Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Saving Even More Money with a Home Reverse Osmosis System!

Daniel from AB&R Plumbing here again, and I decided that, since I was saving so much money with my new tankless water heater (see the previous blog entitled “Well, I finally did it!”), I decided to save even more on my drinking water.

I broke down and had a new Reverse Osmosis drinking water system installed in my Mission Viejo home.

AB&R plumbing has installed quite a few Reverse Osmosis systems recently, in both homes and offices. We have installed them in Irvine, Aliso Viejo, Trabuco Canyon, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Mission Viejo and many other cities in Orange County. I decided it was time to “take the plunge” and start saving money on buying bottled water.

A home Reverse Osmosis system basically gives you an endless supply of purified water that you can use for anything. For cooking, giving it to your pets, watering your plants, using it in the steam iron (or my new garment steamer – still not sure what this is!), making coffee or tea, making ice cubes, almost anything that you would want to make sure and use the cleanest water available.

If you are buying bottled water now, you have a few problems to consider.

- The cost – It can cost you more than $6.00 a gallon to buy bottled water. Sure you can pay less than this, but then you get into the next problem.
- Quality – how good is that water you’re buying? There is an internationally sold brand of water that says right on the label that it has 309 ppm of dissolved solids. This is almost as bad as your tap water!
- Convenience – With bottles, you have to go buy them, carry them home, they take up space to store them, and what happens to all of those bottles? Even if you recycle them (and most people don’t), it still is a lot of plastic! This means that a Reverse Osmosis system is “green”!

With a home reverse osmosis system, you will take the TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) of your water down to less than 25 ppm (in Orange County, it usually starts at around 450 ppm). You have the system installed at your kitchen sink by a trained professional, we remind you when your filters need to be replaced (usually once a year), and it can usually be connected to your ice maker to give you purified ice!

My wife and kids love it! I had a line run to my ice maker, so it took an extra 40 minutes, but he was done in under an hour-and-a-half. It is very convenient (and pretty cool) to be able to get a drink of pure, clean water, right at my kitchen sink, anytime I want.

There are all kinds of options and add-ons: you can get an undercounter chiller or heater, you can get custom-finished faucets, there are pumps to increase your pressure (and they don’t use electricity), and more.

Give AB&R Plumbing a call and ask about having a home Reverse Osmosis system installed in your Orange County home today. You’ll save money, save time, and cut down on your use of plastic – which is very “green”.

I guess you could say you will save some green by being “green"!

Our Jetting is Better Than Their Jetting

We have customers who pay us more for quarterly jetting of their drains than they used to pay “someone else”, and they are happy about it.

How does that work?

Our jetting service is better than their jetting service for three reasons.

1)Experience: We have over 20 years experience in jetting drains. This means that we know how drain systems go together, what kind of “creative plumbing” we might run into, and – most importantly – what to do about the challenges we find.

2)Our jetter: We use a 4000 PSI diesel-powered jetter with a 500’ hose. This is a powerful tool (from US Jetting) that, unlike the over-glorified pressure-washers that most jetting companies use, will actually emulsify grease and wash it away. Less powerful jetters break off chunks of grease that float down line and become a problem further down.

3)Thoroughness: Most jetter companies just jet the drain mains. This is why they can charge so little; they come in, jet one or two lines, and are gone. It takes them very little time, but it is not nearly as effective as what we do.

At AB&R Plumbing, we jet from every floor sink, every cleanout, every floor drain, and every other access point we deem necessary. We jet the trap arms, laterals, mains; basically we jet everything we can reach. Just jetting the mains and not doing the trap arms and laterals, is like sweeping your hallways and not cleaning the offices.

So, we charge more for our quarterly jetting (or monthly or semi-annually), but you end up paying less in the long run. Since we are jetting as much of your drain system as we can reach, you will be less likely to need to call us out between quarterly visits because something clogged up. All of your lines will be getting cleaned during each jetting visit, instead of just the ones outside.
We have contracts with customers all over Orange County for quarterly and semi-annual jetting. We do restaurants in Newport Beach, Anaheim Hills, and Costa Mesa. We do Office Complexes in Orange, Costa Mesa, Tustin and Lake Forest. We do a couple of small malls, a few strip plazas and even a branch of the US Post Office.

Are there other benefits to using AB&R Plumbing as your jetting company? Yes!

Our technicians drive trucks that are well stocked with both tools and parts, and they have years of knowledge and experience to apply to almost any plumbing problem you may have. From clogged drains to leaking faucets, from no hot water to faulty mixing valves, from a toilet that won’t flush to installing a water softener, AB&R Plumbing is the one to call for all your plumbing needs. Residential, commerical or industrial...

If Water Goes Through It, We Do It!

Well, I finally did it!

This is Daniel from AB&R Plumbing here, and I finally installed a new Noritz #0841 tankless water heater in my Mission Viejo home. I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner!

My wife has been after me for a long time to install a new tankless water heater and we are all glad I finally did. Endless hot water from these Noritz tankless water heaters is really great. Most homes in Mission Viejo, and the surrounding cities like Lake Forest, Laguna Hills and Laguna Beach, are just perfect for new installations. My Mission Viejo tankless water heater installation, however, did present a couple of unique challenges.

Our old 50 gallon gas water heater was installed in the downstairs laundry room, and the gas line was only ½”. The original flue was galvanized and connected to the FAU vent. This does cause two issues because most tankless units require a minimum of a ¾” gas line and you need to install a stainless steel vent. Having to comply with these requirements was part of my original reluctance to complete the renovation. It wasn’t until my wife left for a trip out of town with the girls from
www.calvarymissionviejo.com that I decided to finally take the plunge and surprise her with a laundry room make over.

Believe it or not, I hired my own crew to help in the remodel! The boys from AB&R Plumbing completed all aspects of this make over. Everything from demo, tile removal, drywall repair and of course all of the plumbing repairs needed to convert this outdated Mission Viejo laundry room to something more conducive to today’s demands. Even though I decided to remodel the whole laundry room, my main focus was the tankless water heater. We ended up removing the old 50 gallon water heater and rerouting all of the required plumbing for the new tankless water heater outside …. That’s right….. outside,
www.noritz.com offers several outdoor models.

Once I was able to move all the plumbing and the water heater outside, this freed up a lot more space in the laundry room. We were able to install more shelves and a garment steamer. (What’s a garment steamer???? I don’t know … but my wife says she needed it and it “irons stuff”. Who knew!!!!)

Even though I decided to install the new Noritz #0841 tankless water heater outside, I could have still installed it inside as well. With some minor modifications, I could have easily utilized the original plumbing system that was installed in my Mission Viejo home. But now that we moved the new tankless water heater outside, I now have room for a garment steamer!!!!!

Life is good.