Tub to Shower Conversion in El Mirage, Arizona

El Mirage is a different kind of West Valley town from the age-restricted communities on the other side of Peoria, and the Census numbers say so. The 2020 count was 35,805, with the Bureau's 2025 estimate at 35,820, a change of 0.1 percent. QuickFacts records 10.1 percent of residents at 65 and over and 27.7 percent under 18, with 69.7 percent of housing units owner-occupied and a median owner-occupied value of $321,900. That is a family town with a young age profile, and the tub-to-shower requests here tend to come from households remodeling a second bathroom or setting up a ground-floor bath for a parent rather than from a whole neighborhood converting at once.

The condition that most changes the work here is the water, and El Mirage is unusually specific about it. The city runs its own supply, pumping groundwater from nine city wells, and its 2024 water quality report states that hardness varies at each well, that the range is 4 to 9 grains with an average of 7, and that 7.5 grains is recommended for water softeners. Very few utilities in the region print a softener threshold in their own report. It means a homeowner here can look up a number, compare it against a published recommendation, and make the softener decision separately from the shower decision.

Nine Wells, Seven Grains, and a City That Permits Its Own Work

El Mirage is an incorporated city, which puts the permit counter inside the city rather than at the county. Its Building Safety division is responsible for providing technical advice with regard to fire and building safety codes during the pre-construction phase of projects, so questions about scope are worth asking there before demolition rather than after a wall is open. That is a structural difference from Sun City and Sun City West, both of which are unincorporated and route the same job to Maricopa County Planning and Development, and from Youngtown, which is incorporated but runs a different code edition. Three neighboring communities, three different answers about who reviews the work. The one thing that does not change across any of them is the Arizona Registrar of Contractors licensing requirement, which is a state matter and applies the same way in every one of these jurisdictions.

The water story is where El Mirage stands apart from its neighbors on the EPCOR systems. Nine city wells feed the supply, hardness varies well by well, and the published range is 4 to 9 grains per gallon with an average of 7. Compare that with EPCOR's Northeast Agua Fria district at 12 to 15 grains per gallon and total dissolved solids of 374 to 461 parts per million, or its Agua Fria district, which serves parts of multiple cities and towns in the West Valley and reports a range of 2 to 17 grains with dissolved solids from 190 to 638 parts per million. El Mirage sits at the softer end of that spread and, just as importantly, in a narrow band. A narrow band is easier to design a shower around, because there is less difference between an ordinary week and the worst week the surfaces will face.

See El Mirage, AZ on Google Maps — we cover the whole area from Peoria.