Pipe Patrol Plumbers & Drains of Imperial Beach

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. We'll usually ask roughly when the place was built, because in this town that answer changes almost everything about what we're likely walking into and what goes on the truck.

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.

Read our reviews on Google ›

For a while, the pier had a different name. The Edwards Wave Motor Pier.

Imperial Beach has always done things its own way, starting with the name. This was a summer escape for farmers who lived about ninety miles inland in the desert, and the town was named to sell them on it. In March of 1887 roughly two thousand laborers moved into the area to build the Hotel del Coronado, and a fair number of them never left.

The pier came in April of 1909, built by the South San Diego Investment Company, and it was a fishing pier meant to draw investors out to a very quiet stretch of coast. Then somebody had an idea. In 1910 they extended it another two hundred feet and bolted six machines to the end of it, called the Edwards Wave Motor, invented by a San Diego man named Theodore LaBrum. The patent describes waves lifting a float, which turns a wheel, which makes electricity. One account says the plan was to run the electric trains coming down from San Diego on nothing but the surf.

It did not work. The machines came off and the pier went back to being a pier. But for a while there this town's biggest structure was a full scale experiment in ocean power, which is a very Imperial Beach thing to have tried. The pier people photograph today is the 1963 one, rebuilt again in 1989, so the wave motor is long gone. The instinct isn't.

That instinct is still in the housing. This is a town that went decades without building much of anything and then put up a few hundred new homes almost at once, so a cottage that has weathered eighty years of salt air can sit a block from a townhome that hasn't seen ten. Both are worth knowing before something goes wrong, and a pressure check or a camera down the line reads either one in a single visit.