Wisler Plumbing and Air

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How We Handle and Prioritize Repairs

Water Treatment

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There are 3 types of services available in HVAC, plumbing, and even water treatment: maintenance, repair, and replacement. Maintenance describes a proactive effort to prevent downtime and maximize the usefulness of a system. Repair is when something in a system has broken and you’re having to react to the situation. It could be when you don’t have any heating or cooling, or when your drain gets stopped up. (This is what we would call a demand situation.) Last is replacement, which sometimes becomes necessary during repair or maintenance. This is when one or more existing components of a system must be changed out for a new component.

Repairs are generally urgent in manner. If you lose the heating in your house when it’s cold outside, you’ll want the situation resolved as soon as possible. We have to do a good job with managing these kinds of urgent demands and get to the client’s house. There can be a lot of pressure and anxiety that comes with a repair, so we try to do our best to prioritize it over something less urgent. Any repair (which involves reacting to a situation) will have a service charge associated with it. We have a $79 service charge for non-Diamond Club family and a $49 service charge for our Diamond Club family.

What that service charge covers is our ability to bring a well-stocked truck to the home with a qualified technician. The technician diagnoses the situation, figures out what’s going on, and then presents the homeowner with a list of options. Before we do any work that would cost more than that initial service charge, we make sure the homeowner is given options in writing about what’s available for them to move forward and repair their system. If it cannot be repaired, the options would include a potential strategy to replace whatever component is affected.

In general, an HVAC repair is potentially going to range between $300 and $600. Of course, there are repairs that are higher or lower than that range, but that’s a good average amount to get an understanding. It really depends on the system’s age and the type of parts it uses. A high-efficiency system has parts that can be very expensive if they’re not under warranty, so it really depends on the specific situation.

If you’re having cooling or heating issues in your home that need immediate attention, Wisler Plumbing & Air prioritizes those kinds of situations so they can be resolved as soon as possible. Diamond Club family gets a reduced service charge, too. To learn more, contact us online or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

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Exciting News

We have some very exciting news involving how our organization will change starting in 2020: We’re going to be offering HVAC services to all of our clients and the community at large! Right now we’re extremely busy at work to recruit competent people who fit into our organization and allow us to bring the HVAC trade onboard. Once we ramp up all of our systems and procedures, residential owner-occupied homes can come to us as a one-stop shop for water treatment, plumbing, drain cleaning, and HVAC as well.

Our Goals

One of the areas we’ll be working on over the next four to six months is our installs (both plumbing and HVAC) to make sure we do a better job with lead times for our clients. For instance, if one of our plumbers goes out for a leaky pipe and they find that all the pipes are in rough shape, they may recommend a re-pipe of the home. Sometimes the job might take 3 to 5 days to complete, in addition to getting put on a schedule with a wait time of two or even three weeks. We want to be able to shorten that lead time so we’re more responsive for these kinds of larger projects.

Continuing to Grow

This is a huge change for 2020, and we’re definitely going to continue to grow. We anticipate 15% growth next year, and along with that growth comes more new people and more business. We’re on track to run our first HVAC calls at the end of this year, so by the time January rolls around we should be well in the groove of things.

 

If you have any questions about HVAC or plumbing, contact us online or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

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A water tech (technician) can mean several different things, but let’s go with the meaning that generally applies to someone who works on water supply systems. Their work might include the municipal side of the system, or well system for those who live in a rural area. A water tech generally makes sure that water is getting to the residence or business. If the lines/systems that transport water are broken or need repair, the water technician will step in.

 

A water treatment specialist, on the other hand, focuses more on the quality of the water. They are an expert about everything that might be in the water, such as chlorine, sediment, iron, pH, bacteria, hardness, or total dissolved solids. They know how to properly test for these items, and are also capable of prescribing solutions to turn poor quality water into good water. If the water is already good, they can turn it into great water.

 

There are several different levels of water quality. A water treatment specialist is familiar with the differences and what needs to be done to get to those levels. For instance, water that’s appropriate for washing cars or watering the lawn doesn’t need to be extremely high quality. For doing laundry, there shouldn’t be any contaminants in the water that could stain clothes. This is the same kind of water that would be good for taking a shower, since stains and buildup can occur in showers/tubs as well. When it comes to water you intend to consume, it is very important that it’s drinking water quality.

 

Any time the topic of health effects comes up, there are always various different opinions. There are many myths surrounding healthy drinking water, what’s best for someone’s body, and whether hardness causes problems in the plumbing system. Because plumbers see the effects of water on a plumbing system, we have firsthand knowledge about what different contaminants can do.

 

Do you prefer water with high alkalinity, or water without anything in it? I personally believe that pure water with nothing in it is most desirable. But because there are so many differing opinions, the best thing I can say is that someone with experience in water treatment tends to have more truth and facts than someone who has just done online research. (There’s a lot of misleading and inaccurate information out there.)

