What does a plumber do?
You find the leak, which is almost never where the damp is, and you work out what to turn off before you touch anything.
Also called: plumbing and heating engineer, gas engineer, pipefitter.
A day looks like
- 1You find the stop tap before you find the problem, because the first thing a leak needs is for it to stop.
- 2You trace water backwards — it runs along joists and comes out in a room nowhere near the pipe.
- 3You crawl into a loft or under a floor, in the dark, and work with one arm.
- 4You tell somebody the boiler they were told needed replacing needs a twelve-pound part.
Hardest part
Water travels. The stain on the ceiling tells you almost nothing about where the pipe failed, so the job is diagnosis before it is anything else — and the customer wants you to start cutting immediately.
Best part
Finding, in ten minutes, the thing two other people could not find in a day.
How you actually become a plumber
- At schoolAn apprenticeship — plumbing is learned on jobs, not in a classroom.
- TrainingLevel 2 and 3 plumbing, then gas registration separately if you want to touch gas at all.
- How longThree to four years to qualify; gas and heat pump tickets after that.
- Your first jobApprentice plumber — carrying, clipping pipe and watching someone diagnose.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is finding the leak the hard part?
- Because water travels along joists, pipes and cavities before it appears. The visible damp is where gravity stopped, often metres from the failure, so plumbers diagnose by testing one thing at a time rather than by cutting into the stain.
- Can any plumber work on a gas boiler?
- No. Gas work requires separate registration, and working on gas without it is a criminal offence in most countries. Plenty of plumbers deliberately never take it on.
- Is plumbing a good trade to get into?
- It is one of the most consistently in-demand trades there is, it cannot be done remotely, and the retrofit and heat pump transition is adding work rather than removing it.
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