By Fred Bretzke
Fred Bretzke is a full-time pipe trades instructor with SAIT Polytechnic in Calgary and the general manager of A&B Plumbing & Heating. He can be reached at fred.bretzke@sait.ca.
PLUMBING
The
VAN
Life
I can still picture it in my mind’s eye: It’s a hot summer day. The tunes are blasting. And, as I’m rolling down the highway, the wind is blowing in my hair, my left arm out the window gliding in the wind. No AC is needed now. The fresh mountain air is all I need. This is going to be an adventure. I’m going to be working in Banff, the place I wanna live, and vacation, and work, all at the same time.
L
MARKETING ON WHEELS Whenever I’m working or visiting the airport or Banff, I feel like I’m on holidays. As a serviceman, the beauty of the job is often the travelling time. You find yourself in a different place and on a different job almost every day. Shortly after starting A&B Plumbing, I had traded in my 1981 Monte Carlo for a 1980 Red Chevy Vandura, which I nicknamed My Little Red Engine. At the time, all three of us in the company had Chevy Vanduras, one grey, one black and one red – not black, grey and red, like the A-Team, but not far off. You know the saying “Fake it until you make it?” Well, we understood that. We numbered each van, and spaced the numbers out to make it look like we had many vans in our fleet. Attempting to appear as professional as we could, we figured good-looking, well-kept vans were an important part of advertising, although that didn’t really happen until we went to new white vans with our red wrench logo.
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M e c h a n i c a l
B u s i n e s s
ife as a service plumber is about your tools and your van, and your van is actually one of your main tools. It needs to be dependable if you want to do as many service calls as you can. I loved the van I had when we started A&B Plumbing, with its shag rug floor, its 3/4” wooden shelves (which weighed it down considerably), its great bass booming stereo (very important) and its AC. In a van, the small details count. Having enough shelves to stock your van to the brim is also important. Having enough hooks to hold all your extension cords and tools definitely comes in handy. Easy access to your heavy tools like your acetylene B tank and large wrenches is important as well. In our vans, this was usually located in the back corner. Now what to do with your ladders? Hit the roof, of course! It’s vital to get a sturdy pipe roof rack, where you can 1 0 . 2 0
store your lengths of pipe and your ladders. I loved my shag rug, it was great on my bad knees, however it didn’t last long after I started cleaning grease traps with my wet/dry vacuum. With no place to store the huge amount of grease pulled from eight to 10 restaurants a day, I would often temporarily store it in five-gallon white plastic pails lined with green garbage bags. As I bombed around the back-alley potholes, this method proved to be very messy and stinky. All that grease permeated into my beautiful shag rug. Basically, I was running around in a rolling grease van. The things we do for money. There’s nothing in the building or plumbing codes about your service van, but trust me, a dependable good-looking van is vital to a plumber. That’s in Fred’s Code.
