Plumbing Services

Most people arrive here not knowing which of the five they need, and that is a reasonable place to start. What you say to us decides which van comes out and what is already in it, so it is worth a minute.

How do I know which service I need?

Four questions sort almost every job.

• Is water going somewhere it should not? A burst pipe, a leak you cannot isolate, water coming through a ceiling, no water at all. That is emergency plumbing, and the first thing to do is stop the supply rather than describe the problem to anyone.
• Is waste water not leaving? A sink, shower or bath that drains slowly or backs up. That is blocked drains.
• Is the hot water wrong? No hot water, or warm water that never gets properly hot. That is boilers and water heaters.
• Is it a fixture misbehaving? A toilet that runs when nobody has flushed it is toilet repair. A shower that swings hot and cold, or has gone weak, is showers.

Two of these get confused constantly, and it changes the job. A toilet that backs up when you flush is blocked. A toilet that keeps running when you do not is a fill valve. Same fixture, different trade, different tools.

Which of the two of us turns up?

Dave does drains, toilets and showers. Rob does boilers, water heaters and installations. That is not a rota, it is how the work divides, and it means the question you get asked first is which kind of job you have rather than when you are free.

In practice the split follows the buildings. The blocked drains go to the apartment stock in Sitio de Calahonda, Calypso and Torrenueva, where a narrow waste in an older block is the standard cause. The water heater work goes wherever the units are ageing, which is the same stock, and it comes in waves in August when the pressure sags in the urbanisations above the coast road.

Showers and toilets sit across both of those worlds. A cartridge that has seized in hard water and a cistern that will not shut off are the two things we see most often after drains, in every area from Calahonda out to La Cala Golf and Elviria.

Why blocked drains are the job we do most

If you want to know where the work actually is, it is internal blockages. An internal blockage - a trap, a waste run inside the property, a stack that is shared with the flats above and below - is usually cleared in under an hour, and there is no part to buy for it.

It is also the job that comes back, which is why it matters more than the fee suggests. Push a hole through a blockage and water moves again, but the coating on the pipe wall is still there and the pipe is now narrower than it was. The next thing that goes down catches sooner. So we clear it, then run water through and watch how fast it leaves, because a drain that runs slowly has not been fixed. That test is the whole job, and it is the part that gets skipped when someone is in a hurry.

The reason a drain keeps blocking here is hard water. Calcium lines the inside of a waste pipe year by year until a normal amount of hair or soap finishes the job, and it is the same mineral that kills shower cartridges and water heater elements.

The parts question, and why it decides the visit

Common fill valves and flush cartridges ride on the van, so a running toilet is normally one visit rather than two. Send a photograph of the inside of the cistern and we will know whether it is the valve or the seal before setting off. If a job needs something we do not carry, it gets collected on the way rather than booked into a second appointment.

Water heaters are the exception: send the rating plate, not a description. Much of what is fitted here is electric and much of it is Ariston, and the make and model decides whether the element is available at all.

What none of this covers

Gas. We do not work on gas appliances, and we say so at the start rather than at the end. This coast runs almost entirely on electric, but if you have gas, it is a different qualification and not somewhere to guess.