The house
Your whole house's water system, on one page.
This is the map we'd bring into your crawlspace: every pipe labeled, every numbered part linking to the work it needs. Find your problem on the picture — or dial your house's age and see what's probably behind the drywall.
Before 1960: Galvanized steel supply was the standard, and most of it is now well past its service life — rust-scale narrows the pipe from the inside, so pressure drops at fixtures long before anything leaks. Drains from this era are usually cast iron. If your Shoals home predates 1960 and still has original supply lines, that's the first place we look.
1960–79: Copper became the norm for supply lines. It's durable material — but pinhole leaks can still develop over decades, especially where water chemistry is aggressive. Drains moved toward thinner-walled cast iron and early plastic.
1980s: Builder-dependent decade: some homes got polybutylene supply, which is known to fail at fittings and is worth identifying if you have it. CPVC and copper both appear too. If you're not sure what you have, that's a five-minute check.
1990s: CPVC and early PEX carry most houses from this era. Generally sound — the failures we see are at fittings and connections rather than in the pipe itself.
2000s +: PEX is the standard — flexible and corrosion-free. Problems, when they show up, live at connections, manifolds, and kinked runs, not in the pipe. Most calls from these homes are fixtures and heaters, not piping.
Want the long version? Read “What’s in your walls, by decade.”