If you don’t have a person on your staff who already knows, and if the plumber isn’t on call, I hope you are paying the plumber for calling him and asking him to explain, while knowing in advance that your plans won’t include hiring him.
Sorry, the thing you do is hire the plumber and ask “hey, can you help me fix an issue with my sink/toilet/whatever” (de-facto Lightcone has full-time staff with this skillset, so this exact thing hasn’t come up in a long while, but it’s how we got started).
Then, when they show up, you explain what you’ve observed the problem to be and ask “what is the first thing you would do yourself to figure out what’s up?”. Then they would either tell you, or start doing the thing. Then you follow them and watch with them, or try it yourself (don’t be dumb and open up random valves, ask him to watch you and stop you before you do anything dumb).
In my experience most contractors I have called love to talk about their work and are happy to get paid to explain what they do. Also, the vast majority of problems really are very easy to understand. The usual way this kind of stuff works tends to be:
Me: “Hey, so we have this toilet seat which has some water coming up below the toilet when you flush.” Them: “Oh, yeah, that’s a super common problem. These things have a seal below that often comes loose.” Me: “How would you fix it?” Them: “Oh, yeah, I would just open up these bolts, then lift up the toilet, then look at the seal. There are like 3 kinds of seals different toilets use. One always tends to cause problems.” Me: “Mind if I do it?” Them: “No, not at all. Here let me help you hold the seat” Me: “Oh, cool, so this is the part below the toilet. I can see some standing water here around this notch, is that where the seal is?” Them: “No, that’s just the lowest point of the toiler, the seal is actually over here”. Me: “Ah, I see. This thing?” Them: “Yes” Me: “How would you tell it’s broken? Is it broken?” Them: “Let me take a look” leans over “Hmm, yeah, I am not sure, but it does look a bit wrong. See here? This corner should usually be flush, but it’s elevated. My guess is someone installed it wrong.” Me: “Oh, interesting. Does this kind of installation error happen frequently?” Them: “I’ve seen it a few times, but usually people mess up in different ways” Me: “Great, so we replace it?” Them: “Yeah” Me: “Is it this part?” shows Home depot website with product page open Them: “Nope, that’s the wrong part for this toilet, you want this one” points at a related listing Me: “Do you have one with you?” Them: “Yeah, I happen to have that part with me, let me grab it”
Then you install the part, test it, it works. Everyone is happy, and if you had to you could do the same kind of task next time. If you’ve done this 4-5 times, you honestly will be able to solve most common plumbing problems yourself. It took you maybe 2 hours in total to learn.
Who’s going to do the event invoices when you’re fixing the plumbing yourself? You have comparative advantage over the plumber; it doesn’t matter that fixing the plumbing yourself instead of having the plumber do it benefits you, because doing the event invoices benefits you more.
I mean, the whole point of this post is to argue that it’s better for the organization if you learn how to do it yourself. Next time you have a decent chance of being able to solve the problem yourself in 5 minutes, which will save you much more time than the 30 minutes you spent calling around for good plumbers, and the 10 hours you wasted when you hired a bad plumber and they flooded the whole bathroom and forced us to replace half of the wooden floor because you weren’t able to evaluate competence in the space.
Doing the plumbing yourself requires more skill (and probably equipment) than is necessary to understand the plumbing.
Yeah, equipment and things that are dangerous are often two things that are an obstacle to people getting to the point of fully doing it themselves. I do not encourage people to run their own electrical lines, even if they know how it works. Not worth the risk. But it’s quite easy to basically understand all the steps involved in doing so and use that to become well-calibrated at evaluating the difficulty of a task, or to speed someone else up with a task.
Sorry, the thing you do is hire the plumber and ask “hey, can you help me fix an issue with my sink/toilet/whatever” (de-facto Lightcone has full-time staff with this skillset, so this exact thing hasn’t come up in a long while, but it’s how we got started).
Then, when they show up, you explain what you’ve observed the problem to be and ask “what is the first thing you would do yourself to figure out what’s up?”. Then they would either tell you, or start doing the thing. Then you follow them and watch with them, or try it yourself (don’t be dumb and open up random valves, ask him to watch you and stop you before you do anything dumb).
In my experience most contractors I have called love to talk about their work and are happy to get paid to explain what they do. Also, the vast majority of problems really are very easy to understand. The usual way this kind of stuff works tends to be:
Me: “Hey, so we have this toilet seat which has some water coming up below the toilet when you flush.”
Them: “Oh, yeah, that’s a super common problem. These things have a seal below that often comes loose.”
Me: “How would you fix it?”
Them: “Oh, yeah, I would just open up these bolts, then lift up the toilet, then look at the seal. There are like 3 kinds of seals different toilets use. One always tends to cause problems.”
Me: “Mind if I do it?”
Them: “No, not at all. Here let me help you hold the seat”
Me: “Oh, cool, so this is the part below the toilet. I can see some standing water here around this notch, is that where the seal is?”
Them: “No, that’s just the lowest point of the toiler, the seal is actually over here”.
Me: “Ah, I see. This thing?”
Them: “Yes”
Me: “How would you tell it’s broken? Is it broken?”
Them: “Let me take a look” leans over “Hmm, yeah, I am not sure, but it does look a bit wrong. See here? This corner should usually be flush, but it’s elevated. My guess is someone installed it wrong.”
Me: “Oh, interesting. Does this kind of installation error happen frequently?”
Them: “I’ve seen it a few times, but usually people mess up in different ways”
Me: “Great, so we replace it?”
Them: “Yeah”
Me: “Is it this part?” shows Home depot website with product page open
Them: “Nope, that’s the wrong part for this toilet, you want this one” points at a related listing
Me: “Do you have one with you?”
Them: “Yeah, I happen to have that part with me, let me grab it”
Then you install the part, test it, it works. Everyone is happy, and if you had to you could do the same kind of task next time. If you’ve done this 4-5 times, you honestly will be able to solve most common plumbing problems yourself. It took you maybe 2 hours in total to learn.
I mean, the whole point of this post is to argue that it’s better for the organization if you learn how to do it yourself. Next time you have a decent chance of being able to solve the problem yourself in 5 minutes, which will save you much more time than the 30 minutes you spent calling around for good plumbers, and the 10 hours you wasted when you hired a bad plumber and they flooded the whole bathroom and forced us to replace half of the wooden floor because you weren’t able to evaluate competence in the space.
Yeah, equipment and things that are dangerous are often two things that are an obstacle to people getting to the point of fully doing it themselves. I do not encourage people to run their own electrical lines, even if they know how it works. Not worth the risk. But it’s quite easy to basically understand all the steps involved in doing so and use that to become well-calibrated at evaluating the difficulty of a task, or to speed someone else up with a task.