Very few modern inventions provide as much value as quality home plumbing systems. Every year, people in Australia spend more than $18 billion on plumbing services. Together, they support an industry that employs almost 66,000 people!
Of course, with so many options to choose from, it can be difficult to know how to identify the right plumber for you. Fortunately, there are a few principles you can apply to help you find one of the best plumbers in your area.
Read on to learn all about the most important techniques you can use to find a great plumber for your new home plumbing system!
1. Make Sure to Consider a Variety of Options
When it comes to having someone install a new plumbing system, you want to cast your net as wide as possible. After all, the more options you consider, the more likely you are to include one of the best plumbers in your area on your list of candidates.
You can easily generate a list of more candidates than you will probably know what to do with simply by googling “plumbing for a home near me” or similar searches.
2. Ask Around for Recommendations
Asking around for recommendations can help you generate a shortlist of top candidates for your plumber. Your friends, family, and acquaintances all are likely to have worked with plumbers in the past.
That means that they can tell you which plumbers are reliable and trustworthy in their experience. Make sure to share any important details with anybody you ask for recommendations so that they know what kind of plumber to recommend to you.
Asking for recommendations can also help you gather recommendations for which plumbers to avoid. That can potentially save you a lot of time doing further investigation.
3. Find Someone With the Right Kind of House Plumbing Experience
In general, the more experience a plumber has, the better. However, not all types of experience are created equal. It is important to distinguish between plumbers who have lots of experience plumbing a house versus those whose experience lies mostly in creating plumbing diagrams or in doing plumbing for commercial buildings.
Even among the plumbers with lots of residential experience, you want to find someone with as much experience doing jobs as similar to your own as possible. If there’s anything unusual about the job you want to have done, make sure to ask each candidate plumber what kind of experience they have doing that kind of work.
If you need a new home plumbing system installed, you might want to ask each plumber how much installation they have done before. Some plumbers are likely to have more experience doing maintenance than installation work.
4. Check Out Online Ratings and Reviews
These days, you can easily find ratings and reviews online for almost any kind of business. Plumbing is no exception.
Looking at online ratings can be one quick way to narrow down your list of candidate plumbers. If you are in a rush, you might decide it is prudent to only further investigate a few plumbers who have the highest overall ratings.
This strategy is fast, which is sometimes the top priority for someone. But it is not as reliable as a more methodical approach.
If you can afford to take the time, you might want to look through the ratings and reviews of more plumbers than just those who have the highest overall ratings. One of the reasons it is important not to put too much stock in overall ratings is because you do not always know how a plumber got those ratings.
If a plumber got those ratings mostly for doing maintenance work, they may not be that relevant if you need installation work done, and vice versa.
On top of that, it is inevitable that a plumber will receive a bad rating here and there. A perfectly good plumber might have the bad luck of getting a couple of bad ratings early on that drop their overall rating down. However, if you notice that they have received mostly good ratings since a certain point in time, that may be an indicator that they will do quality work for you.
Whatever you decide, you should take the time to read the online reviews before hiring any particular plumber. Online reviews often contain much more detailed information than ratings.
5. Keep Track of Customer Service Quality
Some contractors are known to be unreliable. Even if they know their trade, it may not be worth your time to have to constantly keep on top of them to make sure they get the job done.
As you go through written reviews online, make sure to note down anything you read about the customer service of each plumber. Ideally, you want to find someone who responds quickly and shows up on time.
If you call plumbers to ask them questions, make sure to note down how easy it was or wasn’t to get in touch with them. You might also want to make a note about how friendly they seem to be on the phone.
The most important thing might be that you find someone who does quality work. But if you have multiple options that seem like they will do a good job, it makes sense to go with whichever one seems to have better customer service.
Understand How to Choose the Right Plumber for Your Home Plumbing System
We hope learning about how to choose a plumber for your new home plumbing system has been helpful for you. Most people don’t take the time to really find a great plumber, but doing so is an investment. You will enjoy better quality installation and more reliable maintenance if you take the time to find one of the best plumbers in your area.
To learn more about how to find a great plumber or to speak with plumbing experts who might be able to help you, feel free to reach out and get in touch with us here at any time!
