Hilliard built in waves. Each wave has its own plumbing timeline.

Hilliard is the furthest city on our list from the shop, and we will say that plainly rather than pretend otherwise. It is about half an hour out, so non-emergency work here gets scheduled properly rather than squeezed between closer calls.

What makes it worth writing about is the chronology. Three large subdivisions went in during the 1950s. Connection to the Columbus regional water and sewer system in the 1960s is what actually unlocked development at scale. Then I-270 finished in the 1980s and the city had a second, much larger boom. Building has continued westward toward Brown Township farmland ever since. The consequence is that Hilliard does not have a housing stock so much as four of them, and the mid-1980s cohort sits squarely inside the polybutylene and early-CPVC window - grey plastic supply pipe with crimped fittings that failed often enough nationally to become its own category of problem. A 1955 house on the Old Hilliard side, a 1985 house off the beltway and a 2015 house near the western edge have almost nothing in common below the floor.

Two more things shape the work here. First, a meaningful share of the established 1980s to 2000s neighborhoods - Scioto Trace, Dexter Falls, Hilliard Green - include condominiums and townhomes, where shared walls and shared drain stacks make locating a leak and scheduling a repair a genuinely different job from a detached house. Second, the water: Hilliard is on the City of Columbus supply at roughly seven to nine grains per gallon, and the interesting part here is not the number but the mileage. In a housing stock this age, most water heaters are now on their second or third replacement, and the second replacement is where the original sizing mistake usually gets repeated by whoever swapped it fastest.