 

If you want to learn exactly what’s going on with your water and get the best option for your home, reach out to the team at Wisler Plumbing and Air to work with a water treatment specialist. Contact us online or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

 

 

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If anyone is considering putting a water softener in their home, here are some of the top questions to ask the professional installing the system:

 

What’s the return on investment?

 

Whenever you’re thinking about spending money on your home, you’ll probably want to know if (and when) you’ll see a return on your investment. My opinion may admittedly be a little bit biased based on my plumbing background, but I think a water softener will improve the lifestyle of everything in the plumbing system, including the showering experience. It’s one of the quickest items that you’ll see a return on after putting it inside your home.

 

What difference will it make?

 

Whether or not you’ll notice any type of change going from hard water to soft water depends on how much hardness you have and what type of treatment is being used. Sometimes putting in a softening system or filtration system will in fact lead to a very different experience.

 

Aside from the differences you can immediately feel and see, there are also some changes that are less obvious. It could affect things like your water heater or appliances, potentially increasing their longevity.

 

What kind of maintenance is recommended?

 

Just like your car, a water treatment system is going to need maintenance. You’ll probably want to find out what kind of maintenance is needed and how often it should be performed. Generally, we’ll recommend at least yearly maintenance, if not every 6 months for salt.

 

How much salt is the water softener going to use?

 

It could become very frustrating if you got a water softener that required you to haul salt all the time. That’s why it’s a good idea to know what you’re getting into in advance.

 

If you want to find out the answers to all your questions about putting a water treatment system in your home, reach out to the team at Wisler Plumbing and Air by contacting us online or giving us a call at 540-483-9382.

 

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With any product, there are potential upsides and downsides depending on the situation. There are two types of tankless water heaters: electric tankless and gas tankless. One of the downsides is that there are very few times when it would make sense to select an electric unit. So if a home doesn’t have LP or natural gas, a tankless water heater probably isn’t the best solution.

 

Another potential downside of tankless water heaters is the fact that they deliver hot water on-demand, meaning that the water is heated as it flows through the system. For that reason, it requires a large amount of energy during times of increased usage. Although it is very efficient and doesn’t use much energy overall, it will use a significant amount of gas in a span of a few minutes if people are taking multiple showers. Therefore, we find that we have to be very careful about where we install the tankless water heater. We must make sure the gas line is sized to provide adequate volume of gas for the heater to run properly.

 

Poor water quality is bad for all water heaters, regardless of whether they are tankless or tank systems. However, one of the downsides of a tankless water heater is that it may not even function at all with poor water quality. Additionally, the owner’s manual will list certain requirements for water quality that must be met in order for the warranty to be honored.

 

In some situations it could be more expensive to retrofit a tankless water heater into a home (e.g., for a finished basement). During the finishing process, there might be a water heater in the middle of the basement that would need to be relocated. The whole hot water system would need to be converted to that style of installation.

 

If you have any questions about the potential downsides of installing a tankless water heater in your home, reach out to the team at Wisler Plumbing and Air by contacting us online or giving us a call at 540-483-9382.

 

 

 

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If you’re looking into getting a water softener for your home, you should first determine that hardness is the only water quality issue you need to address. If the water is simply hard and everything else about it is fine, you can limit your choices to a water softener. However, if there is chlorine present in the water, or there are any other quality issues, that will influence the type of water softener you put in.

 

If you’re only trying to address hard water, the technology that has proven itself effective is the same no matter what brand you choose. All of them will use ion exchange, which removes hardness and puts a little bit of sodium back into the water. (It’s such a small amount that you would hardly notice.) Where the different brands and models do compete is when it comes to the control mechanism (computer board) that manages the whole system.

 

Depending on how good the control mechanism is, it could potentially make the water softener work very efficiently or inefficiently. Water softeners from many years ago just had a simple time clock, which would make the system regenerate every 3 to 4 days regardless of how much water was used. In today’s water softeners, most manufacturers use a meter that measures the amount of water you use and only regenerates when necessary. The technology has continued to grow, and newer systems have become very efficient in the amount of salt that is used.

 

I would also caution everyone not to fall for gimmicks when choosing a water softener. The water treatment industry is full of myths and too good to be true solutions. (We have debunked a lot of them.) If you go online and see a company that makes incredible promises, the first question you should ask yourself is, can I prove that this system will actually do what they claim? If you cannot test the unit to determine that it has actually corrected a water issue, then it is probably going to be a gimmick. Don’t waste your money on untested solutions that promise the world.

 

As a starting point, it’s a good idea to get a free in-home consultation so we can assess your water quality. Then we can make a recommendation about which products would be ideal. To reach out to the team at Wisler Plumbing and Air, contact us online or give us a call at 540-483-9382.

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