If you want a plumber in Barnsley for something that is not a boiler, Joe does that too. Showers, leaks, taps, cylinders, radiator valves, outside taps, and the small jobs a lot of firms will not put in the diary because there is no money in them.
The gas registration matters more on a plumbing job than people expect. His number is 633652 and it takes seconds to check us on the Gas Safe Register. It means the person lying under your sink is also the one who is allowed to touch the boiler when the leak turns out to be coming from it, instead of a second visit from somebody else next week.
Why the leak is rarely where the stain is
A brown ring on a ceiling is the end of the story, not the beginning. Water runs along a joist, follows a pipe, sits on the back of a plasterboard sheet and comes through at the lowest point it can find, which can be a room away from where it started.
So the first job on a leak is finding it rather than fixing it, and the order it gets checked in matters. Above a kitchen ceiling the usual suspects are the bath or shower waste, the seal round the bath, the toilet pan connector and a joint on a hot or cold feed, roughly in that order of likelihood. A stain that only appears after somebody showers is telling you something quite different from one that is there every morning, so it is worth noticing which yours is before you ring.
Not every leak needs the floor up. Plenty are a failed silicone seal or a waste nut that has worked loose, and those are half an hour rather than half a day. Joe will say which one he thinks it is and what finding out involves, instead of lifting boards first and explaining afterwards.
Which shower will actually work in your house?
This is the question worth asking before you buy anything, because the shower aisle does not know what is in your loft and the box does not tell you.
If you have a combi boiler, hot water arrives at mains pressure and a mixer shower usually works well straight off it. What you cannot do is fit a pump. There is nothing to pump, and trying to draw off the mains that way is not allowed. If the shower is weak on a combi, the problem is the incoming water supply rather than the shower.
If you have a cylinder with tanks in the loft, the pressure at the shower comes from how high the tank sits above it. That is why the shower in the back bedroom of an old house can be feeble while everything downstairs is fine. Here a pump genuinely helps, or an electric shower sidesteps the problem entirely by taking cold water and heating it itself.
If you have an unvented cylinder, you already have mains pressure hot water and you want a good thermostatic mixer, not a pump.
Joe will tell you which of those you have got and what it will support, and he would rather do that on the phone for nothing than fit a shower that was never going to work.
Small jobs, and why they are hard to get done
Nobody advertises this, so it is worth saying plainly. A lot of plumbing firms will not come out for a dripping tap or a running toilet, because the travelling costs more than the job earns. That is why people end up living with a leak for eight months and why a small problem becomes a stained ceiling.
Joe does take them on. He will also tell you when a job is not worth paying anyone to do, and where a washer and ten minutes of your own time will fix it. Turning down work he could have charged for is not generosity, it is the reason the phone keeps ringing.
Where the job goes the other way and turns into a room rather than a repair, that is a different conversation. Full bathrooms, strip out to tiling to fit and finish, are set out on the bathroom renovations page with photographs of the work at each stage.
