How it started
One van, and a great many old house drains
Miguel Salazar served his apprenticeship on the cast iron and lead of Sunnyside in the mid-nineties, at a time when everybody in the trade was already calling that work obsolete. It was not obsolete then and it is not obsolete now — most of this neighbourhood still drains through it — and learning to read an old house drain properly turned out to be the best possible training for everything that came after.
The shop on Roosevelt Avenue opened in 1996 with one van and a pipe vice. The vice is still here. So is the habit of making a piece to fit rather than forcing a catalogue fitting into a pre-war joist bay, which is a large part of why our repipes look the way they do.
What has changed is the equipment: cameras, locators, acoustic detection, jetting, trenchless repair and a licensed engineer who does the design work. What has not changed is that the person who quotes the job works here, the person who does it works here, and the person who answers when it goes wrong at three in the morning works here too.
What we hold ourselves to
Four commitments, in plain language
Same-day service, and a real emergency line
Call before noon on a weekday and you are almost always seen that day. After hours the phone is answered by a person in Woodside, not a call centre that takes a message and hopes somebody rings you back.
Flat-rate pricing, approved before we start
You are quoted the whole job — parts, labour and the visit together — and you say yes or no before a wrench comes out. No hourly meter running while somebody walks back to the van.
Licensed, bonded, insured, permits pulled
A licensed master plumber stands behind the work. Where the code requires a permit and an inspection, we pull it, rather than burying an unpermitted repair inside your wall for the next owner to find.
The same faces, year after year
Our plumbers are employees, not a rotating cast of subcontractors. Several of them have been under the same Woodside basements for longer than the boilers standing in them.
Why we do not pay commission
The single decision that shapes everything else
This trade has a reputation problem, and most of it comes from one structural cause: people paid a percentage of what they sell. Put a plumber on commission and you have made it expensive for them to tell you that a spot repair will do what a replacement would.
Our plumbers are paid for the day. Nobody here earns more by replacing a sewer line than by repairing one section of it, and nobody earns anything at all by telling you that your pipe has twenty good years left. That is not a moral position; it is just the only arrangement under which the advice you get is worth anything.
It costs us work, occasionally. It also means that when we do tell somebody their line is finished, they tend to believe us — and we have the camera footage to show them why.
- No commission on parts, equipment or job size, at any level.
- Repair and replacement priced side by side, with the footage that justifies each.
- The failed part shown to you, with an explanation of what killed it.
Licensing and insurance
The paperwork, since somebody always asks
Licensed, bonded and insured
A New York City licensed master plumber signs off on the work, permits are pulled where the code requires them, and a certificate of insurance goes to your building or managing agent the same day it is asked for.
Master plumber supervision
Work performed under the supervision of a licensed master plumber. That is not a formality — it is who signs the permit, and it is what makes an inspection something you pass rather than something you avoid.
Permits and filings
Filed where the work requires them, with the inspection arranged and the sign-off handed to you rather than left in a drawer here. A properly closed permit is worth real money when you sell.
The shop
Where the work happens
In their words
What customers tell us
Illustrative comments written for this demonstration site. They are not real customer reviews and are deliberately not marked up as ratings anywhere in this page's structured data.
They talked me out of the expensive job.
Two other companies quoted me a full sewer line replacement. These people put a camera down first, found a single crushed section under the sidewalk, and repaired that. It cost me a fifth of the quote and it has been fine for three years.
Two in the morning, water coming through the kitchen ceiling.
The woman on the phone talked my husband to the main shutoff before she even took the address. That stopped it. Somebody was there in forty minutes and the whole thing turned out to be a failed supply line under an upstairs sink.
Somebody who actually understands old house drains.
Our building had been told for years the whole stack needed replacing. He spent a morning with a camera and found the problem was one bad connection in the basement. The board still has its reserve fund and the drains have been quiet since.
My kitchen did not lose a Friday night.
The floor drain backed up at four in the afternoon in July. They had someone here within the hour because we are on a contract, jetted the line, and we opened on time. That contract has paid for itself several times over.
Same-day service in most cases
Book a plumber, or call the 24-hour line
Tell us what the water is doing and we will tell you honestly whether it needs somebody tonight or whether it will keep until the morning. Diagnostics are $89 and credited in full against any repair you approve.