Social media for plumbers whose best customers left the house months ago

The house you are posting about has been closed since April

The most useful plumbing content in this county describes a failure with nobody in the room to notice it.

Traps dry out in an unoccupied house and sewer gas comes back up through them. A washing machine hose left under pressure for six months does not fail politely. An ejector pit with nothing running through it stops being a pump and starts being a smell.

None of that is a search. Nobody types it, because a homeowner in Ohio has no reason to imagine it. Which is exactly why it belongs on social rather than on a page waiting for demand that never forms.

Write it as a walkthrough of one real failure at a time. What the plumber found, what it cost in drywall rather than in pipe, and the ten minute step in March that would have avoided it.

Publish it against the calendar the houses actually run on. These failures are set up in the week a house is closed and found in the week it is opened, so the preventive version has to be out before the northbound trip and the walkthrough version before the southbound one. A closing checklist posted in June reaches a Palm Beach County owner who left in April and cannot use it.

An owner who never saw the job is judging your photographs

When the customer was in another state during the work, the only evidence they will ever have is what you sent them.

An owner describing a repair they did not witness is describing your reporting, not your soldering. Clear before and after pictures, a plain note on what was replaced and why, and one honest line about anything left unresolved is the entire experience from their side.

So build the photo habit for the customer first and treat the content as a byproduct. Crews shooting for the invoice end up with better footage than crews shooting for a feed, because the pictures have to explain something to somebody who was not there.

Then show publicly what a good report looks like. An owner in Connecticut choosing between two companies in Palm Beach County cannot compare workmanship and can easily compare documentation, and hardly anybody in the trade puts theirs on display.

Name the parts in plain words while you are at it. A remote owner reading a line item they do not understand has one way to check it, which is to ask somebody they know down here, and people in this county have opinions about plumbers.

The card people ask about in this county is issued by the county

Licensing here runs through Palm Beach County as well as the state, and residents know the difference.

Plumbers working across these municipalities generally hold a Palm Beach County Certificate of Competency, issued through the Construction Industry Licensing Board of Palm Beach County. Long time residents know the phrase and use it.

The question turns up in comments constantly, because the county fills every winter with people who have hired contractors in three other states and arrived suspicious. Some of what reads as rudeness in a thread here is just somebody checking.

So put the credential where it can be read without anyone asking. In the profile, in a pinned post, in the frame where the truck is visible. Answer it before it is raised and the thread stays about the work.

Leave everybody else's licensing status alone. A comment implying a competitor is not properly licensed outlives the thread it was written in, and it is not your claim to make in public.

Your customers drink surface water out of a wetland and they ask about it

The city's supply is unusual for Florida, and the questions land on whoever happens to be standing in the kitchen.

West Palm Beach draws surface water through Grassy Waters Preserve and the M-Canal into Clear Lake, rather than pumping a well field the way most utilities around it do. Residents pick up on it, and taste and smell in a surface system move with the season.

The person they ask is often a plumber, because you are the one under the sink. Answer with equipment rather than with an opinion about the supply. What a carbon filter changes and what it does not, what a softener is actually for, why a whole house system and a fixture filter solve different problems.

Say which utility you mean. Palm Beach County Water Utilities Department serves a large part of the county, Lake Worth Beach and other municipalities run their own systems, and a confident statement about the water in Wellington is not a statement about the water in Old Northwood. Send people to their own provider's published reports for anything specific.

It is a slow subject and it suits this audience. An owner reading from somewhere colder is not buying a repair today, and a plain explanation of a filter is the kind of thing they save and come back to when they are down here again.

The rest of running a plumbing account, from what a crew should film to how to handle a review that stings, works the same here as anywhere else, so we keep it on our plumbing social media page instead of repeating it under a Palm Beach County heading.