Plumbing in Redwood City

Redwood City is our home base — our shop is on Orchard Ave, which means most calls here are a short drive rather than a scheduling problem. It also means we've worked on most of the housing types in the city and know what tends to fail in each.

The pre-1960 stock through Mount Carmel, Stambaugh-Heller, Friendly Acres and the older streets around downtown is where we do most of our repipe work. Galvanized supply lines were standard for decades here, and they corrode from the inside out — which is why the first pinhole leak is almost never the last. If we find galvanized behind a wall we'll tell you honestly whether you're better off repairing this one and planning a repipe, rather than paying us to come back four more times. Cast-iron drain lines of the same era scale up internally and crack at the joints, and the symptom is usually recurring clogs across several fixtures rather than one blocked sink.

Woodside Plaza and the 1950s tract builds have a different profile: slab foundations, which means a hot-water leak shows up as a warm patch on the floor or an unexplained jump in the water bill long before you see water. We locate those with acoustic equipment and thermal imaging before anything gets opened up, because on a slab the water surfaces a long way from where it's actually leaking.

Redwood Shores is newer and built on fill, so the issues are different again — sump pumps, shifting that stresses supply connections, and drainage rather than corroding pipe. Mature trees along the older streets are the other recurring theme: clay and cast-iron sewer laterals develop joint separations as the ground moves, roots find them, and the line clogs on a schedule. We camera the lateral before quoting any sewer work, and trenchless replacement usually spares the front garden.