Pipe Patrol Plumbers & Drains of La Mesa

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. Say your kitchen drain has clogged three times this year. You might hear what hydro jetting actually is, why a regular snake keeps buying you a few weeks instead of fixing it, and whether your line is even a candidate. Then you decide. That's always the order it goes in, and it never goes the other way.

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 voted 429 to 1. One guy said no.

Before La Mesa was La Mesa, it was La Mesa Springs, named for the natural springs that drew a stockman named Robert Allison out here in 1869. Spring Street is called that for a reason, and the original spring house still stands in Collier Park.

The trouble was that springs alone don't run a citrus town. Water was supposed to come from a wooden flume, more than thirty miles of it, finished in 1889 and built to carry water down out of the Cuyamacas. San Diego threw a parade when it opened. Out here it never worked properly. The company that built it couldn't serve El Cajon, La Mesa, Spring Valley or Lemon Grove reliably, a drought hit in 1897, and by 1899 the whole thing was in foreclosure.

It stayed a mess for another decade. In 1910 Ed Fletcher, the developer behind the Grossmont Tract and the Mount Helix properties, bought the failing water company with a partner. He'd named Grossmont after William Gross eight years earlier, so the man selling the neighborhoods now also owned the water going to them.

La Mesa had had enough. The city incorporated in February of 1912 with about seven hundred people in it, and that September they held a special election to form their own municipal water district alongside Lemon Grove and Spring Valley. The vote came back four hundred and twenty nine to one. Somewhere in La Mesa there was exactly one person who thought the water situation was fine.

A century later the houses are still telling a water story, just a quieter one. In the older neighborhoods, the Village and the streets around Mount Nebo, many homes went in with galvanized supply lines and clay sewer laterals that are now reaching the end of what they were built for, depending on the year the house went up and what's been replaced since. If your house has been standing here since the trolley days, there's a decent chance some of its original pipe has too. A camera down the line or a pressure reading answers that question in one visit, and knowing beats finding out the hard way.