Plumbing

Most plumbers find a slab leak by process of elimination: open a section of floor, look, close it, try again. We use electronic and acoustic leak detection first, listening for the pressure signature a leak makes as it moves through the slab or behind a cabinet, and narrowing the source to a few inches before anyone lifts a tile. That is the difference between one clean repair and a trenched living room. Houston's blackland clay moves with every wet season, and a supply line that sat still for years starts to flex under a foundation that no longer sits the way it did when the pipe went in. That is where most of our slab leak calls come from, not from bad pipe, from ground that will not hold still.

Drains, sewers and water heaters

A drain that clears and then clogs again inside a fortnight was never actually cleared, it was punctured. A cable can push a hole through a blockage and leave the rest of the buildup sitting in the line, which is why the same clog is back in fifteen days. Camera inspection is what tells the difference between a soft stoppage and a structural problem: tree roots working into a joint, a sagging section from soil settling under the yard, or a section of aging cast iron that has simply narrowed with age. For water heaters we work both tank and tankless, and on an attic install we are thinking about more than the unit itself: the drain pan, a flooding monitor that alerts if water reaches that pan, an inline filter to keep sediment out of the tank, and an expansion tank so a closed system has somewhere to send the pressure that thermal expansion creates every time the water heats. Skip that last part and a closed water heater slowly works its own fittings loose.

"We had an extremely clogged pipe that could not be cleared by normal methods. They had to cut into our walls and removed the pipe. The plumbing work and drywall work were completed quickly and to our satisfaction.", Sheri England, Google review, on Miguel