← RelayCrewA plumbing answering service for the calls that come at 2am.
Pipes do not fail during business hours. They fail when the family gets home, runs the dishwasher, and water starts coming through the ceiling.
Ava answers at any hour, works out whether it is a genuine emergency, and either wakes you or books it for the morning.
The after-hours problem is really a triage problem
Every plumber has the same two bad options at night. Forward the phone to your mobile and get woken for slow drains. Or send everything to voicemail and lose the genuine emergencies, which are also the highest-value jobs you take.
The cost of the first option is your sleep and eventually your patience. The cost of the second is a flooded house that someone else dried out.
Triage fixes both. Someone needs to take every call and decide, against your rules, which ones are worth waking you for.
How a plumbing call gets sorted
Is water still moving
The first question on any leak call. An active uncontrolled leak is a different ticket from one the homeowner has already shut off.
Shutoff guidance immediately
Before anything else, Ava walks them to the valve. Ten seconds of instruction can save a ceiling, and it buys everyone time.
Emergency versus schedulable
No hot water in January is urgent. A running toilet is not. Your definitions, applied consistently at 3am when nobody is thinking clearly.
After-hours rates stated
The premium is quoted on the call, so nobody argues about the invoice when your tech is standing in their hallway at midnight.
Routine work booked
Everything non-urgent goes straight into tomorrow\u2019s calendar with a confirmation text, instead of a callback list waiting for you at breakfast.
Emergency work is where the margin is
After-hours plumbing carries a premium for a reason, and the customer calling at midnight is not price shopping. They want someone to pick up.
Which means the first company to answer usually gets the job outright. There is no comparing three quotes at 2am. There is one plumber who answered and several who did not.
Missing those calls does not just cost you one job. An emergency customer who is happy with you tends to stop shopping altogether, and they tell their neighbours during the next freeze.
Common questions
Will it wake me for every call at 2am?
No, and that is the point. You define what counts as a genuine emergency. An active leak with no shutoff reaches you. A dripping tap gets booked for Tuesday morning and you find out about it over coffee.
Can it walk someone through shutting off their water?
Yes. That script is set up during onboarding. It is often the single most valuable thing said on an emergency call, because it stops the damage getting worse before anyone arrives.
Can it quote emergency call-out rates?
It quotes exactly what you tell it to quote, including after-hours premiums. Anything beyond your stated ranges goes to you rather than being guessed at.
What about commercial and property management calls?
Those can be routed differently from residential. Many plumbers want property manager calls handled with different priority, different rates and a different escalation path.
Sleep through the drain calls.
Wake for the ones worth waking for. $995 setup plus $799 a month, live in 14 days.
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