Lane Cove's On-Call Plumbing Team

A pedestrian mall has anchored the village centre since the late 1970s. War-service home blocks from the 1940s and 50s make up a lot of the standalone housing here.

The flats arrived in a second wave, the first block in 1962 and hundreds more through the 1960s and 70s along the main roads near Longueville Road and Burns Bay Road.

That's a lot of ageing shared plumbing packed into one suburb. Root-prone clay sewers under the older streets tend to back up suddenly, and that's a common after-hours callout regardless of whether it's a house or a block of flats above it.

The suburb also falls away steeply toward the Lane Cove River in places, and sudden storms can surcharge drains on those slopes, overflowing into the lower-lying properties below.

Bushland reserves along the river add mature tree cover to a lot of these older streets too, which is its own quiet contributor to root intrusion in ageing clay sewer lines nearby.

Beyond the drainage and slope issues already covered, two other patterns turn up often.

Flats and houses alike carry plenty of reno-era flexi hoses, and it's the connection itself, not the tap, that tends to fail first and flood without warning. Ageing hot water units in the post-war houses and older flats also fail suddenly, frequently after hours rather than during a convenient weekday.

Winter tends to bring a small spike in those hot water calls specifically, as older units finally give out under the extra load of a cold season.

1. Call through the details, including whether it's a strata job.
2. We turn up and diagnose what's actually wrong.
3. The price gets locked in before we start.
4. Finished work carries the lifetime labour warranty straight away.

Flat blocks from the 1960s sometimes have plumbing runs that were never well documented, and locating the right isolation point can take a bit longer than it would in a newer building.