repeat clogs, repeat leaks, or fading pressure usually mean the pipe itself is the story, and a camera inspection shows what's actually going on before anyone recommends a repair.

Plumbing services in Mesa

City Plumbing and Rooter AZ LLC serves Mesa from our San Tan Valley service area, and we're in the city every day. The services Mesa homeowners call us for most:

• Drain cleaning and hydro jetting for slow and repeating clogs
• Leak detection and slab leak detection when water shows up where it shouldn't
• Water heaters — repair, replacement, tankless, and the flushing Mesa's hard water makes necessary
• Sewer camera inspection and sewer line repair and replacement
• Water line repair and replacement
• Emergency plumbing, 24/7

For service options, pricing conversations, and booking, see our main Mesa plumbing page — and our San Tan Valley page covers the service area we're based out of for the southeast Valley.

Call your local Mesa plumber

Historic Lehi home or a new build in Eastmark — if it's leaking, clogged, or running cold, we'll explain what we find and what your options are before any work starts. City Plumbing and Rooter AZ LLC, AZ ROC #362148, open 24/7. Call 928-361-9755.