A plumber might specialize in new home construction or home remodeling, or he might be someone you call to fix a faucet or repair a toilet.
There has always been a demand for a good plumber and in the past it has mainly been the service and repair plumber who has done the repiping of homes.
Prior to the mid 1980s, the complete repiping of a home was an occasional thing, but then something happened in the Southwest United States that changed the plumbing industry. A large number of homes reached 30 to 40 years of age, and the old galvanized pipes that they had been built with, reached a level of deterioration that became a real problem for the homeowner.
In time, rust builds up inside galvanized pipes, reducing the volume of water that can get through to the fixtures.
LOW WATER PRESSURE
The result is low water pressure in the sinks, shower, washer, yard sprinklers–in other words, a really annoying problem develops, where you are taking a hot shower and suddenly the water turns ice cold because someone has flushed a toilet or turned on a faucet in another part of the house. The lines have become so clogged, there is not enough volume of water in the lines to serve all of your needs.
COPPER REPIPE SPECIALISTS
This ballooning situation created an increased demand for repiping, and companies such as ours began to specialize in this procedure, leaving the everyday service and repair jobs to other plumbers.
This was not unlike what happened in the early days of automobile manufacture. Originally, all cars were custom-made until Henry Ford worked out a way to mass-produce the automobile on an assembly line. By increasing the speed and efficiency of manufacture, Ford was able to dramatically reduce the price of the car, putting the automobile within reach of the average family.
So it was that companies, such as MasterServ, became repipe specialists. In fact, MasterServ was the first to see this market for what it was and we were the first to begin this specialization, becoming the largest and most successful repipe specialist in the Southwest, and the entire plumbing industry was changed in the process.
(Next: more insights into the home repiping industry.)
