We work in the towns within about a half-hour of the shop. We could try to cover more ground, but then we would be late everywhere instead of on time in the places we already know.
The shop is in Stillwater, and we say yes to most calls within about 30 minutes' drive. That covers the towns listed here, plus a few unincorporated stretches in between. After 30 minutes the math gets harder for both of us - we are not going to charge you a $200 trip fee, and we are not going to lose money driving an hour each way.
If your town is just outside the radius and you cannot find a plumber, call us anyway. We have made exceptions for repeat customers, for emergencies where nobody else can get there, and for jobs big enough to justify the drive. Worst case, we know most of the good plumbers in the surrounding counties and we are happy to point you to one we trust.
The most common complaint people have about contractors is "they said they would be here at 10 and they showed up at 4." That is what happens when a shop tries to cover too much ground. We would rather work the same neighborhoods week after week, get to know which houses have polybutylene and which have galvanized, and show up when we said we would. The short list is the whole point.
When you work the same neighborhoods for over a decade, you start to notice patterns. Here's what we've learned about the towns we cover - the kind of stuff a plumber driving in from an hour away wouldn't know.
A lot of these houses were built between 1950 and 1975, and a chunk of them still have polybutylene supply lines from the original build. We've replaced more PB in these two towns than anywhere else. Hard well water is also the norm - if you live here and don't have a softener, your water heater is probably aging twice as fast as it should.
Homes near the lake almost always pull from wells with iron content. Iron stains in the toilet bowl, rusty hot water, weird smells - all symptoms of the same thing, and all fixable with the right filtration. Most homes out here are also on septic, so we're careful about what goes down the drains and we know which septic guys to recommend.
Lots of homes built in the late '90s and 2000s out here, which means PEX supply and PVC drains - generally easy to work on. The catch is the mature maple trees the developers left in place. We probably clear five root-blocked sewer laterals a year out of these two neighborhoods. Worth a camera inspection if you've never had one done.
Mix of everything - some 1920s farmhouses with cast iron drains and galvanized supply, some 1980s splits, some new construction. The thing they share is exposure: these towns sit higher up and the wind cuts through crawlspaces hard. Frozen pipes are a real winter problem. We've insulated a lot of crawl space lines out here.
One call confirms it. We will tell you straight whether we can come out, when we can be there, and roughly what it will cost.