Drain CleaningPark Glen Fort Worth TX

Park Glen: Hillwood's 3,317-Home Master Plan, Now 30 Years Old

Park Glen began construction in 1988 as a Hillwood Development project — the master-planned community arm of Ross Perot, Jr. — and grew into one of North Tarrant County's first true master-planned communities, eventually comprising 3,317 homes spread across 13 named villages. For years it was the fastest-growing neighborhood in the Metroplex. The neighborhood is anchored by seven HOA-managed parks with disc golf, soccer, and basketball, an internal trail system through the village greenbelts, and Park Glen Elementary serving as one of the Keller ISD anchors inside 76137. The housing stock is late-1980s and 1990s suburban traditional — brick veneer, gabled two-story and ranch hybrids — with infill construction continuing into the early 2000s in the newer villages.

What that means for plumbing: Park Glen is wholly past the PVC adoption cutoff. Every sewer lateral and most interior drain stacks are Schedule 40 / SDR-35 PVC (with some ABS on interior drains). There is no clay tile, no cast iron, no crown corrosion to worry about. PVC is structurally sound for 50 to 100 years under normal conditions and essentially impervious to root intrusion at the pipe body. The original Park Glen plumbing is, by any reasonable measure, in good shape.

But the oldest sections are now more than 35 years old, and a few problems are starting to appear. The dominant one is hard-water scale plus grease compounding inside kitchen drains. Fort Worth water tests at approximately 14 grains per gallon, or roughly 240 mg/L as calcium carbonate — classified by the USGS as "very hard." Every gallon through a Park Glen kitchen line deposits a fraction of its mineral content on the pipe wall, and 30-plus years of daily cooking grease has bonded to that scale into a coating thick enough to noticeably narrow the bore in the oldest villages. (Full mechanism in what Fort Worth's hard water does to drain pipes.) Hydro jetting every 5 to 7 years on the kitchen line removes both layers and resets the cycle.

The second emerging issue — and the reason Park Glen now warrants a baseline lateral camera inspection — is pipe-belly settlement. Park Glen sits on the clayey upland soils typical of the western Tarrant survey area (Heiden / Ferris series). Where backfill around the original sewer laterals was not perfectly compacted in 1988 or 1992, the soil has continued settling over three decades, and any low-spot the pipe has dropped into now holds standing water and accumulates solids. We also see early signs of root intrusion at compromised joints in the oldest villages, where the now-mature live oak and cedar elm canopy is starting to find any joint that backfill movement has stressed enough to crack the glue seal. A camera inspection at the 30-year-of-ownership mark identifies all of this and sets the right maintenance plan. Neighboring planned communities with similar pipe age and conditions: Fossil Creek, Woodland Springs, Heritage, Crawford Farms, and Marine Creek.