Like indoor plumbing systems themselves, not all plumbers are created equal. There are certain qualities you should look for when hiring a plumber in Oshawa, Bowmanville, Pickering and Ajax—qualities that includes critical plumbing elements like certifications, recommendations and insurance coverage.
There are 5 primary qualities you should look for when hiring a plumber:
1. Certifications
A certified plumber will have gone through the necessary training to make him a qualified plumber. Ask to see his certificate(s) and then verify those qualifications.
2. Experience
Certification(s) alone aren’t enough to guarantee that a plumber is worth his weight in o-rings—they also need verifiable experience. There are some tricks of the trade and knowledge of how not to do things that only experience can bring.
3. Liability Insurance
When accidents happen in plumbing they can be prohibitively expensive, which is why you want to look for a plumber in Oshawa, Bowmanville, Pickering and Ajax that is fully insured, meaning hundreds of thousands of dollars in liability insurance. Should a plumber you are interviewing not have liability insurance this illustrates that they do not cross their T’s and dot their I’s (a bad quality for a contractor messing with your running water).
4. WSIB Coverage
Plumbing is like an extreme sports version of home repair as it can be quite dangerous. Heavy equipment can drop on workers, amongst a range of other possible accidents. This is why every plumber should have Worker Safety Insurance Board coverage—so that in the worst case scenarios they and you are covered in terms of accident liability.
5. References
Experienced plumbers should be able to offer you a long line of verifiable references (you’ll notice throughout this list that “verifiable” is a critical, reoccurring factor). Be sure to check the references as many people rely on asking for references being merely a formality. When checking references, ask how reliable, prompt, hardworking and trustworthy the plumber is and what, if any, negatives there are about his work manner—because glowing recommendations alone will rarely paint a whole picture.
When hiring a professional and reliable plumber in Oshawa, Bowmanville, Pickering and Ajax you should look for a combination of all 5 qualities listed above—take any one quality missing as an alarm bell.
