We're not a Powell service area. We're a Powell business.

Powell is not a line on a service-area map for us. The shop address is here, the trucks are parked here overnight, and Keith has answered this phone from this town since 1996. Most Powell calls are a short drive from the office, which is why they usually fit into the same day.

Powell is on Del-Co Water, which typically runs somewhere around seven to eight grains per gallon. That is not the hardest water in the county, but it is hard enough to set the clock on every piece of hot-water equipment in the house. Scale settles on a tank floor and insulates the burner from the water it is supposed to be heating. It consumes an anode rod years faster than the brochure suggests. It narrows a tankless heat exchanger, and it is the usual reason a five-year-old shower cartridge starts dripping. None of that is a crisis. It is a maintenance schedule, and knowing the schedule exists is most of the fight.

The other thing about this town is that its biggest building wave has come due all at once. Wedgewood dates to around 1996; Golf Village, Liberty Hills, The Chase and the Wedgewood Park sections filled in through the late nineties and early two-thousands. Copper, water heaters, angle stops, hose bibs and fill valves installed within a few seasons of each other are now thirty years old on the same streets. Meanwhile, a few blocks from the Olentangy Street and Liberty Street crossroads, downtown Powell still holds houses that predate all of it, where the supply under the floor may be galvanized and the drain may be cast iron. Same town, two completely different service calls.