Plumber in Gerringong

Gerringong was not sewered until 2001. The $50 million Gerringong Gerroa Sewerage Scheme broke ground in August 2001 and laid around 50 kilometres of pipe, and Kiama Council's septic pump-out service stopped once it was running. Practically, that means any Gerringong house built before roughly 2002 was originally plumbed to an on-site septic system. We still find decommissioned tanks, old absorption trenches and abandoned drainage lines in Gerringong backyards, usually when someone is landscaping, putting in a pool or trying to work out where a soggy patch of lawn is coming from.

The Bridges Road stormwater problem is real and documented. In the August 2020 storm, 86.8 mm fell on ground already soaked by 220 mm over the previous fortnight. A drainage pit and catchment hollow on the far side of Bridges Road gave way, and water ran through the Chittick Lodge grounds into properties on Henry Lee Drive and Fern Street — one home took about 700 mm through it. Kiama Council's Gerringong–Jamberoo Flood Study looked specifically at mitigation options for that area. If you are on that side of town, sub-floor drainage, sump pumps and overland-flow management are worth doing before the next east coast low, not after.

Gerringong is properly coastal, and salt gets into everything. Copper pipework, hot water unit casings, outdoor taps, roof flashings and gutter fixings all degrade faster here than they do eleven kilometres inland at Jamberoo. Annual maintenance genuinely pays for itself on Gerringong properties, particularly anything on the Werri Beach side.

Around one in five Gerringong dwellings sat empty on Census night — 362 of 1,851. That is a lot of houses standing idle for weeks at a time. Intermittently occupied homes bring their own faults: water sitting in pipes, hot water systems cycling for nobody, small leaks that run undetected for a fortnight, and blockages nobody notices until the next visit. We do pre-arrival checks and between-guest turnarounds for Gerringong holiday homes and short-term rentals.

The town has a heritage village core dating to the 1850s alongside a lot of 1970s-onward suburban stock, so the plumbing you find behind a Gerringong wall varies enormously street to street. We CCTV before quoting anything structural rather than guessing from the age of the front door.