Barley Services

Yesterday I spoke briefly with a man who used to work for one of the most well known plumbing and HVAC companies in town. I won't use their name here, so I'll just call them Con Man Services. They're actually not owned by the local proprietor whose name they bear; he sold the outfit to a huge corporation that operates in twenty states under multiple aliases. But they still put the supposed owner in the ads as though it were a local family owned mom & pop grocery. But you know you're dealing with a lying sack of sewage when he says "And we'll even give you $250 for that old water heater!"

I worked for the big "rooter" companies in Memphis for eleven years and six months, then opened Barley Services on August 1st of 2001. I am a licensed plumbing contractor with a loyal and growing customer base. I am the entire company; when you call, you get me-not a secretary. As a one-truck operation, I can cover only a limited area. Ordinarily, if you draw a line from Frayser to Midtown to Germantown, Memphis is cut in half diagonally. I serve the northeast half. Sometimes people at church call me Dr. Barley, but how many doctors actually make house calls any more?

I'm amazed by how many water heater manufacturers there are. On second thought, it makes sense that there should be so many. Practically every building that you see has at least one water heater in it, and nearly ten per cent of them will need to be replaced each year. A generation ago, water heaters were made better and lasted longer, but price-conscious customers forced the manufacturers to make them cheaper and cheaper. But not all brands are the same. A good water heater will cost more than a cheap one.

A toilet usually can be fixed and doesn't need to be replaced. Sometimes, though, it is cheaper to just replace the toilet. A decent one costs about $100 at Lowe's. The labor to install it usually runs $100, plus $10 if you don't already have it at your home for me to install. Modern toilets are "water savers." Instead of, say, 3.5 gallons per flush, they use 1.6 gallons. When federal law began requiring this, we professionals thought that it should have been called "The Plumbers Job Security Act of 1995."

When I hear it, I know that I'm talking to someone who never had to spend two hours and a trip to the parts house trying to keep an old faucet alive for a customer. Faucet repair can be a nightmare. If you invest in good tools, stock your truck with plenty of faucet parts (although you can never have them all), have a fair amount of experience, and are working on a faucet that's in good shape, the repair can go quickly. Such jobs are uncommon, though. More common is encountering a handle that swears it will stay on the stem or die defending its position, a valve frozen into the faucet body as though the last "plumber" used Super Glue on the threads, a screw broken off where it cannot be reached, an oddly sized seat the likes of which hasn't been seen in Memphis since Austin Peay was governor, or maybe just faucet demons that hover over the work space and knock handle screws down the drain, smooth out splines so that handles no longer work, or cause leaks even though all of the parts and packing are new.