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Wellington Quick-Action Plumber Team

When a blocked grease trap shuts your kitchen or a leaking riser threatens three floors of tenants, you need a Wellington team in your building now — not a call centre promising to “try and find someone”. Southern Plumbing keeps stocked vans across Lower Hutt, Porirua, Kapiti and every Wellington city suburb.

Call 0800 484 353 — 24/7 commercial emergency response, every public holiday. Your Job On Time, or It’s Free.

Trusted Plumbing Solutions in Wellington

Commercial plumbing in Wellington is not residential scaled up. Backflow prevention on a school, grease-trap management for a hospitality fit-out, and hydronic riser work in a 1970s CBD office tower each have their own codes, their own inspectors, and their own failure modes. We’ve been doing this since 1982.

40+ years, ~29,000 completed jobs, Master Plumbers members for 25+ years. Certifying Plumbers and Gasfitters on staff who self-certify their own work — no third-party inspection delays on your schedule.

Commercial Services We Offer

  • Hotel and motel plumbing — risers, unit repairs, pool plant
  • School and council plumbing, including commercial gas
  • Commercial kitchen plumbing and grease-trap installation
  • Backflow prevention testing and RPZ installation
  • Office tower maintenance and repiping
  • Hydronic heating design and boiler installations
  • Retail and hospitality fit-outs
  • Commercial drainlaying and CCTV inspection
  • 24/7 emergency callouts — burst mains, flooded plant rooms, blocked main-line drains

Maintenance Contracts That Actually Work

Building managers and facilities teams need a plumbing partner who shows up on the SLA, documents every visit, and doesn’t hold the building to ransom on emergency callouts. Southern handles scheduled preventative maintenance, annual RPZ testing, and reactive callouts on one consolidated contract.

We issue fixed-price quotes before work starts, invoice monthly with detailed line items, and our Certifying Plumbers self-certify their own output — so you’re not waiting on third-party sign-off to close a job.

Commercial Gas & Hot Water

Commercial-grade hot water has different failure modes to residential. A hotel losing hot water is a guest refund event. A cafe losing gas is a closed business day. Southern keeps parts on the van for the brands that actually fail — Rinnai Infinity continuous-flow, Rheem commercial cylinders, hydronic ring-main components.

Blocked Drains, Grease Traps & Commercial Drainage

Commercial kitchens, food-court drains and multi-tenant building waste lines block in ways residential drains don’t. Our commercial drain team runs industrial water-blasters, CCTV with pipe-locating, and mechanical cutters for tree roots and heavy scale.

  • Grease-trap pump-out and maintenance schedules
  • CCTV inspection with written report and location data
  • Main-line water-blasting for multi-unit buildings
  • Hydro-jetting for lateral drains
  • Pipe-relining and drainlaying where needed

Fit-Outs, New Builds & Tender Work

We tender on commercial plumbing packages for hospitality fit-outs, retail rebuilds, and mid-scale new builds across Wellington city, the Hutt Valley, Porirua and the Kapiti Coast. Our quotes include the full compliance paperwork, inspections, and as-built drawings — no chasing subcontractors for PS3s.

If you need a reliable commercial partner who actually picks up the phone, call 0800 484 353 or request a quote online.

Frequently Asked Questions

About Us

About Us

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Our Story Starts in 1982

Southern Plumbing & Gasfitting Ltd. started life as Brennan Plumbing in 1982, founded by Doug Brennan. The name changed as the business grew, but the core hasn’t: family-owned, Wellington-based, and staffed by trades who live in the suburbs they service.

40+ years. Around 29,000 completed jobs in the past decade alone. Some of our senior team were first licensed back in the 1970s — which means there isn’t much in Wellington’s pipe-work they haven’t already seen, fixed, and quietly improved on.

History — Training Wellington’s Plumbers

In the mid-80s Wellington had a serious shortage of qualified plumbers. Rather than poach from other firms, Brennan Plumbing chose to train.

Since then we’ve trained dozens of apprentices. Many now run their own Wellington businesses, and several train apprentices themselves. It’s one of the quieter things we’re proud of — we haven’t just fixed Wellington’s plumbing, we’ve supplied a big slice of the tradespeople who keep fixing it now.

Training is still a large part of daily life at Southern. Personal and professional growth in the trade isn’t a slogan for us; it’s how we recruit, retain and keep the quality bar where it needs to be.

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Our Core Values

Five values, written on the wall back in the early days and still the yardstick we hire, train and work against:

  • Family — remembering our purpose. We’re a family business, and you’re a family inviting us into your home.
  • Genuine — acting with trust, honesty and respect. Every quote, every conversation.
  • Quality — do it once, do it right. Cheap work we’d have to come back and re-do is bad for everyone.
  • Passion — taking pride in everything we do, from a 15-minute tap swap to a full bathroom rebuild.
  • Communication — proactively understanding service and value. If something’s changed, you hear it from us first.

