Friday, August 29, 2008

Price Book Changes!

We’ve Updated Our Price Book!

No matter what the “experts” tell you, we are in a recession. (If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck… )

Because we are ALL hurting, we decided to re-vamp our entire price book. The boss and I spent more than 20 man-hours going through every item in our price book. We lowered almost every price!

Now, plumbing is still expensive; don’t expect something that would have cost $500.00 before to only cost $50.00 now! That’s not going to happen. But it might be $425.00, maybe even a little lower!

Our prices were not outrageous before. We have a saying here, “Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.” By this we mean that we just want to make enough money to turn a profit. We are trying to build relationships; partnerships, if you will. We need to make money, but we don’t need to get it all from ONE customer!


To give you an example of one of our prices. The normal price to test a backflow device is usually either $49.00 or $59.00! That's it! (There are a couple of things that could make it be more than this, but normally this is the price per device!)


Something totally off the subject...

I am sure many of you watched the Olympics! I know my wife and I did. We have Tivo, so we were able to record a lot of it and watch it when we wanted to. (How did we ever do without Tivo? We have told friends about it, and they all said things like, “That’s nice”, but you could tell they didn’t care. Then they got Tivo and they absolutely love it!) It was tough though, I watch Sports Center almost every morning and I couldn’t watch during the Olympics. I didn’t want to find out what happened before I got to watch it. What fun would it have been to watch the basketball gold medal game if I already knew who was going to win? (Okay, I had STRONG suspicions who was going to win, but I didn’t KNOW!)

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Water Treatment

AB&R Plumbing now offers water treatment to all our Orange County customers!



I won't even ask if you are spending too much on bottled water. If you are buying bottled water, you are spending too much. Can you believe more than $1.50 for 12 ounces of water!? And you don't even know if the water is any good or not!



When you are talking about drinking water, you usually measure what is called Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) in Parts Per Million (PPM). TDS is basically a measurement of everything dissolved in your water, that is not water. It can't tell you how much of it is lead or sodium or phosphorus or iron, it just tells you the total. An easy way to think of PPM is, if you had 1 million ounces of water, at 500 PPM, 500 ounces of that water would not be water. Typical Southern California tap water is between 350 and 500 PPM.

So, what do you do? You can buy bottled water! That's expensive, you have to lug the bottles home from the store, you end up throwing away 9or hopefully recycling) a lot of plastic. You can't even be sure if you are getting good quality water! One of the major brands of water sold in stores today (it was VERY trendy a few years back and it's one of the more expensive brands) tells you right on the label that they have 309 parts per million of dissolved solids in their water!

This stuff is almost the same as your tap water, and they want you to pay more than $2.00 a liter for it!!!!!

Talk to your friends who have them and you will find that a home reverse osmosis system, installed under your kitchen sink, gives you bottled-quality-or-better water for only pennies a gallon.

Many of the major water bottlers use reverse osmosis to purify their water and then they sell that water to you. You can cut out the middle man, spend a lot less than $6.00 a gallon, and get clean, fresh, purified water right at your kitchen sink.

Contact us today for more information about a home reverse osmosis drinking water system or whole house water softener today

We are going to be increasing our content on our website to include more information about reverse osmosis and water softeners. Keep an eye out for that info and, in the meantime, if you have any questions, just contact us.



Now a little bit about your author (that's me!)

I have been in the water treatment field for more than 20 years. I started out in Boston with a company that is now (I believe) the largest privately held home & office water treatment company on the east coast. (My brother owns it, so I'm kind of proud!)

After Boston, I moved to a more central part of the state and started my own home & office water treatment company. After 3 years, I sold that company (to my brother) and moved to California.

In California, I helped a friend start a third water treatment company in Santa Ana. I left after about 5 years.

I am now working for AB&R Plumbing. We are using their expertise in plumbing, combined with my expertise in water treatment, to bring the best of both worlds to you.

So, since I lived in the Boston area for all those years, can you guess what my favorite baseball team is? That's right! The Pittsburgh Pirates! (Just kidding, it's the Red Sox!) Any other baseball fans out there? Keep it clean, especially you Yankee fans!

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Welcome to AB&R Plumbing

Welcome to AB&R Plumbing's first ever blog page! Here, we hope to tell you about the services we offer, anything new that happens, and basically give you more information about plumbing and AB&R.

First, who we are!

AB&R Plumbing has been in business for over 20 years. We are a full service plumbing company offering all the services you would expect of a plumbing company, plus a few you probably wouldn't expect. See our list of services below.

At AB&R, our motto is:




If Water Goes Through It, We Do It!


AB&R Plumbing services all of Orange County, California and a little bit beyond. We service homes, offices, office parks, apartment complexes, condo associations, Home Owners Associations, restaurants and more. If you have a need for a service plumber, you would do well to call us first.

Some of the services we offer:



  • Backflow Device Testing & Repair

  • Drain Clearing

  • Drain Video Inspection

  • Reverse Osmosis Sales & Service

  • Water Softener Sales & Service

  • Commercial Kitchen Ficture Repair or Replacement

  • Residential Fixture Repair or Replacement

  • Water Heater Repair or Replacement

  • Tankless Water Heater Installation

We provide scheduled services and repairs as well as Same Day or Emergency services.


Check out our website for more information on these services. Also, I will be posting more info here as time goes on.

If you check out our website, go to our Plumbing Services page. Click on the "Print Coupon" button and our list of discount coupons will come up. You can select any (or all) of these and print them for discounts off our plumbing work.



Okay, enough about plumbing for a minute. Let's talk about our people.


Our company President is a surfer! (He doesn't say "dude" that often.) I have heard him say he gets up at 4:00 in the morning to go surfing! He and his pastor frequently go together!


My wife and I are ballroom dancers (for fun only, we do not compete or teach). We actually met at a dance in Newport Beach. I started dancing in Massachusetts about 9 years ago and she started here in California about 10 years ago. We know some great places to go dancing and quite a few good instructors here in Orange County, CA