What 675 Written Inquiries Taught Us About Durham Region Plumbing
For 4.5 years, Durham homeowners have told us what they need through our contact form, one message at a time. We read all 675 of them, added 16 months of local search data, and here is the honest picture: what people ask for, and exactly when. No prices, no guesswork, just what the messages actually say.
of written inquiries ask for a quote or estimate up front, roughly 1 in 3 before any phone call.
235 of 675 written inquiries
of bathroom renovation inquiries are a request for a quote or consultation, the most quote-driven job we get.
117 of 147 bathroom renovation inquiries
Toilets, faucets and fixtures are the single thing Durham homeowners write in about most: 23.0% of everything.
155 of 675 written inquiries
Inquiries peak twice a year, in spring and again in October, the same rhythm every year for 4.5 years.
April 75, October 70 (calendar-month sums)
All four figures come from written inquiries (n=675). What customers say after the job, 170 Google reviews, has its own section further down, and the two sources are never blended.
What Durham homeowners actually write in about
From written inquiries (n=675)
Every one of the 675 written inquiries we kept was sorted into a service category. Toilets, faucets and fixtures top the list, and bathroom renovations are close behind. 447 of the 675 inquiries (66.2%) named a service we could classify.
Percentages are shares of all 675 written inquiries. "Other / unspecified" covers inquiries that did not name a single service clearly (including a small water-treatment group folded in to protect privacy).
Repair or replace? On fixtures it is almost a coin flip. Inside the 155 fixture inquiries, 51 asked us to repair a toilet, faucet or tap and 50 asked us to install or replace one, with another 46 simply asking for a quote. A leaky tap is just as likely to be worth fixing as swapping out.
Most people who write in are planning, not panicking
From written inquiries (n=675)
We also sorted each inquiry by what the person wanted us to do. The biggest single group is not an emergency, it is a request for a price. The contact form is where Durham homeowners plan work, and quotes top the list. Bathroom renovation is the most quote-driven job in Durham Region: 117 of 147 bathroom-reno inquiries (80%) were a request for a quote or consultation, the highest quote share of any service we offer.
Shares are of all 675 written inquiries. Only 2.8% of written inquiries are flagged urgent. When a pipe bursts, people phone. The form is a planning channel: leak-and-pipe inquiries split 36 repairs to 27 quotes, and fixtures split 51 repairs, 50 installs and 46 quotes.
Plumbing inquiry season peaks in April, and again in October
This is the pattern no single year could show us. Adding up 4.5 years of inquiries by calendar month, two peaks appear every time: spring and October. Bathroom renovation inquiries follow the same twin-peak rhythm. Homeowners plan renos for spring and fall, not summer.
Each bar is the total for that calendar month across December 2021 through July 2026. Bathroom-reno inquiries run 48 across March to May versus 31 across all of June to September. The quietest months overall are November (41) and June (42).
| Month | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All inquiries | 58 | 59 | 69 | 75 | 57 | 42 | 56 | 50 | 48 | 70 | 41 | 50 |
| Bathroom-reno | 15 | 14 | 16 | 19 | 13 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 8 | 18 | 8 | 13 |
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
What Durham searches for: drains dominate local search interest
Alongside our own inbox, we tracked how often hayesplumbing.ca showed up in Google for four families of plumbing searches over 16 months. This is search interest, how often these topics were searched in our area, not phone calls, jobs or sales. Drain, clog and sewer searches tower over everything else.
Over the 16 months, drain/clog/sewer drew 86,970 impressions, 3.8 times the water heater class (22,916), and peaks in summer. Water heater search interest climbed hard into 2026, reaching 4,429 in June 2026 versus a spring 2025 average of about 793 (roughly 5.6 times). Leak/pipe (24,660) sits mid-pack; sump/flood (3,407) is small but spikes with spring melt.
Impressions reflect how often the site appeared for these searches, which is shaped by ranking as well as demand, so we read the seasonal shape, not year-over-year levels, and never as traffic or sales.
| Class | Mar 25 | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan 26 | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drain / clog / sewer | 7,726 | 6,207 | 7,284 | 8,316 | 8,504 | 7,625 | 4,691 | 4,252 | 4,187 | 4,717 | 4,169 | 3,937 | 2,907 | 3,883 | 4,134 | 4,431 | 86,970 |
| Leak / pipe / burst | 2,712 | 1,018 | 1,807 | 2,126 | 2,118 | 2,244 | 848 | 1,668 | 1,561 | 1,492 | 1,453 | 1,189 | 1,152 | 847 | 1,204 | 1,221 | 24,660 |
| Water heater | 1,708 | 517 | 497 | 448 | 1,890 | 2,461 | 1,315 | 446 | 530 | 822 | 1,199 | 903 | 1,209 | 1,651 | 2,891 | 4,429 | 22,916 |
| Sump / flood | 450 | 170 | 155 | 131 | 366 | 260 | 120 | 56 | 87 | 225 | 182 | 74 | 286 | 366 | 262 | 217 | 3,407 |
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
The questions homeowners actually ask
358 of the 675 inquiries carried a real question. Grouping the 15 most common question themes into families shows where curiosity concentrates. Family totals below are simply the theme counts added together; nothing is re-labelled.
