Plumber & gasfitter in Sydenham

Two kinds of work in one suburb

Sydenham has cottages and older houses sitting alongside cafes, workshops, retail and light industrial. It's one of the few parts of Christchurch where our residential and commercial work genuinely overlap.

For businesses

The commercial calls here are usually urgent, and usually gas. A cooktop that won't light or an appliance that's been red-tagged stops a kitchen trading, and there aren't many certifying gasfitters who'll pick up at 5:30am to sort it. We're open 24 hours, and we issue the gas certificate on completion.

• Commercial cooktops, ranges, chargrills and fryers — connected, commissioned and certified
• Moving or replacing sinks, hand basins, dishwashers, glass washers and coffee machine plumbing
• Commercial hot water sized for the actual demand, not guessed at
• Blocked wastes and grease traps, failed mixers, toilets out of action in a customer-facing space

Most of it can be done before open or after close, and where it can, we'll do it that way — a few hours of after-hours labour is almost always cheaper than closing during service.

For the houses

Sydenham's residential stock is old — cottages and villas, many with original or near-original pipe runs behind the walls. The recurring find is galvanised steel pipe still in service, rusted narrow from the inside while looking perfectly sound from outside. The symptoms are pressure that's been slowly getting worse for years and discoloured water after the house has sat empty.

Older brick and masonry buildings through here also took a beating in the earthquakes, and repairs from that period frequently left mixed pipework — copper into PEX into the remains of galvanised, with the joints between dissimilar metals quietly corroding.

Close to base

We're based in St Martins, a couple of kilometres away, which matters when something has stopped a business trading.