Plumber in Maillardville and Austin Heights
We reach Maillardville and Austin Heights in 90 minutes from downtown Vancouver.
These are Coquitlam's oldest neighbourhoods — Maillardville founded in 1909 as a francophone mill community, Austin Heights developing through the post-war decades — and they're the one part of the city where the housing predates the Poly-B era entirely.
That matters, because everywhere else in Coquitlam the pipe conversation is about grey plastic. Here it usually isn't.
What's actually in these houses
Galvanized steel supply piping in the pre-1960 stock. It rusts closed from the inside over decades, and the symptom is water pressure that has declined so gradually the household adjusted years ago, plus discoloured water first thing in the morning. Flushing does nothing; only a repipe restores it.
Copper from mid-century construction and later renovations. Sound material, though at fifty-plus years the hot side starts producing pinhole leaks — small, persistent, and usually discovered by staining rather than by a flood.
Clay sewer laterals under mature street trees, particularly through the older Maillardville streets. Root intrusion is the default rather than the exception, and a main line that has blocked twice has a structural cause.
Cast iron waste stacks in the older houses, scaling internally over decades until the bore narrows.
Some Poly-B, in houses replumbed during the 1980s or 90s or in infill from that period. It's worth checking rather than assuming either way.
Austin Heights and the post-war stock
Austin Heights is largely 1950s and 60s, and it carries the same post-war issue we see across Burnaby: a furnace and water heater originally sharing one masonry chimney, where the furnace has since been upgraded to sidewall venting and the water heater left venting alone into an oversized flue.
That affects draft, and draft on a gas appliance is a carbon monoxide question. We check it whenever we're replacing a tank or doing gas work in a house of that age.