Plumber in Frisco, TX: Licensed, Local, With an Office on Westridge Blvd

This is the top call right now, here like everywhere else we work. The AC condensate line is tied into the sink drain under the cabinet, and when that drain clogs, the sink fills and water runs into the cabinet. In the photo the AC line is the black one, marked, coming into the drain above the trap, and the cable is in that drain line clearing it. One house in Frisco has this setup in the girls' bathroom, and we have cleared that sink twice in a year and a half. Hair goes down that drain, and a lot of organic buildup from soap and face wash goes with it. Calcium builds up in there too. The AC line adds its own: dirt and mold grow inside it, and the water it drips pushes all of that into the same drain. A drain like that fills up again with time, and we tell you so before we start. Drain cleaning has the details.

The PRV sits in a box at the front of the house, between the meter and the house. We replace them all the time, for three reasons: hard water scales them up, they wear out with age, and the builder's box is often full of dirt, so nobody sees the valve until it fails. When a PRV fails high, pressure climbs over 80 PSI and starts eating cartridges, fill valves and the water heater. When it fails low, the shower fades. A gauge on the hose bib tells us in a minute. And the third way: the valve itself starts to leak in its box. The clip here is a PRV leaking in its box, water running out of the old valve into the mud. We dug it out and put in a new valve with a new shut-off valve next to it. The PRV replacement page shows how one is changed.

Another call we get all the time. Most of them fail from age and from never being touched: nobody flushes the tank, the anode rod is never changed, the expansion tank is never checked. We say this without blame, because nobody tells a homeowner to do it. The expansion tank is the quiet one. There is a rubber bladder inside, it cracks with time, water fills the tank, the tank rusts, and one day it drips onto the heater. A scaled tank also drops your hot water pressure. Water heater repair and replacement and expansion tank replacement are separate pages, because they are separate jobs.

The spigot on your wall is a frost free one. If the builder and the plumber installed it right, it should not freeze or burst. It still needs a cover before a freeze, and that is what our reminders say: let the faucets inside the house drip, put covers on the outside spigots, find the main shut-off valve before you need it. It helps. And still, every spring and half the summer we replace outdoor spigots that cracked inside the wall during the freeze. The crack shows nothing until the first time you turn the hose on, and then water runs into the wall. Others simply leak: you close the handle and the water keeps running. Nothing burst, it just will not shut off. Both kinds are on the hose bib repair page, and the guide on the main shut-off valve shows how to stop the water fast if a pipe does burst.

The soil here moves. Joints in the sewer line open a little, roots find the water, and a year later the toilets back up. We clear the roots with the chain snake and run a camera through the line. Sometimes the camera goes in first, when the line is clogged but still lets it through. Sometimes it goes in after the clearing, because in a packed line the camera shows nothing. It depends on how bad the clog is. If the camera shows a separated joint, we repair that section. That repair is on the sewer line repair and camera inspection page. A backup that comes back after clearing is the sign.

Hard water, same as the rest of Texas. Calcium builds up inside the cartridge and breaks down the rubber, and the faucet drips or won't shut off. One we pulled came out crusted white, it is in the photo here. The tub spout goes the same way. The diverter inside it, the part that sends the water up to the shower head when you pull the knob, scales up, its rubber and plastic wear through, and then water runs from the spout and the shower head at the same time. Faucet and shower valve repair is its own page.

We put a gauge on the hose bib at a lot of houses here. Very often it reads over 80 PSI, and 90 is not rare. In a few homes we have seen 105. Above 80 the whole system is under stress, so when we put in a new PRV, we usually set it to 70 PSI. Then there is the other end. With hard water an old PRV rusts and clogs inside until almost nothing gets through, and the gauge shows 30 PSI. Too high or too low, it is usually the same valve. Check your pressure once a year.

In the newer homes here, when the main water line leaks, it is usually at one spot: around the pressure reducing valve and the secondary shut-off valve next to it. In about half the houses nobody has ever serviced them, the valve box is buried and packed with wet dirt, and in that dirt the pipe corrodes, pinholes show up, and one day it rusts through. The valves and the pipe should sit in air, not in wet dirt: a clean valve box has no dirt in it. That is the main trend we see here right now. Water line repair is the page for that leak.

A freeze breaks more than outside spigots here. In garages we very often see the water line that feeds the outside spigot burst, because a garage is cold no matter what. In one of those garages, the one in the photo, the line to the spigot had burst inside the wall and was flooding the garage. We came out, shut the water off, cut out the burst section and put in new copper.

We replace backflow preventers on sprinkler systems often. Most of them simply rust. The handles and the shut-off valves on the backflow rust until they will not turn, and then you cannot close the water. After the backflow the line is usually PVC, and in the ground that plastic is brittle: the ground moves or a root presses on it, and the pipe cracks.

A week with the plunger. A Frisco family called about a toilet that would not flush right. For a week they had been using the plunger after every flush: it clogged, they plunged it, it worked, and the next flush with paper clogged it again. We ran a six-foot toilet auger through it and the line opened, but the plumber felt something was still not right. So we pulled the toilet. The bolts were rusted, the wax ring was ruined, and there was already water and waste on the tile under it. Then the camera went in, and right at the first bend sat a plastic sponge, the head of a toilet cleaning wand. Somebody had flushed it during a cleaning, most likely. We sent in a short pickup tool and got it out. That does not always work. This time it did. Toilet repair is the page for a toilet that keeps clogging.

The expansion tank that hung on the pipe. A homeowner called about a drip at the water heater: a supply line had started to drip. When we got there, the expansion tank was hanging on the PEX line with nothing else holding it. On the day it was installed that worked. A tank full of air weighs almost nothing, and the pipe held it fine. But the rubber bladder inside fails in three to five years. This one had failed, and the tank was full of water. It is a two gallon tank, so two gallons of water hung on a plastic pipe and bent it. A tank like that rusts through and leaks sooner or later. Here the pipe would have given out first and flooded the house. We replaced the tank and secured the new one the way the code requires. The job itself is on the expansion tank replacement page.

FPP Plumbing, 12800 Westridge Blvd, Suite 116, Frisco, TX 75035. The Frisco line is on the button at the top of the page. Office hours Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM. A licensed plumber is on duty 24/7. Depending on who is on call that night, the plumber at your door may be Nick, Christopher or Denys. All of Frisco, all four ZIP codes, 75033, 75034, 75035 and 75036. Every job out of this office is done under our Responsible Master Plumber license, M-44816.