Water damage is a clock, not an event
Every other trade on this site can wait until Monday. Plumbing frequently cannot, and the reason is not the plumbing - it is everything the water reaches on the way down.
A supply line failure above a suspended ceiling costs almost nothing to repair and can cost tens of thousands in ceiling tile, carpet, drywall, stock and lost trading days. The repair is rarely the expensive part. The delay is.
That is why the first call matters more than the eventual invoice, and why we would rather tell you how to isolate the supply on the phone than arrive to a bigger job.
Diagnose, then price
The habit we most often replace is hourly billing on an undiagnosed problem. It puts the plumber and the building owner on opposite sides: every hour of poking around is billable, and nobody is committing to what the fix actually is.
Our sequence is diagnosis first - locate the leak, or put a camera down the drain - then a written price for the repair that follows from it. You are agreeing to a specific fix at a specific number, and if the survey shows the problem is smaller than feared, the price reflects that.
Kitchens are their own category
A commercial kitchen is not an office with a sink. Grease loads the drain line continuously, and the line is usually long, shallow and full of bends. Three things follow from that:
Cabling a grease line is a temporary result. It clears a channel through the middle and leaves the walls coated, so the interval to the next blockage gets shorter each time. Jetting scours the full bore and resets the clock properly.
Grease traps need pumping on a schedule and a manifest for the waste. We arrange it with a licensed hauler rather than pretending it is a plumbing task.
And the blockage almost always arrives at the worst possible hour, because it is caused by service volume. A kitchen on a jetting schedule pays a predictable amount; a kitchen without one pays emergency rates a few times a year and closes for a night.
Repipe or repair
For older buildings the real question is rarely how to fix today’s leak. It is whether this is the third leak on a run that is going to keep failing.
The camera survey and the failure pattern answer it. Two failures in different places on the same horizontal run usually mean the run is done. Repeated failures at joints on cast iron mean the same. A single failure where something physically damaged the pipe is just a repair.
We will tell you which of those we are looking at, including when the honest answer is that a section needs replacing and patching it again is money wasted.