Richmond Hill is really two towns

Which Richmond Hill do you live in?

The stretch along Yonge and the streets around Mill Pond have been there a long time. Homes there run the full range — some genuinely old, plenty from the mid-century, a lot of them renovated once or twice by owners who found the original pipe still buried in the walls. Work here looks like our Thornhill work: aging supply lines, cast iron waste, and the leaks that come with both.

Then there's Oak Ridges, Jefferson, Bayview Hill, Rouge Woods, Westbrook — most of it built through the 1990s and 2000s. Those houses aren't old, but they're old enough. The original water heater is finished. Builder-grade fixtures are letting go. Nothing dramatic, just a steady list of small things arriving at the same time.

We mention this because it determines whether a plumber walking into your house should be thinking about the pipe in the walls or about the fittings on the ends of it. Assuming the wrong one wastes your money.

The leak you haven't found yet

The most common Richmond Hill call we get that isn't an emergency is a water bill that jumped for no obvious reason. Nine times out of ten there's no puddle anywhere, and the homeowner has already looked.

Do the meter test before you call anyone. Shut off every tap and appliance, note the meter reading, wait half an hour without using water, and read it again. If it moved, water is going somewhere. The usual culprit is a toilet flapper leaking silently into the bowl — no sound, no visible water, and a genuinely alarming amount of waste. After that it's supply lines underground or inside walls, which is what our leak detection work is for. We'd rather find it than open your walls looking for it.

Out toward Oak Ridges and the rural edge: we work throughout, but we don't service private wells or septic systems. On a property with private services we handle everything inside the house from the pressure tank onward. The well, the pump and the septic bed need a specialist in those systems.