Pipe Patrol Plumbers & Drains of Coronado

When you call, here's exactly what happens.

The first thing you'll be asked is whether this is an emergency, because if water is coming through your ceiling right now, everything else waits and we get moving. If it isn't an emergency, you just talk. There's no form to get through and no order you have to say things in.

If something is worth understanding, you'll get it explained in plain English. There's usually a building question here too. If you're in one of the Shores towers, we'll ask about building access, parking, the elevator, and whether the HOA needs notice, because none of that is a detail. It decides whether the job happens today or gets turned around at the front desk.

Once you're ready, we get the details that actually help. Your address, how to reach you, and photos of the problem if you have them, so the contractor often knows what he's walking into before he parks. From there we keep the arrival window as tight as we honestly can and we keep you in the loop. Communication is the thing that comes up over and over in our Google reviews, and that isn't an accident.

Built different, on purpose.

No memberships, on purpose.

Plenty of companies around here sell a monthly membership, and we want to be straight with you about why we don't.

A membership is money leaving your account every month for a problem you don't have yet. Maybe you use it, maybe you never do. Either way you're paying on a schedule that has nothing to do with your house.

We'd rather you keep it. You call when something is actually wrong. You get a recommendation based on what's in front of the technician that day. Then you decide what happens next. That's the entire model and it isn't changing.

They drilled all over looking for water. There wasn't any.

Before there was a hotel or a bridge or a single house worth photographing, there was a problem. Elisha Babcock and Hampton Story had bought the entire peninsula and were about to build a resort on it, and the peninsula had no fresh water anywhere on it. They drilled. They came up dry.

So they went under the bay. The Coronado Water Company ran pipe across roughly three thousand feet of San Diego Bay, from the foot of Market Street over to the peninsula, and tapped San Diego River water at Old Town. A second line later came up the Strand from wells out by the Otay River. Since day one, having water here has meant bringing it in from somewhere else.

When the Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888, indoor plumbing was rare enough that the hotel advertised it as a luxury, right alongside the electric lights. Their own history is proud of about seventy one bathrooms with tubs and seventy one water closets. Then the land boom collapsed, and Babcock took the plain water coming up from those Otay wells, renamed it Coronado Waukesha Water after the famous mineral springs back in Wisconsin, and started shipping railcars of it to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A century later the water still comes from across the bay, and the houses that grew up around that hotel are still carrying the pipe they were built with. If your place here predates the bridge, there's a fair chance some of its plumbing does too. That isn't a reason to panic. It's a reason to know what you've got, and a camera down the line or a pressure check answers it in one visit.