The call usually starts the same way. There's a banging in the walls, when the washer finishes, when a faucet snaps shut, and it's gotten loud enough that the household stopped ignoring it. That sound usually means the pressure is too high, and it's worth taking seriously. Pipes knock when the pressure behind them runs high, and in La Mesa's older homes, where the plumbing has taken full street pressure for decades, that's common.
You can't see water pressure, but it affects every part of the plumbing. In the healthy range, everything downstream lasts as long as it should. Above it, everything wears early, the joints, the faucets, the supply lines, the appliances, and most expensively the water heater, which wears out early under pressure it was never meant to hold. When a water heater fails early, the high pressure behind it is often still there, and the new heater goes in under the same strain. The regulator, or PRV, either works, has failed without anyone noticing, or, in plenty of older La Mesa homes, was never installed. From inside the house, all three look the same.
Telling them apart takes a licensed contractor and a gauge, and that's what the visit is for. The pressure gets measured, the regulator gets checked, and the situation gets explained in plain English, working fine, failing, or missing, with the options for each. If the home never had a regulator, you hear what adding one protects. Your house has been taking whatever pressure the street sends, and a gauge test shows you what that number is.
