Drain Cleaning
Kitchen, shower and shared-stack blockages, cleared from the cleanout rather than the fixture.
See details →
Landlord and tenant work
Plumbers in the University District, on a turnover schedule
Converted houses, shared stacks and a hard deadline every August. We work the way rental property actually works.
(970) 973-0235
The pattern here
Single-family houses carrying four times the fixture load they were built for
The blocks around UNC are mostly early and mid-century single-family houses, and a large share of them have been converted at some point into multi-bedroom rentals or split into units. The plumbing underneath rarely changed to match.
A house designed for a family of four, running one bathroom and one kitchen on a single stack, now runs six tenants, two bathrooms, a laundry, and a dishwasher that did not exist when the drains were sized. Nothing about that is illegal or unsafe. It just means the system is at the top of its capacity all the time, and it fails at the weakest point far more often than the same house would in a quieter neighborhood.
The other structural factor is behavior. Rentals see a higher rate of wipes, cooking grease, hair and foreign objects in the drains than owner-occupied housing does, not because tenants are careless, but because nobody in a shared house owns the drain. A blockage in a student rental is almost never one person’s doing; it is six months of small contributions arriving at once.
So the work here is less about exotic failures and more about volume, speed and prevention.
Call about a rental property
Landlord accounts, multi-property scheduling, invoiced properly.
Turnover
The August window, and how to not be in it
Every plumber in Greeley knows what the second half of August looks like. Leases end, properties empty, and every landlord in the district discovers on the same weekend that a toilet runs, a shower drips and the kitchen drain is slow.
The properties that get sorted properly are the ones inspected in June. A walkthrough during a quiet month costs the same as one during the rush and produces a list you can schedule instead of a queue you have to survive. Running toilets, seized angle stops, leaking traps, disposals that hum, tired water heaters, and hose bibs left with hoses on them are all cheap in June and expensive in August.
For multi-property owners we can run a route: several addresses in a day, one visit each, a written list of what was found and what was fixed. It is dramatically more efficient than being called out to each one individually across three weeks.
If you are already in the August rush, call anyway, we hold capacity for it. But June is better, and it always will be.
Book a pre-turnover inspection
Multi-property routes available. One day, several addresses.
June, not AugustThe same inspection costs the same money and produces a schedule instead of a queue.
Shared stacks
Why one blocked drain affects three bathrooms
In a converted house, upstairs and downstairs bathrooms usually share a single vertical stack and a single branch to the lateral. That means a restriction low in the system presents in the fixture at the bottom, typically the ground-floor shower or the basement floor drain, even though the material causing it came from upstairs.
This causes genuine confusion between tenants and landlords. The ground-floor tenant reports a backing-up shower, someone snakes the shower drain, it clears briefly, and it returns. The actual restriction is a grease and hair mass twenty feet along the branch, and clearing at the shower only bores through it.
The right approach is to clear from the cleanout with a proper cable, then confirm with a camera if it has happened more than once. On a shared-stack property, repeat blockages in the same place almost always mean either a bellied section of branch line or a partially collapsed lateral, and no amount of fixture-level snaking will change that.
Venting is worth checking too. Bathrooms added during a conversion were often tied into vents that were adequate for the original fixture count and are not now. The symptom is a gurgling drain elsewhere in the house whenever someone flushes, and it is a genuine problem rather than a quirk.
Clear from the cleanout Snaking at the fixture bores a hole through the blockage. Clearing at the cleanout removes it.
For tenants
What to do before you call your landlord at midnight
If you rent here, a few minutes of knowledge saves a genuinely bad night.
Know where the main shutoff is. Usually in the basement near the front of the house, on the wall facing the street. Find it now, turn it to check it actually moves, and tell your housemates. A burst supply line puts several liters a minute into the building until somebody closes that valve.
Know where the water heater is and what its shutoff looks like, because a leaking heater is the second most common flood source in these houses.
If a toilet is overflowing, take the tank lid off and push the flapper down by hand. That stops the water immediately, before you find the shutoff behind the bowl, which in an old house may be seized anyway.
