Pipe Patrol Plumbers & Drains of Santee

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. Out here we'll usually ask what neighborhood you're in and roughly when the house went up, because in a valley that filled in this fast that answer narrows things down before anybody leaves the shop.

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.

This town is named after the second husband.

George Cowles bought four thousand acres out here in 1877 and planted vineyards, and the place that grew up around him got called Cowlestown. Reasonable enough. He died in 1887.

His widow Jennie then married a land surveyor named Milton Santee, and according to the historian who wrote it down, she lobbied hard to have the town renamed in honor of her new husband. In 1893 the citizens gave what the record calls a reluctant vote, and Cowlestown became Santee. Whatever else you want to say about that, she got it done.

The town stayed farm country for another sixty years. Then in 1958 the Carlton Company bought forty three hundred acres of the old Fanita Ranch and started building. Its president was a man named Bill Mast, which is why you drive on Mast Boulevard. Santee went from under two thousand people in 1950 to nearly twenty six thousand by 1970, and Carlton Hills and Carlton Oaks still carry the builder's name.

Santee voted against becoming a city, changed its mind three years later, and incorporated on the first of December, 1980. It's past sixty thousand people now.

That build out is what's under the houses. Streets that went in together, on slabs, with the water lines run under the concrete where you can't see them, and East County's hard water working on tanks and fixtures the whole time. If your house came out of the Carlton years, its plumbing has been on the same clock as the rest of the block.

Here's the part most Santee homeowners don't know until they need to. Padre Dam holds the property owner responsible for the entire length of the sewer lateral, including the portion out in the public right of way. Not just the run across your yard. All of it, out to the main, and if the trouble turns out to be in the right of way section, the district wants video of it before repairs go ahead. So a camera down the line isn't just how you find out what's wrong here. It's what the district asks for.