The photos from a recent service call tell the story clearly. On the left, a drain snake cable working its way through a clogged toilet, water sitting in the bowl, the blockage not yet cleared. On the right, the same toilet after the snake did its job, the bowl draining correctly, the trap and drain opening visible and clear at the bottom. Two photos, one visit, the outcome that a plunger was not going to achieve on its own.

The photos attached to this post are from a job at a multi-unit residential property in the Phoenix area. A copper supply line running inside an exterior stucco wall had developed a leak. The pipe was not accessible from the interior. It was not accessible from a utility space. It was behind stucco cladding on an exterior wall, embedded in the wall cavity, with soil graded against the exterior base.

We get called out to bathroom drain jobs regularly where both the sink and the tub in the same bathroom are running slow at the same time. That combination shows up more often than people expect, and it usually gets explained as two separate problems happening to coincide. In most cases it is not two separate problems. It is one situation affecting both fixtures.

The second photo in this post is the old lint trap we pulled from a laundry utility space recently. The rust on that unit is not surface level. The walls have rusted through in spots, the mesh screen that does the actual filtering is corroded and compromised, and the discharge port is coated with years of residue that had been restricting flow long before the unit failed completely. That trap had been in place for a long time and had not been serviced or replaced in any of it.

The photos attached to this post are from jobs we have done at commercial and multi-unit properties across the Chandler area. The third image shows a team working a lift station pump-out under a shade canopy in the middle of summer, which tells you something immediately about what this kind of work involves in Arizona. The hatch is open, confined space entry equipment is staged, a ventilation blower is running fresh air into the wet well, the vac truck hose is in, and two technicians are working the job properly rather than just showing up with a pump and hoping for the best.

The second photo in this post is from inside a utility room we were called out to in Chandler. Water on the concrete floor, old copper pipe showing its age at the connections, the kind of space that tells you immediately that something had been going wrong for a while before anyone saw it. The cold water supply line coming into that building had failed where the pipe transitioned from underground to the interior.

The second photo in this post is from a job we did not long ago. A homeowner woke up to find the space between her house and the neighbor's property completely flooded. Muddy water pooling across the entire area, running across the flagstone, soaking into the landscape rock, with no obvious explanation. It had not rained. Nobody had left anything running. The yard just filled with water overnight.

A homeowner called us last summer after noticing her pool water level kept dropping. She had been adding water every few days for about three weeks. She assumed it was the heat. Chandler gets hot enough in July that a pool can lose a couple of inches to evaporation in a week, and that was her explanation until she started doing the math.

The most common call we get during a bathroom remodel is not a planned call. It is a homeowner or a contractor calling mid-project because something unexpected showed up once the walls came down or the floor came up. A corroded valve that will not close. A shower valve that was leaking behind the tile for who knows how long. A toilet flange that is cracked and sitting lower than the floor it is supposed to be flush with.

A landlord we have worked with for a couple of years called us last December about a unit that had a main line backup. His tenants had been dealing with slow drains for about three weeks but had not reported it because they figured it would resolve on its own. By the time anyone called, the backup was affecting both bathrooms in the unit and there was sewage coming up in the tub.

A couple bought a new construction home in a Chandler development last year and called us eight months after moving in. Their water bill had been creeping up since they moved in and they had chalked it up to a new household getting established. In month eight it jumped enough that they could not ignore it anymore.

July in Chandler means two things are about to happen. Temperatures have been above 110 for weeks, and within a few days or a few weeks, a monsoon storm is going to dump a significant amount of water on the Valley in a very short period of time.

We pulled that out of a sewer line inside a Chandler home. The photos are from a job we did not long ago where a homeowner had been dealing with recurring slow drains and occasional backups for over a year. He had the line snaked twice by different plumbers. Each time it cleared. Each time it came back. Nobody had put a camera in to see what they were dealing with.

We went out on a low water pressure call in an older Chandler neighborhood a couple of years ago. The homeowner had been dealing with the problem for close to two years. He had tried a new showerhead, had someone adjust the pressure regulator, and neither of those fixed it. By the time he called us he was mostly just resigned to the fact that his shower was going to feel that way from now on.

We went out on a low water pressure call in Chandler a while back. The homeowner had been dealing with it for about two years, slow flow at the kitchen faucet, a showerhead that never had great pressure no matter what she replaced it with, and a water heater that seemed to be struggling. She had called two other plumbers before us. One replaced the showerhead. One adjusted the pressure regulator. Neither one fixed it.

We replaced a water heater last fall for a homeowner whose unit had made it eleven years. Not a bad run. When we drained the old tank before pulling it, the amount of sediment that came out surprised even her. It came out thick and chalky, a significant layer that had been sitting at the bottom of that tank for a long time.

Running a business is complicated enough without a plumbing problem shutting down your operation. A backed-up drain in a restaurant kitchen during a lunch rush. A water leak in a commercial building that gets discovered on a Monday morning. A tenant calling about no hot water in a unit you manage. These are not situations that can sit on a list for a week.

A homeowner called us after noticing a damp spot on the ceiling of his home office. He had looked in the bathroom directly above it, found nothing obvious, and figured it was probably nothing serious. That was three weeks before he called. By the time we got there, the drywall on the ceiling had softened across an area larger than the original spot and there was early mold forming at the edge of it.

We went out to a home in Chandler a while back for what the homeowner described as a simple shower project. She was in her early seventies, had lived in the house for over twenty years, and wanted to convert the tub-shower combo in the master bath into a walk-in shower. Her exact words were that she was done stepping over the tub edge every morning.