Plumber Bar Beach

A plumber in Bar Beach spends a lot of time fighting salt: fittings facing the ocean corrode well before their time. Bar Beach sits beside The Hill, and The Hill Plumbing Co covers it on the same run, from the Memorial Drive clifftops down to the sand, with a fixed price first.

A suburb shaped by its slope and its salt. House lots were first sold here in 1924, and the suburb now mixes Art Deco flats, some of them heritage-listed, with brick homes from between the wars on the rise toward Shepherds Hill, plus newer apartments facing the sea. Census figures put 38 per cent of dwellings here in flats or apartments.

Why the pipes here work harder than they look. Three local factors wear them out:

• The sewers laid with the original subdivision are clay, run across the rock benches on the hillside, and their collars shift wherever the line steps up or down.
• The suburb faces straight out to sea, so outside taps, valves and copper or brass fittings corrode years ahead of the same parts further inland.
• The ground climbs hard from the beach, so stormwater races down over benched blocks and puts every retaining-wall drain to the test.

When a roof-mounted tank on one of the older blocks fails, the water comes down through the ceilings, so we shut it off before anything else. Outside parts we fit here are marine grade.