Building A Connection With Your Plumber Keeps You On Top Of Your Home’s Condition | New Orleans, LA
Photo By KatarzynaBialasiewicz at istock
At bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of New Orleans, LA, we meet a lot of our customers through emergencies. Whether they looked us up or got a referral from a friend, something has happened in their plumbing and it needs attention, fast. Our plumber comes on the scene, often a messy one uses extensive plumbing knowledge as well as experience with similar homes in the area to understand the pipes and fixtures involved, and gets to work. When the job is done, we may have a few bits of information to make the homeowner’s life easier, such as notes about the age or type of pipes involved, fixtures that need attention, or improvements such as missing or non-functional shutoff valves that we could address. It’s our way of building relationships, not just business. When we have a chance to get to know our customers, and they get to know us, the homeowner’s life can improve when it comes to maintaining their plumbing. It pays to know someone, as they say.
Number One Benefit of Knowing You and Your Property, The Shutoff Valve Hunt
When we make an emergency plumber call, often the first thing we need to do is shut off the water supply to limit the mess. Sometimes there’s a valve nearby, such as under the sink that’s in trouble, but sometimes that valve hasn’t been turned since the house was built maybe a half-century ago. Our plumber can take care of that, but maybe after the emergency. The main resource is the main water supply line shutoff, but you’d be surprised how many places that valve can be hidden. It might be in your basement, but if like many people you store a lot down there it could be behind anything, anywhere, and your plumber needs to be making repairs, not searching. It could be in your yard, in a box-shaped opening in the ground with a cover, that could have been buried over time though so you have to locate it and dig. And in developments, sometimes houses will share a shutoff valve location, and your plumber will find it in someone else’s yard. The bottom line: if we know you, and we know your home, we can make sure your localized shutoff valves are working, and find and test your main shutoff valve as well. When the water’s turned off, things do tend to get a bit more relaxed in an emergency plumbing situation.
Pipe Types and Condition
When we repair or replace pipes, make modifications or add valves for laundry or other use, it’s important to know what kinds of piping we’re working with. That’s especially true if we’re providing a drain cleaning service, either for a single sink or toilet or for your whole house, which we do as a kind of spring cleaning to make sure you have the minimum number of drain problems during the year. If your pipes are metal and corroding, such as copper or iron, or decaying, which some older types of PVC do, we have to be careful about leaks, existing already or potentially created by our powerful drain cleaning techniques. We use video inspection to check before we proceed, and that can also help us tell you about the condition of your drain pipes, water supply pipes, and even your water and sewer lines. Video inspection is one of several techniques our plumbers use to locate leaks and guide patching material for repairs, too.
Appliance and Fixture Installation
From amazing new shower heads to water-efficient toilets that save thousands of gallons per year, garbage disposals to stainless steel washing machine hoses, when you’re upgrading or replacing your appliances and fixtures, our plumbers have ideas, products, and installation methods you need. When we install a dishwasher, we make sure it’s in for the long run, with the proper connections and drain backup prevention if it’s connected to your garbage disposal drain, as many are. We provide garbage disposal upgrades from the wimpy model that often comes with the house, to power grinders that can take what you feed them. In the bathroom, water-saving fixtures are becoming more enjoyable and less annoying, as designers have found ways to power flush the toilet with less water, and give you a great shower by improving the spray, not the water usage. Your bathroom sink by itself can save an amazing amount of water, hundreds of gallons per year, simply by using a faucet that you don’t leave running while you brush teeth and shave. A simple answer? Touchless faucets, turning on when you need them and off when you don’t.
Remodeling
Our plumbers love to help homeowners remodel, add more features, renew the bathroom, or extend their living space. In some cases, adding more plumbing can require some extra plumbing skill in making sure the connections from old pipes to new ones are appropriate and long-lasting, or the pipes themselves are of sufficient capacity to provide the flow rates for the new space. We can work together to make sure that the details are covered and any interesting plumbing options you may not have known about are on the table while you’re designing.
Get to Know a Plumber You Can Trust in New Orleans, LA
At bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of New Orleans, we’re experts at plumbing but we’re your neighbors, too, ready to help you out when you have plumbing problems and looking forward to getting to know you. When we build a relationship with you, we can be ready to answer your tough questions like “is it time to replace my sewer line?” which might actually answer with “in your case, there may be an alternative.” Upgrades to your home in the plumbing realm are also easier when we work together, so give us a call and get to know us, so we’ll be ready for the tough times and the good ones.
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