Reactive maintenance plumbing and gasfitting in Christchurch

For property managers and landlords

Most of this work comes from people managing property for someone else, and the job is rarely just the plumbing. It is the access, the tenant, the owner who wants to know why, and an invoice that has to survive being forwarded on.

• We contact the tenant and arrange access ourselves. Give us the name and number and you are out of the middle. We confirm a time, turn up at it, and tell you afterwards what we found.
• You get told what was actually wrong — not just what was replaced. If a fault is going to come back, or the real problem sits somewhere we have not been asked to touch, that goes in writing while it is still cheap to act on.
• Invoices written to be passed on. Enough detail that an owner reading it a week later can see what happened and why it cost what it did, without you having to translate.
• Honest triage before we drive anywhere. Plenty of reported faults are a tripped RCD, an isolating valve someone has turned, or a filter that needs rinsing. If it is something the tenant can do in two minutes on the phone, we will say so rather than book a callout.
• One tradesperson across a portfolio. If you hold several properties, it saves repeating the history every time. We remember which house has the cylinder in the roof space and which one has the toby that has to be found with a shovel.

For commercial premises

On a trading site the clock is different: the question is not only how the fault gets fixed but whether the doors open tomorrow. Commercially we do the reactive and maintenance work and small alterations — we do not take on full fit-outs or new commercial builds.

• Gas that has stopped a kitchen. A cooktop that will not light, a red-tagged appliance, a continuous flow unit that has locked out. This is the work we get called for most, and we issue the certificate on completion of anything that needs one.
• Water where it should not be. Failed mixers, leaking supply, a ceiling starting to stain — the things that damage stock and fitout if they wait until Monday.
• Fixtures out of action in a customer-facing space. A toilet or basin that a business cannot trade without, prioritised accordingly.
• Work timed around trading. Where a job can safely wait for before open or after close, we will do it then. Out-of-hours labour is almost always cheaper for a business than closing during service.

For owner-occupied homes

The same service without the middle layer: something has gone wrong in the house you live in and you want it dealt with properly. Burst and leaking pipework, a cylinder that has stopped keeping up, a gas appliance that has stopped behaving, blocked wastes and gully traps, spouting overflowing in the wrong place. There is more on the everyday side of this on our general plumbing page.

How we sort urgent from not

Not everything that feels urgent is, and treating it all the same way costs someone money. Roughly how we grade it:

• Now, whatever the hour. Uncontrolled water, a suspected gas leak, no water to an occupied property, or anything that has stopped a business trading.
• Today or tomorrow. No hot water, a single toilet out in a one-bathroom house, a leak that is contained but getting worse.
• Next working day, at standard rates. Dripping taps, a slow waste, a running toilet, most things a tenant has flagged as annoying rather than urgent.

We will tell you which of those we think you have before anyone commits to an after-hours callout. Out of hours and on public holidays we take emergencies only — anything else is booked for the next working day at standard rates.

Paperwork you can file

Reactive work generates the records that get asked for later, usually at the worst moment — an insurance claim, a sale, a dispute with a tenant or an owner. Gas certificates are $40 + GST and issued on the spot by a certifying gasfitter. Where a job is worth photographing, we photograph it. And where a fault points at something bigger, a plumbing and gas report is a cheaper way to find out the scale of it than discovering it one callout at a time.

Where our work stops

Blockages in the underground sewer or stormwater drain are drainlaying work and need a jetter and a camera — we clear everything above ground, including gully traps, waste pipework inside the building and spouting and downpipes, and we will refer the rest on rather than charge you to find out. Our 2-year workmanship guarantee covers the work we do, but not drain unblocking or materials and appliances supplied by someone else.