Plumber Parkwood

Parkwood WA 6147, City of Canning. About 14 km south-east of the Perth CBD.

Parkwood lies about fourteen kilometres south-east of the Perth CBD in the City of Canning, bounded by High Road, Nicholson Road, Roe Highway and Willeri Drive, and separated from Lynwood as its own suburb in 1993. The housing dates largely from the 1970s and the ground falls away toward the Canning wetlands to the north. For a plumber that means ageing drainage, stormwater that has to be planned for the fall, and two large schools with amenities to match.

• Ground that falls toward the wetlandsThe northern part of Parkwood sits lower and the water table there rises through winter. Soak wells on those blocks fill quickly and empty slowly, so stormwater is a design question about where the water can go rather than how big a hole you dig.
• Roe Highway along the southern boundaryThe highway edge makes Parkwood quick to reach from several directions, which matters for an after-hours call-out more than the distance from the city does. It also means some service runs sit under busy frontage where work has to be planned rather than improvised.
• Schools with heavy-use amenitiesLynwood Senior High School and Parkwood Primary run toilet blocks and tapware that take hundreds of uses a day. Those fixtures wear on a completely different cycle to domestic ones and are better replaced on a plan than after a failure closes an amenity block.
• Seventies housing on original drainageMost Parkwood houses are still on the sewer line they were built with, and fifty years of garden growth sits over it. A drain that blocks every year is telling you about the condition of that line rather than about what is being flushed.