Making $105K A Year As A Plumber in San Antonio, TX | On The Job

My family was very supportive.

My peers definitely were not.

They looked down on the trade.

They felt like because I didn't go to college, I wasn't going to amount to anything.

People expect us to come in like a bull in a china closet and just kind of wreck everything.

The plumbing image has changed quite a bit since I first started.

We try our hardest to take care of people's houses.

My name is Richard Mendarez.

I'm 30 years old.

I'm a journeyman plumber.

I live in San Antonio, Texas, and I expect to make $105,000 to $125,000 this year.

I grew up in New Braunfels, Texas.

It was me, my mom, my brother, and my sister.

We're a pretty tight-knit family.

We used to play board games all the time.

And my grandparents are the ones who really kind of instilled the hard work into me.

When I was in high school, this was at Churchill High School, it was very frowned on to do trades.

So they were really downplaying the trades and pushing college on everybody.

There was teachers that was in our assemblies.

Everything was geared towards going to school.

And if you didn't,

Well, good luck.

I was very disappointed because I really, really wanted to get my associate's degree.

And I think I was maybe three credits away from it.

The textbook that got in my way was a psychology book.

It was about $500.

I couldn't muster up the money to get it.

So that's the reason why I dropped out of college.

I was making, I think it was $8.50 an hour.

Then I got a raise to $10 after about a year.

Second year was $17.50.

And from there, after the pay cut went down, I think it dropped me to $12.

The owner got in trouble for some tax evasion and had to cut our pay.

significantly, enough where I was at risk of losing my apartment.

My girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, just found out she was pregnant, so I really needed to push to get something done.

I didn't want to not have a stable future.

I was 20 years old when I started plumbing.

I reached out to my mom for some help and she directed me towards my father, who I hadn't seen in a long time.

He's the one who, I guess, ushered me through the door and got me started in an apprenticeship program.

We get a raise depending on, you know, how much we're selling.

So it's not necessarily commission-based, but it's more, I guess, performance-based.

The pay rate, it's endless.

So whatever you start at, you can end on an infinite number.

There's no cap off.

I can tell you the highest that I've ever been, I think it's like $86 or $87.

Sir, one, two, three.

We just loaded up the water heater.

We got to go install this bad boy today in somebody's garage.

So for right now, we get our parts together so we can have what we need.

Plumbing is fun because you know when you start, but you don't know when you get off.

Our days a week standard is Monday through Friday.

We do run on call.

When we do on call here, we're doing one day a week.

When you're on call, you can pretty much expect to not have any plans.

Don't make any plans because they will probably get wrecked.

Don't expect to come home in time for dinner.

Saturdays are always booked up.

Sundays are a little bit slower.

We're so booked right now with calls, we need plumbers.

We need people to come in and help.

My normal day, we dispatch from our house.

They usually have the first customer ready for us by about 7.30.

We'll leave our house about 7.30.

We get to our first job between 8 and 9 in the morning.

Old water heater had absolutely no code upgrades.

Just two stainless steel flex lines is all it had.

Ball valve on there soldered in place, so I'll have to unsweat that.

But the valve itself is very corroded and old.

There's no normal.

We're always going, going, going.

You fit food in when you can.

Some days we don't get lunch.

Some days we eat on the drive from one job to the other.

And I don't think customers really know that.

I don't think that ever comes up.

Sometimes if you get stuck on a job, or let's say you're on a job where a customer has no water, you can't really leave them without water.

So we try our hardest to get them some kind of service before we can take a break.

So we're going to turn the water on to the water heater now.

You don't always get to get home and have time to sit down with your family and have a sit down dinner.

That can be a little bit difficult.

There's been several days where I'm not getting home till nine or 10 at night and I haven't eaten all day.

When it started to freeze, everybody lost water.

We were getting between 250 to 500 calls a day on people calling in saying, hey, my water lines are frozen.

I have a broken pipe.

My house is flooding.

So we were trying to help people cut their water off.

We were out of water for about six or seven consecutive days.

I was running service calls to help other people get water, and I had none.

And I felt bad because I had no water, so I couldn't take a shower.

Once we started working, we pretty much didn't stop for about two weeks.

We worked that week.

the weekend we hit the following week and i think we knocked out that second weekend as well but a lot of our focus was just trying to get people water a big part of our job is you know just consoling the customer i would say that's that's probably a good 60 to 70 percent of our work it's very important that we have some kind of empathy for them because for us as plumbers we see it every day i leave one house and it's flooded i go to another house it's flooded so my work environment doesn't change but for them this is the end of their world as they know it

Just want to let you know, we're all done.

Everything's good to go.

You should have about an hour, 45 minute wait before the water gets completely hot and you're all set.

Worst job I've ever worked on.

This was a sewage backup for an apartment complex.

They did not have a backwater valve.

When I walked in, it was sewage everywhere.

There was sewage in the sinks, in the tubs.

It was filled to about six inches of the property throughout everything.

We didn't know we were walking into that much.

We knew it was a sewer backup, but not to that caliber.

The money's actually done a lot of good for me and my family.

So my wife, actually she has to have a very, very expensive surgery coming up really soon.

And I've been able to put away almost for the entire surgery without insurance helping anything.

I'm more family oriented.

I love spending time with my kids and my wife because that time I'll never get back.

So at least right now, I'm focusing more on my family.

They love, absolutely love doing anything and everything outdoors.

We're real big into like obstacle course races, the Spartan Race, Savage Race.

We're real heavy into that kind of stuff.

As long as they're happy, that's kind of all the thing I want for them because money comes and goes, but a lifetime of happiness, you know, you can't beat that.

I'm very glad I stuck with this career because it paid off.

I feel like I've been very successful.

I really feel like if I had stayed in college and not joined the trade right away, I would have been struggling like a lot of people right now.

Plumbing, yes, there's money in it, but it feels good to help somebody and it just happens to make money doing it.

I would be proud of where I'm at.