Who we are
We stayed small
on purpose.
Five people, two vans, and the same person who quotes your job is the person who shows up to do it. That is not a size we are working toward. It is the size we chose, back in 2009, and it is the whole reason the phone still gets answered by someone who knows what they are talking about.
How Stillwater started
One plumber who got tired of the script.
Del Prentice spent six years driving a truck for one of the big franchise outfits, the kind with a script taped inside the glovebox. The script had a line for every job: the water heater was always “living on borrowed time,” the cheapest cartridge was always the one that had failed. Del got good at the script. He hated it more every year.
In 2009 he quit, put his own name on a used van, and started answering his own phone. There was no crew for the first two years — just Del, a set of tools he had bought himself, and the the Fairbank Valley. What kept the lights on was not marketing. It was the second call, from the same house, six months later, because the first job had been done right and the price had matched what he said on the doorstep.
Stillwater is five people now, still two vans, still no subcontractors and still no script. Del drives one of the vans most weeks — his knees have opinions about crawl spaces these days, but he is not ready to give up the part of the job where you find out what is actually wrong with a house. Everyone he has hired came recommended by someone already on the crew, which is a slower way to grow a company and, so far, the only way he trusts.
How a job goes
Five steps. No stage
where you are guessing.
The same plumber from the first call to the last vacuum. Nothing is handed off, and nothing is started before you have said yes to a number.
Step 01: You call
A plumber picks up. We ask what you are seeing, and if water is moving we tell you how to stop it before we talk about anything else.
Step 02: We diagnose
On site, with a camera or a meter where it helps. You watch what we watch. Guessing is what makes plumbing expensive.
Step 03: You approve
A written price with the options laid out side by side. Nothing starts until you say the word, and the number does not move afterwards.
Step 04: We fix it
Floors protected, walls contained, and the work done to code with a permit where one is required.
Step 05: You get your house back
Cleaned up, patched where we opened, old parts hauled away, and a written record of what was done.
Where we draw the line
Two vans. A short list of
things we will not do.
What is in the van
- A camera scope and monitor, not just a hand-fed cable
- A moisture meter, so “it feels damp” becomes a number
- Two full sets of angle stops and wax rings — the ten-dollar parts that cause the callbacks
- Floor runners and boot covers, in both vans, every day, whether we think you will notice or not
- A shop-vac wired to the saw, not left back at the shop
What we will not do
- Quote a repipe or a sewer repair over the phone — nobody has seen your walls from a phone
- Leave an open wall overnight without capping and pressure-testing it first
- Sell you a tankless system because the ticket is bigger than the tank you actually need
- Skip a permit to save you a week, even if you ask us to
- Send someone to your house who is not one of the five people you already know
We have turned down work over this. A landlord who wanted a fixture reinstalled without fixing the rot behind it. A flipper who wanted the cheapest legal option and a signature by Friday. If the fastest way through a job means doing it wrong, we are the wrong company to call, and we will tell you that up front instead of taking your money first.
The crew and the vans
The people who will actually
be in your house.
After-hours emergency line
Water does not wait
for business hours.
Answered by a plumber, not a call center, seven days a week. We will tell you how to shut it off before we even get in the van — and if we cannot reach you tonight, we will say so on the call rather than leave you waiting.
Not an emergency?
Good. Then let’s just get it on the calendar.
Tell us what is going on and where. A plumber calls you back — not a booking bot, not a call center reading from the same glovebox script Del quit over.
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