Plumbers in Ennis, Texas

What six months with the water off does to a house

An empty house does not fail all at once. It fails quietly, in a handful of predictable ways, and every one of them is invisible on a walkthrough with the supply shut.

Traps go dry. Water evaporates out of a trap in a few weeks in a hot house. Guest baths, laundry standpipes and floor drains are the first to go, and the smell that greets you at the door is usually this and not a broken drain.

Rubber hardens. Tank flappers, fill valves, faucet cartridges and the washers inside angle stops all dry and set. They hold while the pressure is off and start weeping within a day of it coming back, which is why so many of these houses flood on day two rather than day one.

The heater sits still. Left full, the anode is spent and the tank corrodes with nothing drawing through it. Left drained, the tank is often fine and the gas valve, thermocouple or elements have not been proven in a year. Either way it is the single most likely thing to leak in the first week.

A freeze happened and nobody was home. A split that opened in January in a dry system leaves no stain and no sound. It announces itself the moment the main is opened, usually into a wall or an attic, and that is the failure that makes people wish they had done the first fill with a plumber standing in the house.

The yard grows over the evidence. Meter boxes silt up, cleanout caps vanish under grass, and a lateral carrying nothing for a year has had time to settle and root.

Turning the water back on, deliberately

There is an order to this, and it costs nothing to follow. Shut the cold inlet to the water heater first so the tank stays out of it. Open a tub spout on the highest floor to let air out. Then open the main slowly, a quarter turn at a time, and listen: a system that is holding goes quiet within a minute, and one that is not keeps running while nothing is open.

Walk it in that first ten minutes. Under every sink, at every stop valve, along ceilings below bathrooms, in the attic above them. Then close everything, leave the house still, and watch the meter for an hour. If the dial moves with all fixtures shut, you are looking for a leak, not a drip, and the house valve test will tell you whether it is inside or out on the yard line.

Only then fill the heater, and only after that restore power or gas to it. Firing a dry electric element takes seconds to ruin.

Drains get their own test. On a slab house with cast iron below it, we would rather isolate and pressure test the drain line than take on faith that a line nobody has flushed in a year is intact. Dallas homeowners get the full version of that story on our foundation testing page; here it is enough to say the test is cheap compared with finding out after the floors are down.

Bidding on a house you are not allowed to test

The two ways these houses come up are not the same purchase. A trustee sale on the courthouse steps gives you no access, no contingency and no disclosure, so the plumbing is a number you set aside rather than a thing you inspect. A bank-owned listing usually does give you an option period, but with the utilities off, and a standard inspection with no water in the pipes cannot tell you much beyond material and age.

If you have an option period, spend some of it getting the water on. Sellers will often allow it with a plumber present even when they will not turn it on themselves, because the risk they are worried about is exactly the one we are there to catch. That single visit changes the purchase from a guess into a costed repair list.

Ennis stock varies enough that age tells you what to expect. The older streets near the downtown grid run to cast iron drains and galvanised supply with decades of patches behind them. The seventies and eighties additions west of town are copper and cast iron at the age where both start to need decisions. Newer subdivisions toward the interstate fail on workmanship rather than age.

How we work with buyers here

We meet you at the property, do the fill in the order above, and give you a written list separated into what has to be done before you move in and what can wait a year. Inside an option period you get it the same day, which is the only version of it that is any use.

Ennis, Waxahachie, Midlothian and Palmer are on our normal Ellis County route, and the visit is quoted on the phone before we drive out.