Plumber in Coronado

What happens when you call.

The first thing you'll be asked is whether this is an emergency, because if water is coming through your ceiling right now, everything else waits and we get someone out to you. If it isn't an emergency, you just talk. There's no form to get through and no order you have to say things in.

If something is worth understanding, you'll get it explained in plain English. There's usually a building question here too. If you're in one of the Shores towers, we'll ask about building access, parking, the elevator, and whether the HOA needs notice, because the contractor needs to know before arriving.

Once you're ready, we get the details that actually help. Your address, how to reach you, and photos of the problem if you have them, so the contractor can often prepare before showing up. From there we give you an arrival window and keep you posted. Communication is the thing that comes up over and over in our Google reviews.

What makes us different.

No memberships, on purpose.

Plenty of companies around here sell a monthly membership, and we want to be straight with you about why we don't.

A membership is money leaving your account every month for a problem you don't have yet. Maybe you use it, maybe you never do. Either way you're paying on a schedule that has nothing to do with your house.

We'd rather you keep it. You call when something is actually wrong. You get a recommendation based on what's in front of the technician that day. Then you decide what happens next.

They drilled all over looking for water. There wasn't any.

Before there was a hotel or a bridge or a single house worth photographing, there was a problem. Elisha Babcock and Hampton Story had bought the entire peninsula and were about to build a resort on it, and the peninsula had no fresh water anywhere on it. They drilled. They came up dry.

So they went under the bay. The Coronado Water Company ran pipe across roughly 3,000 feet of San Diego Bay, from the foot of Market Street over to the peninsula, and tapped San Diego River water at Old Town. A second line later came up the Strand from wells out by the Otay River. Since day one, having water here has meant bringing it in from somewhere else.

When the Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888, indoor plumbing was rare enough that the hotel advertised it as a luxury, right alongside the electric lights. Their own history is proud of about 71 bathrooms with tubs and 71 water closets. Then the land boom collapsed, and Babcock took the plain water coming up from those Otay wells, renamed it Coronado Waukesha Water after the famous mineral springs back in Wisconsin, and started shipping railcars of it to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A century later the water still comes from across the bay, and the houses that grew up around that hotel are still carrying the pipe they were built with. If your place here predates the bridge, there's a fair chance some of its plumbing does too. That's no reason to panic, but it's worth knowing what you've got, and a camera down the line or a pressure check can answer it.