Advice worth more than the service call.
Plumbers hand out advice all day, and most of it evaporates the moment the van pulls away. This page is where we write it down. Every guide here starts as a question a real Portland homeowner asked us on a real job, then gets answered the way a journeyman would explain it across your kitchen counter: specific, honest about ranges, and free of scare tactics.
New guides land here as the questions come in, so the library below keeps growing. If your situation will not wait for an article, the phone is faster: every answer on this page began as a conversation anyway.
Real questions, answered properly.
Each guide is the long-form version of an answer we give on Portland driveways every week, with the numbers and the reasoning left in.
Cost Guide
Water heater replacement cost in Portland: tank vs tankless
What a water heater replacement costs in Portland: tank vs tankless price ranges, what drives the difference, Energy Trust rebates, and repair-vs-replace math.
Read the guide
Cost Guide
How much does it cost to repipe a house in Portland?
Portland repipe costs explained by a repipe plumber: what drives the price, PEX vs copper, whole-house vs partial, permits, and how to compare bids fairly.
Read the guide
Homeowner Diagnostics
Low water pressure: what your house is trying to tell you
A Portland plumber's diagnostic guide to low water pressure: failed PRVs, corroded galvanized pipe, main line leaks, and fixture-level fixes, in checking order.
Read the guideWhat this blog is, and what it is not.
Most plumbing blogs exist to catch search traffic, and you can tell. Eight paragraphs of filler, a scary what-if, and a call button sitting where the answer should have been. I wanted ours to be the opposite: journeyman answers with the fluff sanded off. If a repair is safe to handle yourself, the article says so. If a price depends on your house, you get the honest range and the exact reasons it moves, because that is how I would want it explained to me.
That is the entire editorial policy. Read one of these and you will understand your own system a little better, spot the padding in a weak bid, and know which questions to ask any plumber you hire, including us. Informed customers ask sharper questions, and sharper questions keep every trade honest.
Jeremy Williams · Owner, Panda Plumbing
Have a topic you want covered?
Send your question through the contact page and it goes on the writing list. Most of these guides started life as somebody’s service call.