Faucet Calls, and Where They Go

Routing on a ZIP code

We route to independent contractors who cover a given ZIP code. Coverage is not uniform — a state we cover well in one metro may have gaps elsewhere in it. If nobody covers yours we will say so on the call rather than take your details and leave you waiting.

No town pages, and the reason

A town page earns its place when there is a figure behind it that is true, published, and different in every town. For faucets there is nothing of the sort, and the shortfall is not close.

• Nothing counts faucets. No survey asks how many a household has, what kind they are or how old they are. There is no register and no estimate.
• Nothing counts faucet faults. A dripping tap is fixed privately or lived with. It is not reported to anybody and nobody aggregates it.
• Housing age is the obvious proxy and we will not use it. An older town has older fixtures on average, and that says nothing about whether any particular faucet needs a cartridge. Publishing thousands of pages on a correlation we cannot demonstrate is exactly the kind of content this whole operation is built to avoid.

So the pages would have carried the name of a town and nothing else. Fifteen pages that are all substance beat four thousand that are not, and we would rather publish the reasoning than the pages.

The part that is national

The mechanisms, which are the same in every state. The faults, which are the same everywhere. And the federal rule and the date it changed, which applies identically across the country — one of the few genuinely national facts in household plumbing.

• The 2014 line
• Which valve