Words of advice for home owners in Somerville, Cambridge, or Belmont

Mature trees add beauty and shade to landscapes, but their roots can cause extensive damage to sewer pipes. Roots grow into the pipes because they like it there! Sewer pipes contain water, nutrients and oxygen…the essential elements for tree and shrub growth and overall health.

Aside from resulting blockages and backups, root invasion can lead to expensive repairs…or perhaps even total sewer line replacement.

The flow of warm water inside sewer ..read more

Like all mechanical things, garbage disposals don’t last forever…not even close.

So to give it a little (or even a lot) more longevity, there are some simple “care and feeding” steps you should know and follow:

Feed the disposal a little at a time. Take care to keep utensils and your hands out of the drain. Corn husks and other fibrous items shouldn’t be put into the disposal as they may clog the drain.  Other such items include onion skins, celery, and most ..read more

Here are three common household plumbing problems and a few things you can try on your own to resolve the problem. Toilet Overflowing

To fix an overflowing toilet, start by pushing the tank stopper belt down to the valve seat and keep pressing on it. The tank stopper and valve seat are found inside the toilet tank. Next, immediately turn off the valve underneath the toilet. This is the water shut-off valve. No Hot Water

Besides the obvious, i.e., no hot water running from ..read more

When your plumbing works perfectly, it’s a good day.  And when it doesn’t…well, that depends on what the problem is and how much it might cost to get it fixed.

So here’s the thing:  you can wait until something DOES go wrong, or you can contact Dennis Foley Plumbing to schedule a whole-house plumbing inspection to check for problems in the making and take any necessary corrective action now.

Just like your car needs an oil change every 6,000 miles and you ..read more

Today the word green has a whole new meaning. Once a word that described a color, today the word green defines the environmentally friendly, energy efficient practices relating to recycling, appliances, light bulbs, home improvement and so much more. You may have even heard the phrase “Is it green friendly?” These are words and phrases that we should get very comfortable using as they are the words of the future when it comes to our health and the way we ..read more

We just finished installing a Turbomax indirect hot water heater for a condominium building with about 10 bathrooms, 5 kitchens and 3 washing machines. They were getting sick of replacing those 100 gallon commercial hot water heaters. If you’re involved in these type of buildings, you know what I’m talking about. The water heaters that use a huge amount of gas, cost 8 to 12 thousand installed, and only have a 3 year warranty!! Talk about a rat race.

They called ..read more

Now that everything is cleaned up, we went and updated the plumbing and electrics.

Every bathroom needs it’s own 20 Amp circuit, so the electrician ran a new wire down to the panel in the basement, and replaced all the wiring to the bathroom. We installed a new fan and light combination, which is ducted through the attic to the outside.

In renovations, things that aren’t planned for do happen. A defective fitting on one of the new shower valve stops leaked ..read more

My customer’s bathroom is now gutted, but the cleanup is far from over. While the gutting crew was amazing, cleaning up is a lot of work. They aren’t too careful on de-nailing, so that ‘s the first thing to do. It’s not fun to keep getting caught on old nails and pieces of old wire lath. This bathroom tile was an old mud job, so there were little shirt and hand ripping remnants of wire lath left behind. The mud ..read more

We just gutted a bathroom for a customer that I’ve been working for since my son was a baby- and he’s 36 now with 2 children of his own! This bathroom was probably original to the house, but the owners are very neat and everything was in amazingly good shape after 60 years or so! The tile was starting to crack in the bathtub area, and the whole bathroom, while very clean and tidy, needed an update. When I worked at ..read more

Have you had a lot of main drain stoppages? Had bad backups at inconvenient times? It may be that you have a house trap on your main drain line. These were commonly installed for many years, ending probably 40 years ago. They are illegal to install now, probably because they impede the flow of waste out to the sewer. Many of our customers have had us remove them.

Some house traps, like the one we just removed, are under the cellar ..read more