Plumber in Gerroa

Gerroa is barely half occupied. Of 521 private dwellings recorded at the last Census, only 237 had anyone in them on the night — about 49% occupancy, the highest proportion of empty houses anywhere we work. That is the defining fact about plumbing here. A house that sits idle for six weeks develops different problems from one lived in daily: water stagnating in dead legs, hot water systems cycling for nobody, a slow leak running unnoticed for a month, and the classic — a blockage nobody discovers until the family arrives on Boxing Day. Most of our Gerroa work is either a pre-season check or an emergency in the first 48 hours of a holiday.

The town is as salt-exposed as anywhere on this coast. Gerroa sits at the northern end of Seven Mile Beach with the Crooked River behind it, averages over 1,250 mm of rain a year, and has recorded westerly gusts to 140 km/h. Copper pipework, hot water unit casings, tap spindles, outdoor showers, roof flashings and gutter fixings all corrode faster here. On a house that is only occupied part of the year, that corrosion runs for months without anyone noticing, which is exactly how a slow leak becomes a ceiling.

Gerroa is the end of Sydney Water's map. Its area of operations runs from the Hawkesbury River in the north to Gerroa in the south, which makes this the last town on the Sydney Water network — Berry, ten minutes down the road, is Shoalhaven Water. Local wastewater goes to the Gerringong Gerroa Water Reclamation Plant, where treated effluent is used for agricultural irrigation or a sand dune system, and discharges to Crooked River when the dune system is full.

Like Gerringong, Gerroa was unsewered until the sewerage scheme was built in 2001–02, and the treatment plant itself was built here near Crooked River. Any Gerroa house predating that was originally on septic. We regularly find decommissioned tanks and abandoned absorption trenches when locating drainage on older blocks, which is worth knowing before you dig a pool or an extension footing.

Half of Gerroa's households own their home outright and the median age is 56 — this is an older, settled, largely mortgage-free town, with a big seasonal influx on top. We work a lot with owners who are not on site, coordinating access with property managers, neighbours and cleaners, and sending photos rather than expecting someone to drive down from Sydney to look at a tap.