Social media for a North Texas plumbing company whose best work happens under a slab

Nobody notices a slab leak until one spot on the floor is warm

The most expensive job you sell announces itself quietly, and most homeowners here misread it for months because nobody ever told them what to listen for.

A patch of tile warm in one place. Running water with every fixture off. A water bill that jumped for no reason anybody can name. Each of those is a short post on its own.

Say what to do next in plain steps. Where the shutoff usually is, how to read the meter dial, what to write down before calling anybody.

There is nothing to point a camera at, which is exactly why it has to be taught. Film the meter dial turning with the house shut down, the listening gear on the floor, the chalk mark where the sound was loudest. That sequence is the closest thing to a picture of the problem that exists.

Repeat it every year. People keep arriving in Plano, Frisco and McKinney from places where the ground does not move, and nobody has told them what a slab does over a wet spring and a dry August.

The person who learns it from you calls you, and calls before the flooring is ruined rather than after, which is a better job for both of you.

Under the house you are filming with a headlamp and one free hand

Access to a slab leak here is either a hole cut through a floor a family walks on or a tunnel driven in from outside, and both decide the footage for you.

When the route is through the floor, the furniture has been moved, plastic is up and the family is standing in the next room watching their house get opened. Frame downward. The shot is the hole, the pipe in it and the failed section on a drop cloth, not a pan across somebody's living room.

Tunnels are the better footage and much the stranger sight. A crew going in through a hole in a flower bed and working their way under the house is something almost no homeowner has ever seen, and it explains a large estimate faster than a paragraph can.

Down there the conditions do the framing for you. A headlamp is the light, dust is in the air, the lens fogs in an August afternoon and a technician on his back has one hand free. Close and short is the only thing that works, and the sound of the job carries the clip better than narration recorded in a tunnel ever will.

Do the talking above ground. A technician standing at the entry, explaining what is under the house and why the crew went in that way rather than through the kitchen, is the version a homeowner can follow.

Show the ground going back. Backfill, compaction and the flower bed replanted is what a customer worries about most, and it is the easiest thing in this trade to photograph well.

A post-tension slab is not a floor you open on camera

Newer houses across the northern suburbs sit on tensioned slabs and the older stock closer in does not, so one video of a saw cutting concrete teaches the wrong lesson to everybody on a pier and beam house.

A homeowner in Prosper or Frisco watching you cut a hallway floor will ask whether you can do the same at their house. The honest answer depends on what is inside the slab, because a tensioned slab has cable in it that has to be located before anything cuts.

So say which kind of house you are standing in whenever you show a cut. It costs one sentence and it heads off a run of calls from people expecting a job you would not do that way.

Separate the two housing stocks on purpose. A pier and beam house in Oak Cliff or Lakewood has a crawlspace and an entirely different set of problems, and footage from it looks nothing like a tunnel job in Allen.

That difference is also the plainest answer to why tunneling exists at all. Getting under the slab from outside leaves the floor alone, and a viewer who has just watched a jackhammer come through a hallway understands the appeal immediately.

Hail season fills this feed with people selling urgency

Storm restoration has trained North Texas homeowners to be wary of anybody who turns up sounding urgent, and your plumbing post lands in the same feed as all of it.

After a hail event the local feeds fill with restoration ads, door knock video and free inspection offers, and a fair number of the trucks behind them are from out of state. Homeowners here are defensive during those weeks for good reason.

So the tools that work elsewhere work against you here. Countdown language, a free inspection offer, an urgent tone about something buried in the ground: all of it reads as the same wave the neighbors are already dodging.

Post the ordinary instead. A dated, unhurried record of tunnels, meter checks and repaired floors across Richardson, Garland, Oak Cliff and Fort Worth says more about whether you were here last year than any claim about it would.

Keep insurance out of your mouth. Describe what failed and what a repair involves, and leave coverage, adjusters and claims to the carrier, because a confident sentence about somebody's policy is the one that comes back.

The rest of it, who films, what goes out and what is worth putting money behind, does not change between here and anywhere else, and it is written up on our plumbing social media page at /industries/plumbing/social-media.