Is Plumbing Stressful?

People. Finding them, training them, keeping them. That's the whole answer, really. The plumbing part of plumbing I figured out 20 years ago. Sweat a joint, run a drain line, size a water heater. That stuff is second nature. What keeps me up is the business side, and the business side is 90% labor. Right now I've got 6 trucks, 11 employees, and two open positions I've been trying to fill since October. Five months. I've run ads on Indeed, I've posted on the local PHCC board, I've called the apprenticeship coordinator at MATC, a woman named Debra who's been helpful but honest. She told me straight: "Gus, I've got 14 graduates this spring and 30 shops trying to hire them."

My best apprentice, a kid named Wylie, third year, sharp hands, good instincts, showed up to work three weeks ago and told me he was putting in his two weeks. Northshore Mechanical offered him $4 more an hour. Four dollars. That's $8,300 a year before overtime. I wanted to match it but I'm already paying more than my margins want me to. My accountant, Ray over at Lakeshore Tax, showed me the numbers last quarter. Labor is 48% of revenue. Industry target is 40 to 45. I'm over. If I match Wylie's offer and do the same for everyone else who asks, I'm at 52% and that's not a business anymore, that's a charity.

So Wylie left. And now I've got a truck sitting in the lot three days a week because I don't have a body to put in it. Every day that truck sits there is $800 to $1,200 in revenue I'm not generating. My wife, Jeanne, runs the office. She handles dispatch on ServiceTitan, does the bookkeeping, answers the phone. She sees the empty slots on the schedule board and she doesn't say anything but I can feel her doing the same math I'm doing. We built this thing from one van and a pager in 1998. Losing it because I can't find two warm bodies who want to learn how water moves through a building, that's a specific kind of stress that nobody prepares you for when you get your master's license.

Heat. That's it. That's the answer. I know people think of plumbing as, you know, working under a sink or whatever. And yeah, sometimes. But new construction in Phoenix means you're in houses that don't have drywall yet, which means they definitely don't have air conditioning. It's a wood frame and a roof and whatever the sun decides to do that day. Last July I was running PEX lines in an attic in Gilbert. My journeyman, Colby, had a little thermometer clipped to his tool bag. It read 147 degrees. Not outside. In the attic. Outside was only 115.

At 147 degrees, you can feel the heat through your boots on the plywood. The insulation you're kneeling on, that fiberglass batts stuff, it holds the heat and it also shreds your forearms if you're not covered up. So you've got a choice: wear long sleeves and overheat faster, or go short sleeves and crawl out looking like you lost a fight with a cat. Most days I'm soaked through my shirt by 9:30 AM. We start at 6. Colby and I go through about 3 gallons of water each on a summer day. The company provides coolers with ice but by noon that ice is gone and you're drinking warm water that tastes like the inside of an orange Igloo jug.

My buddy Ezra, works at a plumbing supply house, Counter at Ferguson, air conditioned. He sends me these Instagram reels of plumbers in clean uniforms doing satisfying solder work in basements. Meanwhile I'm army-crawling through blown-in insulation with sweat dripping into my eyes trying to hit a stub-out that's 18 inches from a truss. The gap between the social media version of this job and the Tuesday-in-July version is, honestly, it's kind of funny at this point. I screenshot the reels and send them to Colby and we laugh about it. But also I'm 26 and I already have a heat rash on my neck that my doctor, Dr. Pham at Banner Health, says is basically chronic now. She told me to avoid prolonged heat exposure. I told her what I do for a living and she just kind of looked at me.

Getting second-guessed. That's mine. And I know why it happens, so I'm not going to pretend I don't understand it. Plumbing is 98% men. At my company, Henderson Plumbing and Mechanical, there are 20 of us. Two women. Me and a dispatcher named Reese who handles the phones. I'm the only woman who goes on calls. When I pull up in the company van and knock on a door and say, "Hey, I'm Patrice from Henderson, I'm here about your water heater," there is a moment. A little pause. I can see it. Some people don't care at all. A lot of people are totally fine. But maybe 1 in 10 has a reaction, and the reaction ranges from slight surprise to, well, I had a homeowner in Towson last year, Mr. Eckert, who looked at me and said, "Is a real plumber coming or just you?"

My boss, Jeff Henderson, heard about it because I logged it in Housecall Pro like I log everything. He called Mr. Eckert and told him we wouldn't be servicing his house anymore. Jeff's good like that. But the thing about that interaction is it doesn't just sting and go away. It sits in you. Because now, every time I knock on a door, part of my brain is bracing for it. Not expecting it, but ready. And that readiness takes energy. It takes a piece of your focus that should be on the job and points it at managing someone else's assumptions.

The other thing is, when you're the only woman, being good isn't enough. You have to be undeniable. My callback rate over the last 3 years is 2.1%. Company average is 4.8%. My Google reviews, the ones where customers mention me by name, average 4.9 stars across 47 reviews. I track this because I have to. Not because Jeff asks me to. Because the margin for error when someone already half-doubts you before you've touched a wrench is basically zero. My friend Denitra, she's an HVAC tech in D.C., says the same thing. She calls it the "prove-it-again" tax. Every new door, every new customer, you're proving it again. That's not the kind of stress that shows up on a job description. But after 12 years, it's the one that's worn the deepest groove.