Bathroom and shower projects
69 questions- Bathroom renovation quotes27
- Shower or tub replacement quotes19
- Bathroom renovation quote / consultation12
- Shower repair and replacement11
General pricing and scheduling
38 questions- General quote or pricing inquiry19
- Scheduling and callback availability10
- Miscellaneous service questions9
Toilets and faucets
34 questions- Toilet installation / replacement / repair15
- Dripping faucet or spout repair10
- Faucet installation or replacement9
Leaks and pipes
34 questions- Miscellaneous leak or pipe inspection23
- Pipe and valve installation11
Water heaters
16 questions- Water heater related inquiries16
Drains and appliances
17 questions- Kitchen sink drain clogging9
- Dishwasher or appliance installation8
These 15 themes account for 208 of the 358 questions. One number stands out for what is missing: only 13 of all 675 inquiries named a budget figure. Durham homeowners ask for pricing constantly, but almost never volunteer a number of their own.
What 170 Google reviews add
Written inquiries tell us what people ask for before a job. Google reviews are the other side of the story: what customers say after it. We read all 170 public Google reviews of Hayes Plumbing (retrieved July 11, 2026); 147 of the 170 carry written comments, and the corpus averages 4.3 stars, the same figure the public listing displays.
The two sources disagree about emergencies, and that is the insight. Only 2.8% of written inquiries are flagged urgent (19 of 675), but 8.8% of reviews describe emergency or urgent work (15 of 170), roughly three times the share. Forms are where people plan; reviews are where they tell you how the emergency went.
| Measure | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Public Google reviews read (retrieved Jul 11, 2026) | 170 | |
| Reviews with written text | 147 of 170 | 86.5% |
| Average star rating | 4.3 stars | |
| Courtesy / professionalism praised | 68 of 147 | 46.3% |
| Speed / responsiveness praised | 59 of 147 | 40.1% |
| Repeat-customer language | 34 of 147 | 23.1% |
| Emergency / urgent work described in reviews | 15 of 170 | 8.8% |
| Emergency / urgent flagged in written inquiries | 19 of 675 | 2.8% |
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
Praise themes are counted over the 147 written reviews; corpus figures over all 170. "Of 675" means written inquiries. Review numbers are kept separate from the inquiry numbers elsewhere on this page because the two sources measure different moments.
How we built this, and what it can and cannot tell you
Form data through July 9, 2026; Google reviews retrieved July 11, 2026. We would rather show our work than round it off.
The written-inquiry sample
Everything on this page about what people ask for comes from 675 messages that real homeowners typed into the contact form at hayesplumbing.ca between December 2021 and July 2026, more than 4.5 years (first kept message Dec 11, 2021; last July 9, 2026). We call these "written inquiries" because that is exactly what they are: what someone chose to write to us, not a phone call, a job or a sale.
How we got from raw submissions to 675
Our form-submissions records held 1,263 total submissions (Dec 8, 2021 to July 9, 2026). Of those, 1,225 carried an actual message; the other 38 had no usable text. From the 1,225 we removed 550 before counting anything: 490 URL and link spam (a spot-check of 20 random removals was 20 of 20 spam), 53 other spam patterns (spot-check 20 of 20 spam) and 7 of our own form-health test submissions. That leaves 675 kept. Anything that slipped past the filters was labelled neutral by the classifier, not counted as a customer signal.
The Google-review sample
Hayes Plumbing & Bathroom Renovations has a publicly visible Google listing carrying real customer reviews, 170 of them averaging 4.3 stars, which we read in full. 147 include written comments; 23 are star-rating-only and are counted in every total but carry no text signal. None were removed for being unfavourable, and none were invented to fill a gap. Google shows review dates only as rough ages, so we use them to year precision only, and because reviews almost never say which town the writer is in, every city figure on this page comes from written inquiries only.
The search-interest data (a separate source)
The search-interest table is Google Search Console impressions for hayesplumbing.ca from March 1, 2025 to July 8, 2026 (16 full months plus a partial July), grouped into four search families. Impressions measure how often the site appeared for those searches, a proxy for local search interest that is also shaped by ranking. We publish it only as "search interest", never as traffic, calls or sales.
Privacy and honesty rules we held to
- We publish counts and shares only, never any individual's message, name or address.
- No published category is smaller than 5. One small water-treatment group was folded into "Other" to stay above that floor.
- Where a share has a denominator smaller than 675 (for example the question themes, based on 358 questions), we state that denominator with it.
- This is one channel of one plumbing company in Durham Region. It describes what people write to us, a useful window, not the whole market.
Cite this page
The findings on this page are ours to share. Researchers, journalists and homeowners are welcome to cite them with attribution. The underlying aggregate figures are available as a downloadable dataset.
Hayes Plumbing & Bathroom Renovations. "What 675 Written Inquiries Taught Us About Durham Region Plumbing." Oshawa, Ontario, 2026.
https://hayesplumbing.ca/oshawa-plumbing-data/ · based on 675 contact-form inquiries (Dec 2021 to Jul 2026) and 16 months of Google Search Console search-interest data.
Aggregate counts only; no customer text, no personal information.