Plumber Bertram

Bertram WA 6167, City of Kwinana. About 33 km south of the Perth CBD.

Bertram lies about thirty-three kilometres south of the Perth CBD in the City of Kwinana, established as a locality in 1998 and built out through estates including Belgravia Central, with a station on the Mandurah line and a primary school opened in 2007. It adjoins the far older Kwinana townsite. For a plumber that means young houses drawing off a network of mixed age, a suburb with several distinct release stages already, and a station precinct that brings commercial work.

• New estates against an old networkBertram's houses are new but the mains serving parts of the suburb are not. When pressure at a Bertram tap is poor, the cause is often upstream of the property, so we measure at the meter before anyone starts replacing tapware inside the house.
• Several release stages in a young suburbLand has been released here in waves since the late 1990s, so a house from the first release and one from a recent stage are twenty years apart. That gap decides whether the hot water unit and the tapware are due for replacement or nowhere near it, which is why we work from the actual build date.
• A station precinct on the doorstepKwinana station and the small centre beside it bring retail and food premises into the suburb, with grease traps and public amenities that take loads no household approaches. That is scheduled commercial work, not call-out work.
• Group settlement land underneathThe ground here was farmed under the 1920s group settlement scheme, and old bores and irrigation pipework were not always removed before subdivision. We locate services before any excavation rather than finding one with a machine.