Although Greenville, South Carolina, rarely deals with temperatures that dip below freezing, residents and plumbers are impacted in a very real way when it does occur.
“Everybody laughs, but when we get a few flakes of snow everybody panics,” says Scott Smith, master plumber and owner of All Clear Plumbing. “In our area it’s very hilly, and we’re in the South so we don’t get a lot of freezing weather.”
Local infrastructure isn’t built to take on the colder weather. The whole community shuts down during ice events, and chilly temperatures bring along with them the possibility of power outages, frozen pipes and burst waterlines.
Arriving quickly to shut off the water and save customers’ belongings is crucial in these situations, but it was a different sort of late-night call that really grabbed Smith’s attention in the midst of a rare stretch of frigid cold. It was an elderly couple with a backed up sewer line. The gentleman was on oxygen and his wife, who was receiving cancer treatment at the time, needed access to a functioning bathroom.
As transplants new to the area, they had no existing relationship with a plumber who could step up and help them out, so they were relying on nothing more than the phone book. After placing a few calls, reality set in as the couple learned it would likely be days before anyone else would be able to take the job due to the sheer number of emergencies popping up across the area.
“Everybody was busy fixing waterlines, and other plumbers looked at it as, ‘They only have a stopped-up sewer and it can wait,’ but sometimes you have to look past just what it is and you need to look at who it is that’s having a problem,” Smith says. “What we take as an inconvenience was an emergency on their part.”
When he arrived at the retirement community, a neighbor next door had a similar issue, too, so Smith quickly determined that it was a common line. After some investigation, he found a clean-out and began feeding cable from his Duracable drain cleaning machine into the line, eventually clearing what turned out to be a large root blockage.
“When we do get snow on the ground, it’s hard to find clean-outs at night, so having a good piece of equipment that you can roll around to the job is nice,” he says. “I’ve always sworn by their machines.”
The job took about an hour and a half in temperatures hovering in the 20s, and by the time Smith arrived home it was past 1 a.m. It was a very long day, he says, but helping somebody in need takes some of the edge off those late hours. The after-hours visit prevented the couple from having to temporarily move out of their home, which would have been more than just a minor inconvenience, considering their health complications.
This type of business philosophy — treating people as they should be treated and putting people that have a genuine need ahead of the almighty dollar — is one of the reasons for the young company’s word-of-mouth success in recent years, Smith notes. “You do the right things for the right reasons, and it always seems to work out.”
