Plumbers in New Caney, Texas

The jobs that are genuinely yours

None of these need a licence, a permit or us, and a homeowner who does them well saves real money.

Anything that unscrews by hand or with one wrench. Aerators, shower heads, supply hoses to a washing machine, a sink trap. All reversible, all cheap to get wrong.

Toilet internals. Flapper, fill valve, flush valve. It is the most common repair in any house, the parts cost very little, and the worst case is that it still runs and you call us.

Clearing a local blockage. A plunger, a hand auger in a sink or a toilet. What we would ask is that you avoid caustic drain openers, because they rarely work on a real blockage and they make the eventual job unpleasant and more dangerous for whoever opens the pipe.

Replacing a tap, if the isolation valves work. That proviso is the whole job. If the stops underneath will not close, stop there, because you are now working on a live line with no way to shut it off.

Where a licence and a permit come in

Texas requires plumbing work to be done by a licensed plumber in most circumstances, with a narrow allowance for a homeowner working on their own homestead. Beyond that allowance, and for anything permitted, the rules apply regardless of skill.

Gas is the clearest line. Any alteration to fuel gas piping is licensed, permitted and pressure tested work. The failure mode is not a wet floor. Nothing about a gas line is a weekend project.

Water heater replacement is permitted work almost everywhere. It brings venting, combustion air, relief discharge and seismic or pan requirements with it, and those are exactly the items an inspector checks and a buyer's inspector finds later.

Anything that alters drainage or venting. Moving a fixture, adding a bathroom, re-routing a drain. Venting in particular is where confident amateur work goes wrong, because the mistake does not show as a leak, it shows as a smell and a gurgle a year later.

Work on the sewer lateral or the water service. Both are permitted, both affect more than your property, and both are inspected for good reason.

Anything inside a slab. Not a licensing subtlety so much as a practical one: the cost of being wrong under concrete is enormous.

The DIY repairs that cost the most to undo

We are not trying to frighten anybody. These are simply the ones we are called to most, and they are all avoidable.

Mixed materials joined wrongly. Copper straight onto galvanized without a dielectric fitting corrodes at the joint. It works for two years and then weeps inside a wall.

Over tightened plastic fittings. Plastic threads crack when they are treated like metal ones, and the crack often does not show until the fitting is under pressure and buried behind something.

Flexible connectors used as pipe. They are for the last few inches, not for making up a length of run. We find them buried in walls and inside cabinets doing structural work.

An unvented fixture. The classic remodel mistake. It drains, so it looks finished, and then the trap siphons and the room smells for years before anyone works out why.

Undocumented work found at sale. Unpermitted additions turn up in inspection reports and they get negotiated against, which is how a saved few hundred dollars becomes a deduction of several thousand.

How a call plays out

Ring us and describe what you want to do. If it is a job you can do yourself, we will tell you that and often tell you the part number, because a customer who trusts us on the small things calls us for the large ones.

New Caney, Porter, Splendora and the rest of east Montgomery County are on our route. We finish other people's attempts without lecturing anybody, we pull permits where they are needed, and we would rather answer a question on the phone than fix the result of not answering it.