Your Job On Time, or It’s Free

We pioneered this guarantee because your time is as valuable as ours. Everyone’s stood at home waiting for a tradie who doesn’t show up. Everyone’s taken a day off work to get a job done that ends up rescheduled at 4pm with no apology.

So we made a promise: we come when we promise, or you don’t pay.

It’s the sort of promise that forces the whole business — dispatch, scheduling, van-loading, stock-keeping — to get genuinely good at turning up when we say we will. 40+ years in, we’re still improving it. And it’s still the thing customers mention most often in testimonials and reviews.

Why the Master Plumbers Guarantee Matters

We’ve been members of the Master Plumbers Association for 25+ years. Membership isn’t automatic — you apply, they audit, they keep auditing.

Practically, it means two things for you:

  • Your deposit is protected. If a member firm goes under mid-job, the association covers you.
  • Your workmanship is covered. If any Master Plumber’s work doesn’t meet standard, the association steps in even if the firm can’t honour it.

That’s real consumer protection. Anyone can buy a ladder and a van; only an accredited member gets to stand behind this particular badge. Full detail on our Master Plumbers Guarantee page.

A Full-Range Trade Business

We started as contracting plumbers. We’ve grown into a full-range service business because Wellington homeowners kept asking us to coordinate the other trades too.

  • Plumbing — residential, commercial, 24/7 emergency
  • Gasfitting — residential, marine, caravans
  • Drainlaying — new builds, repairs, CCTV inspection
  • Roofing — repairs, replacements, moss treatment
  • Electrical — in-house licensed electrician for tie-ins
  • Building maintenance — full home maintenance, carpentry, painting, vinyl flooring, tiling
  • Eco-plumbing — see our ecoplumber page
  • Bathroom & kitchen renovations

One firm, one point of contact, one warranty. No chasing five subbies.

Eco-Plumbing & Lower Power Bills

Over the last decade we’ve pushed hard into eco-plumbing — solar hot water, heat-pump water heaters, PV panel installations, battery storage and recycling, insulation work, and the broader energy-efficiency advice that ties it all together.

We run our own PV + battery system at home and it powers the house 8 months a year. We install what we actually use.

~29,000 Jobs, Every Wellington Suburb

In the last decade we’ve completed around 29,000 jobs — big and small — across every Wellington suburb from Paekakariki in the north to Martinborough in the Wairarapa, and everywhere in between.

Suburbs you’ll regularly see our vans in:

Brooklyn, Mt Cook, Mt Victoria, Hataitai, Petone, Naenae, Newtown, Woburn, Avalon, Miramar, Petone Beach, Kilbirnie, Waiwhetu, Stokes Valley, Karori, Johnsonville, Khandallah, Lower Hutt, Paraparaumu.

Most of our team live in these suburbs. When you call Southern, you get someone who knows the area — not a call centre routing you to a contractor.

Our Team — Old Hands and New

Our senior team includes plumbers and gasfitters who were first licensed in the 1970s — people who’ve seen how building codes, materials and tools have changed over five decades. They’re the ones who spot the problem everyone else misses.

Alongside them: mid-career journeyman plumbers, apprentices coming through, and specialists in gasfitting, drainlaying, roofing and electrical. On any given job you’ll typically have a Certifying tradesperson on-site, plus whatever support the job needs.

Want to join? See trade jobs in Wellington.

Credentials & Recognition

  • Master Plumbers Association member — 25+ years
  • Certifying Plumber & Gasfitter on staff
  • SuperGold Card member — discount available
  • Most Popular Award — voted by Wellington customers
  • Certified Master Plumber — the highest residential trade accreditation in NZ
  • 24/7 emergency service — every day of the year including Christmas

Backed by decades of testimonials and Google reviews. Read what customers say: testimonials | reviews | current newsletter.

A Note from Our Founder

“We started in 1982 with a van and a phone. What’s kept us going isn’t any clever marketing — it’s that we kept showing up when we said we would, quoted fairly, and did the job properly. If you’ve got a problem with your plumbing, gas, drains, roof or anything else on the house, call me directly. — Doug Brennan, Founder“

Call 0800 484 353 to reach Doug or any of the team. Or request a quote online.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • When did Southern Plumbing start?

    1982 — as Brennan Plumbing, founded by Doug Brennan. The business later became Southern Plumbing & Gasfitting Ltd. That’s 40+ years of Wellington plumbing and roughly 29,000 completed jobs in the last decade alone.