Why Plumbing Repair Isn’t A DIY Job | San Antonio, TX
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It’s a common sight in a San Antonio, TX home: the home owner spots a leak coming from the faucet. There’s a small pool of water underneath the pipes, showing the source of the leak.
“I can handle this,” the home owner thinks. “All I have to do is tighten the pipes and stop the leak. There’s no need to call for help, right?”
Wrong. Unless you’ve been specifically trained as a plumber and know enough to work for a plumbing company, performing a plumbing repair on your own is asking for trouble. In a best-case scenario, you’ll get the job fixed temporarily, but you’ll set yourself up for real problems down the road. Worst-case, you’ll make an already bad situation worse, setting yourself up for a costly and time-consuming repair.
It’s tempting to try to save money on your plumbing projects, but this isn’t the place to try to cut corners. Learn why fixing your own plumbing is often a disastrous idea!
You Can Make the Problem Worse
Even something as simple as pouring a bottle of Drano down your pipes can cause real problems for your plumbing and create a bigger issue when it’s time to call a professional plumber. Drano is a corrosive product, and when you pour it into a stopped drain, you’d better hope that it does the job on its first try. If it doesn’t, you’ve created a biohazard in your bathroom, and you’re going to have to keep people out of the bathroom until a plumber can get in there to do the job right.
The problems with DIY plumbing repair only get worse from there. You might remove the wrong part of your pipe, or use a seal that doesn’t really secure two pipes properly. Over time, that’s going to lead to a bigger leak, a loss of water pressure and probable water damage to the walls and cabinets of your home.
Before you get to that point, it’s important to trust your plumbing problems to an expert. It’s fine to put a drain snake down your pipes, as you can safely do that without damaging anything. But if your repair is too severe for a drain snake to work, it’s time for you to call for professional help.
Plumbing Can’t Be Learned Online
Maybe you’re feeling confident in your plumbing abilities because you’ve watched a video online, and it didn’t look like anything harder than what you’ve done at home. You’ve even got the same tools that the repair expert in the video used on their pipes.
So you’re good to go, right? Not even close. Plumbing is a trade that takes several years of training to learn properly, and watching a 10-minute video before performing plumbing work on your home just isn’t going to cut it. Online videos only go over the basics of plumbing repair, and even those come from experienced professionals who have spent years learning the trade.
You aren’t going to be able to learn everything in just a few minutes, and if you try to follow along with the video, you’re asking for a mess. Consider: you might make a mistake that causes a pipe to slip out of place and send water everywhere. You can’t pause that to get back to where you were in the video, and if the water gets out of control, it can damage your device and leave you with another major problem to deal with. It’s much better to simply leave the plumbing repair job to the experts.
Your Work Isn’t Going to Be Up to Code
Let’s say that you’re able to understand enough about plumbing to get by, and you’re even able to put together a patchwork repair of your plumbing system. You’ve averted a problem — for now.
But just because you’ve managed to handle the plumbing repair problem doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods. If you ever plan to sell your home, doing your own plumbing repair work can really come back to haunt you.
That’s because when you sell your home, you’ll have it inspected to ensure that the buyer isn’t purchasing your problems by buying your house. During the inspection, the inspectors will discover any home plumbing repairs, and if your work doesn’t meet the city’s standards, you can count on the value of your home taking a serious hit. That’s the last thing you want to encounter as a seller, and it’s easily avoidable. All you need to do is call for professional plumbing help.
Plumbing Damage Is Insured
Sometimes, things have to get worse before they get better in the world of plumbing repair. The bad news is that there are some situations that not even the best plumber can fix without a little water damage. The good news is that if your home does have water damage from a plumber’s visit, it won’t cost you a cent. Instead, the plumber’s insurance company will take care of you and pay to fix the damage. You won’t have to worry about a thing beyond getting your plumbing fixed.
But if you’re the one who caused the damage from your own attempts to fix the plumbing? There’s no reprieve. You’re responsible for the damage to your home as well as the cost of the plumber’s work to repair your plumbing system. That kind of cost can easily be thousands of dollars, which is one reason why professional plumbers know to be careful in every home they service. This is a gamble that’s just not worth the risk.
At bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of San Antonio, we know enough to know how to fix pipes properly, and we’re proud to help out in the case of a blocked pipe so you don’t have to do it. When the plumbing system fails at your San Antonio, TX home, trust us to provide a first-rate plumbing repair job that gets pipes flowing the way they should!
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