Local Plumbing Experts
In Marrickville

The Sydney trade sits between $100 and $150 an hour, and that predicts nothing about your job. We settle one figure for the whole piece of work in advance, so an easy morning and an awkward one both come to the number you were quoted.

On anything genuinely urgent we aim to be at the door inside the hour, anywhere across Marrickville and the surrounding inner west, whatever the day or the hour.

Any attendance or after-hours figure gets said on the phone before a van moves, so nothing unfamiliar lands on the invoice. Booked through this site, there is none.

NSW Licence 368473C, and the Fair Trading register confirms it in about a minute. Unlicensed plumbing is illegal in this state and will void a home insurance claim, so make anybody show you a number before they start. Ours prints on every quote we issue.

Soft water is the reason. In hard-water regions a tank silts up with scale and that finishes it, and Sydney's supply does not behave that way. Here the sacrificial anode is eaten away shielding the steel, the tank starts corroding once it has gone, or an element burns out. Neither of those is automatically the end of the unit.

Not necessarily, and that is the whole point. Marrickville sits in a 7.9 square kilometre piped valley that fills from rainfall rather than from a river, and in heavy rain the sewer main itself can surcharge. Where a house has an overflow relief gully, the system is designed to spill at that gully outside, before anything reaches a fixture indoors. Where one was never fitted, the lowest fixture in the house becomes the relief point instead, and on this housing stock that is usually a ground floor shower, a laundry tub or a downstairs toilet. Clearing a line that was never blocked fixes nothing before the next storm.

Inner West Council flood-tags a property where a one in one hundred year event would put water more than 0.15 metres deep across more than 10% of it. That tag attaches to the property rather than the owner and follows the title, and Council is the authority on it rather than us. What it means practically is that flooding here is a documented planning matter, not a rumour, and it is worth knowing where your property stands before you plan any work at ground level.

It is the release valve on your drainage: a grated point outside, set low, designed to let a surcharging sewer spill harmlessly on the ground rather than inside the house. Under AS/NZS 3500.2 its spill level has to sit at least 150 mm below the lowest fixture connected to the drain. Plenty of older houses around here have never had one, and on others the ground level has since been raised or paved over so the clearance no longer exists. Finding it and checking that level is a twenty minute job and it decides which problem you actually have.

The whole Marrickville LGA and every suburb around it: Dulwich Hill, Sydenham, Tempe, Petersham, Lewisham, Hurlstone Park, Earlwood, Petersham and more.