What we charge
Two numbers, published, and they do not move depending on who is asking or what time you call.
Labour
£150 per hour
Call-out
£50 call-out
The rate is fixed before we attend and does not rise for a difficult property, an awkward access or an evening visit. The total depends on how long the job takes; the rate cannot change.
Leak detection and general plumbing both carry the same £50 call-out.
What the hour actually buys
Diagnosis first. An engineer arriving on a hot water call does not open by pricing a new cylinder. He establishes whether the fault sits in the heat source, in the control that splits heating from hot water, or in the cylinder itself, because those three get confused constantly and the wrong one gets replaced. Testing in that order is inside the hour, not added on top of it.
So is the repair, and so is putting back whatever had to come up to reach it. If a board is lifted or a section of ceiling is opened, closing it again is part of the job rather than a separate trade you are left to arrange afterwards. That is the real difference between us and most leak detection firms working in London, who will trace a leak accurately, hand you a report, and leave the hole.
Travel inside London sits in the call-out and is not added back as mileage. The detection kit is included too, the thermal camera, the acoustic equipment, the tracer gas, none of it is hired back to you by the hour.
What makes a job short and what makes it long
Only time moves the total, so it is worth being plain about what eats it. Access is the variable, far more often than the repair itself.
Usually short
The fault is in front of you
A seized motorised valve in an airing cupboard with the cylinder beside it. Isolate, change the head or the whole valve, refill, test. An immersion element and stat on an accessible vented cylinder is much the same. A tap or shower cartridge, a failed ballvalve, a compression joint weeping under a sink. These are the visits where the call-out and a short spell of labour is the whole bill.
Usually longer
The fault has to be found first
A Victorian conversion with pipework buried in screed, chased into a solid wall and covered by a floor laid straight over the old one. A purpose-built block where a Pulsacoil thermal store keeps its pumps and controls inside a sealed unit that has to be worked through in order. A new build with liquid screed over underfloor heating, where nothing can be lifted and the leak is traced from the surface before anything is cut.
Hard water runs through almost the whole supply area and it lengthens jobs quietly. Scale on a plate heat exchanger, a furred immersion element, a gate valve that has not been turned in years and will not shut now it is needed. None of those are difficult. All of them add time, and it is common to meet several of them in the same property on the same visit.
How parts are handled
Parts are charged at what they cost us. Nothing is marked up on the invoice and no supplier discount is kept back. Where a merchant run is genuinely needed the time to collect is charged as time, and the engineer tells you before going rather than after.
Most of what fails is already on the van: immersion elements and thermostats, motorised valve heads, pressure reducing valves, expansion vessels in the common sizes, tap and shower cartridges, copper and plastic pipe and fittings. A cylinder itself, a manufacturer specific control board, or an obsolete part for an older thermal store has to be ordered, and that is usually the point at which the work stops being an hourly job.
Larger work is quoted, not clocked
Cylinder replacement, a full unvented installation with its G3 certification, a bathroom, a rerun of mains supply pipe, anything running beyond a day. Work like that is priced as a job, not by the hour. You get one figure covering labour, parts, taking the old unit away and the certification where it applies, and you get it before anything is ordered.
An hourly rate is the right instrument for a fault of unknown size and the wrong one for work whose scope everybody can already see. That cuts against us as often as it cuts for us. If your job is plainly a full day, we say so and quote it rather than starting the clock and letting you discover the total at the end.
If it turns out bigger than it looked
It happens, and it usually happens once boards are up. A drip at one joint turns out to be the first of several along a run of pipe that has corroded down its whole length. The cylinder is sound but the pipework feeding it is not. A ceiling comes down further than intended because the plaster above the wet patch had already gone.
The rule is the same every time. Work stops, you are told what has actually been found and what it now means in time, and you decide whether we carry on. Nobody keeps working on an open ended job and presents the total afterwards. If what we find turns a repair into a replacement, we stop and quote the replacement rather than letting it disappear into the hours.
Why we publish the rate
The usual argument against publishing is that every property is different. That is true, and it is not a reason to hide the number. It is a reason to explain what moves it, which is what the rest of this page is for.
We are a new company. We have no review count to point at and we are not going to invent one, so what we publish instead is the rate and the method. You can read both before you call, and you can weigh them against a firm that will only discuss figures once an engineer is standing in your hallway. 20 engineers across London also means we are not pricing on scarcity: there is no reason to load a quote because the diary happens to be full that week.
Be clear on this before you call us or anyone else: a fixed rate is not a fixed total. Our rate will not change once we see the property, the access or the hour on the clock. What we cannot tell you from the phone is exactly how many of those hours a fault you have not yet shown us is going to take.