New Orleans, LA

Running a New Orleans plumbing feed on the days the water goes off

Nobody wakes up interested in plumbing. They wake up interested in whether the water is safe, why the pressure dropped, and what the smell under the house is. In New Orleans those questions arrive for everybody at once, several times a year, and they arrive faster than anything can be scheduled. Speed is the unusual part of running a plumbing account here, and it settles most of what follows: who is allowed to publish on an hour's notice, which explainers have to stay undated because they get re-shared for years, and what a household here is genuinely confused about. Four subjects belong to Orleans Parish and its neighbors and to almost nowhere else.

A pressure drop puts the whole city in the same conversation for two days

Boil advisories and low pressure events are the moments when every household in a parish wants a plumbing answer at the same time, and almost none of them are shopping.

Attention like that cannot be bought and should not be sold into. A promotion posted the morning of an advisory reads exactly as badly as it sounds.

Post the useful things instead. What an advisory means for the ice maker and the coffee machine, whether the water heater needs anything, what to do with an under-sink filter, and how to flush the lines at a house once it lifts.

Stay inside the house. Which blocks an advisory covers shifts during the day and is nobody's to draw from a truck, while what a family in Mid-City or Gentilly actually needs is what to do at their own sink for the next two days.

The restart is its own post and hardly anybody makes it. Pressure comes back before the notice lifts, and the questions that follow, cloudy water, a screen full of grit at the aerator, a water heater that sat idle, arrive in a rush.

The advisory will not wait for your Friday edit, so somebody in a truck needs the password

The single most valuable post this account will publish all year is one nobody can schedule, which changes who is allowed to hit send.

Most small shops route everything through one person who edits on a slow afternoon. The arrangement holds for an explainer about a water heater and falls apart when the pressure drops across Orleans Parish on a Tuesday morning.

Decide in advance who can publish without approval, and keep the list to two people. A phone video shot leaning against a truck and posted within the hour beats a polished one that goes out after the advisory lifts.

Write the standing draft now, while nothing is happening. A short script covering what an advisory means and what to check at the house, ready to be filmed the same morning with the date said out loud.

Keep that standing version undated in every other respect. An explainer that names one particular advisory gets re-shared during the next one and read as current, and a neighbor telling a block the water is unsafe on the strength of an old post of yours is a mess with your name on it.

Your drain calendar runs on crawfish, fryers and the holiday roux

Kitchen drains fail here on a schedule anybody who cooks can recognize, which makes the year unusually easy to plan around.

A boil sends shells, seasoning and gallons of hot fat toward a line that was already narrowing. The fryers around the holidays do the same thing in a different month.

Film the honest version. What happens downstream when grease cools in an old cast iron line, why hot water and dish soap move the problem rather than solve it, and what a plumber actually does to clear it.

Tone decides whether it travels. Nobody in this city wants to be told not to boil crawfish. They want to know where the fat should go instead, and which of the things their uncle swears by does anything at all.

Show where it ends up. A jetting job on a line packed with hardened grease explains the whole subject in one shot, and it is the clip somebody sends to whoever hosted last weekend.

Everyone has seen the meter lid and almost nobody has lifted one

The shutoff video is a plumbing staple everywhere, and here it has an unmistakably local object at the center of it.

In much of the city the shutoff a homeowner can reach sits under the meter lid at the sidewalk, the one people photograph and hang on a wall. Show somebody lifting one and finding the valve.

Then show what changes by house type. A raised house in Bywater with the piping exposed underneath is not a slab in Metairie, and a Creole cottage sitting close to the banquette is not a Lakeview ranch.

Tell people what to have on hand, which is usually a meter key and knowing which way to turn, and say plainly when to stop rather than force an old valve.

Everything else about running the account, how often to post, who should be holding the phone, what to do when a thread turns bad, reads the same in Ohio as it does in Jefferson Parish, and we have set that half out once at /industries/plumbing/social-media.

Questions we actually get

What is actually worth filming under a raised house?: More than you would expect, because most owners have never been under theirs. The supply and drain runs are visible in a way they never are over a slab, so you can put a light on a real problem and have a stranger follow it. Keep it short, keep the light steady, and say what somebody could see for themselves from the edge without crawling anywhere they should not.
What should we post during a hurricane or an evacuation?: Very little, and nothing that sells. If you have something genuinely useful about shutting off water at a property or what to check on return, say it once and plainly. Otherwise pause the scheduled queue so a promotion does not publish itself into a bad week. Come back with practical help once people are home, since the restart questions arrive in a rush and almost nobody answers them well.
We work Orleans and Jefferson but not the Northshore. Does that belong in the feed?: Say it plainly and often. A caller from Slidell or Mandeville is a lake crossing you either make or do not, and finding that out twenty minutes into a call wastes their morning and your dispatcher's. Naming the parishes you cover also reads as local, since greater New Orleans is not a phrase anybody who lives here actually uses.
Can we reuse a plumbing content template written for another state?: For the trade material, mostly. For anything touching contracts, warranties, what you say about who owns a shared line or what happens between neighbors, Louisiana runs on a civil law system rather than the common law used everywhere else, so guidance written elsewhere can be wrong rather than merely imprecise. Have your own attorney read the parts you plan to repeat.
A post about grease got angry replies about telling people how to cook.: Then it landed as a warning instead of an answer. The fat and the shells are a plumbing fact and the boil is not up for debate, so lead with where the grease should go, what a strainer catches, and what your crew pulls out of a line the week afterward. Written as a favor rather than a scolding, the same audience shares it.

What is different here

License numbers belong in advertising, as with the other trades. The more useful local variable is that water source, water chemistry and sewer versus septic service differ between neighboring municipalities, which changes which problems a plumber is actually called about and therefore what the page should be about.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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