Stakes. On this hospital job, everything I do has consequences that go way beyond a leak or a warranty callback. Right now I'm on a $14 million renovation of the 4th floor surgical wing at Centennial Medical Center. We're putting in medical gas lines. Oxygen, nitrogen, nitrous oxide, vacuum, medical air. These are the pipes that connect to the wall outlets in operating rooms, the ones that keep patients alive during surgery. If I solder a joint wrong on a medical gas line and it leaks, that's not a water stain on a ceiling. That's a contaminated gas supply in a room where someone is unconscious on a table.

Every medical gas joint I make gets individually inspected and pressure-tested. I braze with a nitrogen purge running through the line to prevent oxidation inside the pipe. My foreman, Royce, has a checklist that's 23 items long for each section of medical gas we install. We log every joint, every test, every purge pressure. The paperwork alone takes about 90 minutes a day, and that's not busy work. A joint we installed two months ago on the vacuum system failed a spot re-test during a third-party audit by Smith-Emery. The auditor, a guy named Walsh, flagged it. Turned out the joint was fine structurally, but the nitrogen purge documentation was incomplete. Missing one pressure reading. So we had to cut the joint out, redo it, re-test it, re-document it. Three hours of work because of one blank line on a form.

Beyond the gas lines, we're also dealing with infection control. The hospital stays open during this renovation. There are patients 30 feet from where I'm cutting into walls. We work behind negative-pressure barriers with HEPA filtration running. If dust from our work area gets into the patient corridor, that's an infection control violation and potentially a patient safety event. My wife Marguerite is a surgical nurse at Saint Thomas, so she understands the clinical side better than I do. She told me once that a fungal infection from construction dust killed a patient at a hospital in Texas back in 2019. So yeah. When I'm cutting into a wall on the 4th floor, that's in my head. The pipe work itself, I've been doing that for 21 years. The weight of knowing what happens if something goes wrong, that doesn't get lighter with experience.

What I see. What I smell. What follows me home after a bad call. People hear "plumber" and they think leaky faucet, maybe a toilet replacement. That's service plumbing. My world is drains and sewers. I spend my days running a RIDGID K-9204 camera down sewer laterals, clearing roots with a cutting head, and crawling into crawlspaces that most people wouldn't enter with a hazmat suit on. My company, Southern Drain Solutions, has 8 technicians. Three of us are sewer specialists. We get the calls that the regular service plumbers don't want.

Last month I got called to a house in Marietta. Older ranch, built in the '60s, cast iron sewer line under a crawlspace with about 24 inches of clearance. The homeowner, Mrs. Cheung, said she'd been smelling something for weeks. I opened the crawlspace access and the smell hit me before I got my flashlight on. Raw sewage. Maybe 6 inches of it pooled across about a 15-foot section of the crawl. And there was a dead possum floating in it. Or what was left of one. It had been there a while. My coworker, Dante, was with me. He's been doing this 11 years and even he stood at the opening for a second and just said, "Nope." Then he put his respirator on and went in. Because that's what we do. We went in on our bellies. The sewage soaked through my coveralls in about 30 seconds. Found the break: a 4-foot section of cast iron had corroded through and collapsed. We scoped it, marked it, and came back the next day to dig up the yard and replace it. Total job was $6,800.

The thing people don't understand about that kind of work is the smell doesn't wash off on the first shower. Sometimes not the second. My fiance, Terrell, says he can tell when I've had a sewer call before I say anything. The smell gets in your hair, in your pores, under your nails even through gloves. I keep a change of clothes in the van and I bag everything from a sewer job separately. But the mental part is worse than the physical part. That crawlspace in Marietta, I still see it when I close my eyes sometimes. Not like trauma, exactly. More like, your brain files it under "things that happened to you" and occasionally pulls it back up uninvited.

My body. Specifically, what 37 years of kneeling on concrete, reaching into cabinets, and carrying cast iron pipe has done to it. I'm 59. My right knee had a partial replacement in 2023. My left knee needs one but I keep putting it off because the recovery on the right took 11 weeks and I couldn't drive for 6 of them. My back has two bulging discs at L4 and L5. My hands, both of them, have carpal tunnel bad enough that I wake up at 2 or 3 AM with numb fingers maybe four nights a week. My doctor, Dr. Brennan up at Copley Hospital in Morrisville, has been telling me to stop since I was 55. "Your body is giving you clear signals," she says. She's right. I just don't know what else to do with my days.

When I started plumbing in 1989, I was 22 and I could dig a trench by hand for 8 hours and go play basketball after dinner. Nobody told me what this work would cost me over time. My apprenticeship instructor, a man named Gene Giroux, was 50 at the time and I remember thinking he moved slow. Now I understand. Every plumber over 50 I know has a body inventory. Knees, back, shoulders, hands. You go around the table at a supply house coffee morning and it's like a roll call of orthopedic complaints. My buddy Merle, 62, retired last year after his second shoulder surgery. Teddy, 57, still works but can't do anything overhead anymore, so he only takes fixture work and water heaters.

These days I do maybe 15 to 20 calls a month. Faucet replacements, toilet rebuilds, water heater flushes. The easy stuff. No more crawlspaces, no more digging, no more wrestling 4-inch cast iron above my head. Even so, I come home and my wife Eloise runs me a hot bath and I sit in it for 30 minutes before I can straighten up. I'm not complaining, really. This trade gave me a house, put my two kids through school, kept food on the table for 37 years. But the trade also took something from me that I'm not getting back. Nobody tells the 22-year-old that. You find out at 50 when you try to stand up from a kneeling position and your body says, not today, not without a fight.