Plumbing Notes/general
Six Questions Worth Asking Before You Hire a Plumber
Before someone cuts into your slab or repipes your house, a few blunt questions will tell you most of what you need to know. Here are the ones we like getting asked.
By Brad Staiger — Staiger Plumbing, LIC. #802197
The questions we want you to ask
A plumber who has nothing to hide does not flinch when you start asking. We have been working the Inland Empire since 2001, and the calls that go best are the ones where the homeowner asks us hard questions before we ever pull a truck up to the curb. Most of the bad work we get called in to fix came from a contractor who was never asked anything at all. Someone in Fontana or Rialto signs off on a slab leak repair based on a price and a handshake, and two years later the patch fails because the wrong pipe went in the wall. The six questions below are not gotchas. They are the things we would ask if it were our own house. An honest answer to each one takes about thirty seconds, and a vague answer tells you plenty on its own.
Is your license active right now
Ask for the license number and check it yourself. Ours is 802197, and the California state board site (CSLB) shows the status, the bond, and whether anyone has filed against it. A license that lapsed last year is not a license. This matters more than people think out here, because the Inland Empire pulls in plenty of out-of-area outfits chasing the growth in Menifee, Wildomar, and Lake Elsinore, and not all of them carry their own number. Some are working under a license that belongs to someone who is not on the job. If the person quoting your slab leak cannot tell you the number from memory or text it to you in a minute, that is your answer. A real license also means permits get pulled when the work calls for it, which protects you when you sell the house and a buyer's inspector starts asking what was done under the slab.
Do you carry workers comp
General liability and workers comp are two different things, and you want proof of both before anyone climbs into your crawlspace or opens a wall. Liability covers damage to your home. Workers comp covers the person doing the work if they get hurt on your property. Without it, an injury on your job can become your problem, and repiping a two-story in Corona or running a gas line means real ladders and real risk. Ask for a current certificate of insurance with your name on it, not a photo of a card from three years ago. We send ours over without being chased. The reason this comes up so often in the IE is the volume of one-person operations working the older tracts from the 91 corridor out to Hemet. A solo guy with no comp is cheaper on paper. The math changes fast if he slips off your roof.
What pipe are you putting in my walls
If the answer is just "PEX," keep pushing, because PEX-A and PEX-B are not the same product. We run PEX-A on every repipe and slab leak re-route, and the difference matters in this climate. PEX-A is more flexible, which means fewer fittings inside the wall, and fewer fittings means fewer future failure points. It also handles a hard freeze better than PEX-B, and while the IE does not freeze like the mountains, a cold snap in Beaumont or the higher parts of Yucaipa is enough to test a brittle line. There is a second reason this question matters here. Inland Empire water is hard, and the old galvanized and polybutylene in homes built before the mid-90s is exactly what we are replacing. We do not install copper, because the same aggressive water that ate the original line will go after new copper too. A plumber who shrugs at this question has not thought about your water.
How long is the warranty, in writing
A warranty you cannot read is a sales line. Ask what is covered, for how long, and what voids it. We back our slab leak repairs for life, in writing, and we are comfortable doing that because of how we fix them. We re-route in PEX-A or sleeve the line in the wall. We do not tunnel-cut or saw-cut under the slab, because chopping up your foundation to reach a pipe creates problems that outlast the leak. That method is part of why so many slab repairs around Norco and Chino Hills, where the clay soil shifts hard with the seasons, come back to haunt the homeowner. Get the warranty terms on the estimate before work starts, not promised over the phone. And ask the plain follow-up: if this fails in year four, who comes out and what does it cost me. If the answer gets fuzzy, the warranty is thinner than it sounds.
What this adds up to
None of these questions are rude, and none of them slow down a plumber who runs a clean shop. License, workers comp, the actual pipe going in your walls, and a warranty you can hold in your hand. That is most of the picture right there. The free part is worth using too. We do leak detection with pressure-decay and acoustic gear at no charge, and the estimate comes in writing the same day, so you can ask all six questions with real numbers in front of you instead of a guess. The homes out here, from the 1950s copper in the Wood Streets to the mid-90s tracts in Murrieta, all have their own patterns, and a straight answer to a straight question is how you tell whether the person standing in your driveway actually knows them. Ask first. The right plumber will be glad you did.
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