Pick one and we will keep it short. Three taps and you are done.
We run calls seven days a week, and we answer the phone around the clock.
Last step. We will call you back to confirm the window.
An emergency deserves a person, not a web form sitting in an inbox. Call the shop and we pick up.
No heat, no water, an active leak, or a backed up main. These move to the front of the line, day or night, weekend or holiday.
Your request is in and somebody will call you back to confirm a window. Here is what we have:
49% of the roughly 6,585 homes in the City of Falls Church were built before 1970, and the 1960s is the most common decade. Only two of the 26 areas we cover have older housing.
Small city, old housing. 15% of the homes here went up in the 1940s and another 6% before 1940, so more than a fifth of this place predates 1950. Most of what we get called for inside the city line is buried, behind plaster, or both.
First question on the phone is whether you are actually in the City. Inside the line, Falls Church is your permit office and your sewer utility both. Cross it and you are on Fairfax County permits and county sewer, which a Falls Church address does constantly. We are thirty-five minutes out in Woodbridge and work both sides of it.
Local governments almost never say what anything costs. This one does. On its own sewer page the City writes that "Sewer lateral repairs are often the most expensive emergency repair that a homeowner will face, typically costing more than $10,000." That is the City of Falls Church describing its residents' pipes, not a contractor describing his rates. Cabling the same line every spring is a payment plan, not maintenance. We run sewer replacement both ways, camera first.
Fairfax Water took the water system over in January 2014. Sewer the City kept: about 47 miles of pipe, over 1,000 manholes, up to 2 million gallons a day, wastewater split between the Arlington County plant and the Alexandria plant. Not Noman M. Cole, which takes City of Fairfax flow. Your lateral is yours either way.
Galvanized steel was standard through the 1940s and 1950s and still common into the early 1960s, which covers most of this city. It corrodes inward. Zinc goes, steel rusts, and the bore narrows every year until a pipe stamped three-quarter inch behaves like a straw. Showerheads get swapped for nothing, because the restriction was never in the valve. Era is not material, mind, and a 1948 house here may have been repiped in 1996. Where the original steel is still in the walls we price a repipe.
16% of the city went up in the 1960s, its biggest decade, and cast iron drained all of it. The inside roughens into tubercles that catch hair and grease, then thins until a hub joint weeps. One slow sink is a trap. A slow tub plus a toilet wanting two flushes is the stack, and that wants a camera.
Add the 12% built in the 1970s to the 49% built before 1970 and most of this city sits in or beside the Orangeburg window. Tar-soaked wood pulp, used for laterals until about 1972. It goes oval under load rather than cracking, so the line backs up on a rhythm and then runs clean for months after a cabling. Pre-1972 house, original lateral, mature trees? Camera it.
Fairfax Water bills you, but this is not what most Fairfax Water customers drink. Falls Church sits in the Washington Aqueduct service area: Potomac water treated at Dalecarlia and McMillan by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with its own lab sheet headed "Distribution Site Representing Washington Aqueduct Service Area".
The 2026 monthly totals here came back 179, 111, 128, 129, 138 and 117 mg/L, calcium hardness 77 to 128. Moderately hard to hard, swinging more than an average suggests. Our opinion: a softener is a comfort decision at that level, and flushing the water heater yearly does most of the same work.
Orthophosphate is present in the finished water here at 2.19 to 2.58 mg/L, roughly double what the same utility reports at its other two plants. It builds a protective film inside pipe, and half this city predates 1970, so that film has been earning its keep.
If polybutylene is why you are reading, take this number with you. 12% of Falls Church homes were built in the 1980s and 1990s, and of the 26 areas we cover only Vienna, at 9%, has less. Polybutylene went in from 1978 until about 1995. It does turn up in later work, so give the water heater ten minutes.
Virginia code 13VAC5-63-80 Section 108.1 requires a permit before work on the water supply, sanitary drainage or vent systems. Section 108.2 exempts replacing a fixture where none of those are altered, and whether a water heater is a fixture or an appliance is the question nobody has answered in writing. Section 108.1 does allow an emergency replacement to be permitted retroactively by the end of the first working day after the work starts.
Inspections run on a strict clock. A request after 4:30 p.m. counts as the following day's, and nothing is scheduled sooner than the next business day. If nobody qualified is on site or the work is not ready, that visit costs $55.00.
This is also the only one of the three independent cities whose plumbing permit form demands the DPOR Master Plumber qualified individual, licence prefix 2710-, on the face of it. A company without one cannot file. Ours goes on with Class A contractor licence #2705131990.
A 1948 house here was never designed around moving air. What replaced the original heat got threaded through closets and joist bays by somebody solving a problem rather than designing a system, and that is where the bedroom that will not hold temperature comes from. The fix is almost never a bigger condenser. Houses this age still run radiators and baseboard, so we do boilers. On the 28% built since 2000 the question flips: young equipment underperforms because of how it was set up, which takes readings to prove rather than a new heat pump.
One call covers plumbing and HVAC. Talk to somebody who has been doing this for decades.
