Plumber in Santee

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. Out here we'll usually ask what neighborhood you're in and roughly when the house went up, because in a valley that filled in this fast that answer narrows things down before anyone heads out.

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.

This town is named after the second husband.

George Cowles bought 4,000 acres out here in 1877 and planted vineyards, and the place that grew up around him got called Cowlestown. Reasonable enough. He died in 1887.

His widow Jennie then married a land surveyor named Milton Santee, and according to the historian who wrote it down, she lobbied hard to have the town renamed in honor of her new husband. In 1893 the citizens gave what the record calls a reluctant vote, and Cowlestown became Santee. Whatever else you want to say about that, she got it done.

The town stayed farm country for another 60 years. Then in 1958 the Carlton Company bought 4,300 acres of the old Fanita Ranch and started building. Its president was a man named Bill Mast, which is why you drive on Mast Boulevard. Santee went from under 2,000 people in 1950 to nearly 26,000 by 1970, and Carlton Hills and Carlton Oaks still carry the builder's name.

Santee voted against becoming a city, changed its mind three years later, and incorporated on the first of December, 1980. It's past 60,000 people now.

That build out is what's under the houses. Streets that went in together, on slabs, with the water lines run under the concrete where you can't see them, and East County's hard water working on tanks and fixtures the whole time. If your house came out of the Carlton years, its plumbing is the same age as the rest of the block.

In Santee, the sewer lateral can run all the way out to the main under the street, and when there's trouble, a camera down the line shows where it is and what it looks like before any repair goes ahead.