Do not pour drain cleaner down a fully blocked drain. It will not clear it, and it makes the eventual mechanical clearing hazardous for whoever has to do it.
Then call your landlord or property manager. If they have an account with us, tell them to reference the address and we can usually get to a genuine emergency quickly.
Landlord accounts
If you manage more than a couple of properties in the district, an account makes the whole thing simpler: one point of contact, scheduled seasonal work, itemized invoicing per address, and priority in the turnover rush.
It also means we build knowledge of your buildings, which house has the buried cleanout, which one has the seized main shutoff, which one is on borrowed time for a water heater. That knowledge is worth more than any discount.
Services here
What we do most in the district
Toilet Repair & Installation
Running fills and rocking bases, the most common turnover item on every list.
See details →Water Heater Repair
Tired heaters serving more people than they were sized for.
See details →Faucet & Sink Repair
Drips, seized shutoffs and the small repairs that stack up between tenancies.
See details →Emergency Plumbing
24/7 response for burst lines and overflows, whoever makes the call.
See details →Sewer Camera Inspection
For properties where the same drain blocks twice in a year.
See details →
Nearby areas
Other areas we cover nearby
Downtown Greeley
A few blocks east. Same housing era, clay laterals and mature tree roots.
Plumbers here →West Greeley
Newer subdivisions with entirely different problems and a lot of irrigation.
Plumbers here →Sunrise
Established family streets with original heaters and cast iron drains.
Plumbers here →University District plumbing questions
Yes, and a large share of our district work is exactly that. We can run multi-property routes, invoice per address, keep notes on each building, and hold capacity through the turnover rush. Tell us how many properties you manage when you call and we will set it up sensibly.
June, if you possibly can. The same inspection performed in June costs the same as one performed in late August but produces a list you can schedule rather than a queue of emergencies. Every plumber in Greeley is booked solid in the fortnight before leases start.
It is worth acting on within days rather than weeks. A slow drain in a shared-stack rental is usually the early stage of a full blockage, and a full blockage in a house with six people is a same-night emergency call at emergency rates. Clearing it early is cheaper in every direction.
Because they share a stack and a branch line, and the restriction is below both of them. The lowest fixture is where the water reappears. Snaking the downstairs shower will clear it briefly; clearing properly from the cleanout removes the actual mass. If it recurs, the branch or lateral needs a camera.
They can call, and for a genuine emergency, water coming into the building; we would always rather they did. For anything non-urgent we will need authorisation from the owner or manager before doing chargeable work, so it is worth making sure your tenants know who to contact.
In most district houses it is in the basement on the wall facing the street, close to where the service line enters. It is worth locating it and confirming it turns before you need it: on houses of this age the valve is sometimes seized, which is a five-minute fix in advance and a real problem in an emergency.
Absolutely, and it is usually the highest-return item on any turnover list. A running toilet can waste hundreds of gallons a day, and in a rental nobody reports it because nobody sees the bill. A flapper and fill valve rebuild takes half an hour and pays for itself quickly.
Often, yes. Bathrooms added during a conversion were frequently tied into vents sized for the original fixture count. The symptom is a drain that gurgles elsewhere in the house when a toilet is flushed, or traps that lose their seal and let odours in. It is a real defect, not a quirk, and it is fixable.
It is one of the shortest runs in our coverage area, and dispatch is answered around the clock. For a burst line or an overflowing fixture, shut off the water first, at the main if you can, then call. We will give you a realistic arrival window on the phone.
Yes, and it is worth doing in this neighborhood specifically. We look at supply material, drain and vent arrangement, the water heater, the state of the lateral by camera if you want it, and anything that has been added during a conversion. It is a short visit that regularly changes what people are willing to pay.
Call (970) 973-0235
Landlord, tenant or property manager, tell us which when you call.
Turnover coming up?
Inspections, repairs and multi-property routes across the University District.
(970) 973-0235Answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every week of the year.