Orange Township grew up all at once. Now it's wearing out all at once.

Lewis Center is ten minutes up the road from the shop, which makes it one of the easiest places on our list to reach on the same day. It is also the most predictable, because of how it was built.

Orange Township went from 3,789 people in 1990 to 12,464 in 2000. Farmland became Olentangy Meadows, Oak Creek, Walker Wood, Glen Oak, North Orange and The Meadows at Lewis Center inside a single decade, and the houses were built by the same handful of builders to the same specifications with the same fixtures and the same builder-grade water heaters. Twenty-five to thirty years later, that means street-level synchronization. When one house on a cul-de-sac needs a heater, the odds are good that three others are within a year of the same call. That is not a coincidence, and it is not bad luck. It is a build cohort reaching the end of its service life together.

The equipment that went into those houses was chosen for a build budget, not for Del-Co's seven-to-eight-grain water over twenty-five years. Plastic-bodied fill valves, entry-level tank heaters, and fixture cartridges specified to a spreadsheet do not age gracefully in hard water. Meanwhile the ground under all of it is Delaware County's clay-heavy glacial soil, which is why almost every one of these houses has a sump pump and why spring is when they announce themselves. Lewis Center is an unincorporated community with no city hall of its own, addresses spread across township lines, and Olentangy schools tying the whole thing together - none of which changes the plumbing, but all of which changes who you call about a permit.