That strong shower is not doing you any favors
If you live in Nixa and your shower feels like a power wash, or your washing machine hose has a faint hiss when the water's running, you're probably feeling pleased about it. Strong water pressure feels like a feature. It isn't. It's usually a sign that pressure coming into your house from the street main is higher than your plumbing was built to handle, and that extra force is working on your pipes and fixtures every single time you turn on a tap.
Most people never think to check this because nothing seems wrong. There's no puddle, no drip, no obvious problem. The cost shows up slowly, in a water heater that fails a few years early, in fittings that loosen, in a bill that creeps up without an obvious reason.
Why this matters more here than in a lot of places
Nixa sits on the edge of the Ozarks, and a lot of the housing stock here was built from the 1970s through the 2000s, with a good number of newer builds filling in the subdivisions off Highway 14 and around Tanglewood. Older homes in this range often still have original galvanized or early-generation copper supply lines, and those materials don't age well under sustained high pressure. Newer homes usually have PEX, which handles pressure better but still has a rated limit, and fittings and valves throughout the system are rated too.
The regional water supply here, drawing off municipal lines fed by groundwater and nearby surface sources, tends to run on the higher side of normal in parts of town, especially in homes lower on the elevation grade relative to the water tower or pumping station. If your house sits downhill from the main distribution point, you're more likely to be getting pressure above the range your fixtures expect.
More on this from High Water Pressure Is A Slow Bill, Not A Benefit.
What the seasons do to a system already under strain
Ozark summers bring long stretches of heat and humidity, and that's when water use spikes with lawn irrigation, hose use, and air conditioner condensate systems all drawing on the same lines. High pressure combined with high demand is when weak points fail, a hose bib splits, a supply line to an outdoor spigot blows.
Winter is the other half of the problem. Nixa gets real freezes, not constant ones, but enough hard overnight drops that pipes contract and expand repeatedly through the cold season. A pipe already stressed by constant high pressure has less give left when it also has to deal with a freeze and thaw cycle. That's often when a slow, hidden leak that's been building for a year finally turns into a wet spot on the ceiling or a soft spot in the floor.
What you can check yourself
You can buy a simple pressure gauge that threads onto an outdoor spigot or washing machine hookup, and it will give you a straightforward reading. Most homes are built for pressure somewhere in the 40 to 60 psi range. If you're reading consistently above 80, that's worth paying attention to.
Beyond that, look at your water heater's age and condition, listen for banging or knocking in the pipes when a faucet shuts off quickly, and check under sinks and around the water heater base for any dampness or mineral staining. None of this requires special tools, just a flashlight and a few minutes.
Where it stops being a homeowner job
If your reading is high, or if you're finding staining, corrosion, or banging pipes, that's the point to call in a plumbing inspection rather than guess at a fix. A proper inspection checks the pressure at multiple points in the house, looks at the condition of your main shutoff and any existing pressure-reducing valve, and examines the supply lines and water heater connections for wear that matches what high pressure typically causes.
Installing or replacing a pressure-reducing valve is also not a weekend project for most homeowners. It involves cutting into the main line, and getting the setting wrong in either direction causes its own problems, either leaving pressure too high still or dropping it so low that upstairs fixtures run weak. This is the kind of thing that's cheap to prevent and expensive to repair once something actually fails, so a slow bill now beats a burst line and water damage later.