The Scottish Plumber

03/17/2026

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

02/12/2026

“Start with the drain lines. Many of these homes still rely on cast iron or, worse, clay sewer pipes.

Cast iron corrodes from the inside out, quietly narrowing the pipe until one day gravity gives up and sewage decides your basement floor looks like a perfectly reasonable place to visit.

Clay tile, meanwhile, has an existential crisis every time a tree is planted nearby. Roots don’t see sewer lines as obstacles; they see them as opportunities.

A hairline crack becomes a welcome mat, and soon your plumbing is sharing space with a maple’s entire extended family.”

https://www.scottishplumber.com/the-challenges-of-owning-an-older-chicago-home/L

Chicago’s older homes don’t whisper their age. They announce it—in creaks, in radiators that hiss like annoyed cats, in basements that smell faintly of history and damp concrete. And nowhere is that age more assertive than in the plumbing. In Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Old Town, Logan Square—ne...

11/14/2025

We 🩵 saving our customers from plumbing villains.

09/11/2024

This photograph depicts six firefighters aboard Ladder 118 responding to the World Trade Center attack, racing toward the disaster site from their station in Brooklyn Heights.

As they cross the Brooklyn Bridge, heading toward the Twin Towers, the buildings are already engulfed in flames and chaos.

The six men —Lt. Robert Wallace, and firefighters Leon Smith Jr., Joseph Agnello, Peter Vega, Vernon Cherry and Scott Davidson—rushed inside to guide people to safety.

Not long after, the North Tower collapsed.

Tragically, none of the men of Ladder 118 survived.

Their actions, however, saved countless lives that day.

The crew’s sacrifice became a powerful symbol of the bravery displayed by the FDNY during the 9/11 attacks.

A memorial plaque hangs in their firehouse and their story is remembered as part of the legacy of heroism that now defines that day.

06/19/2024

June 19th, 2024.

For all the Black people who died in bo***ge and their unrealized hopes and unexplored dreams.

Happy Juneteenth!

Photo: June 19, 1865. The First Juneteenth Celebration.

04/19/2024

Looks like we’ve finally broken through the winter. Hooray for spring!

04/01/2024

Lead pipes still contaminate drinking water, especially in Chicago.

The Windy City has the most lead pipes of any U.S. city. A study estimates that more than two-thirds of children there are exposed to lead in their home tap water.

01/15/2024

On the morning of Tuesday, April 9, James Baldwin left his Atlanta hotel and walked toward Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Throngs of people stretched in every direction. Baldwin squeezed his way closer to the church, inch by inch, until an impenetrable wall of humanity finally stopped him in his tracks. The people “were like rows of poppies,” recalled June Dobbs, a lifelong friend of King’s.

With some help from Jim Brown, he managed to enter the church and found a seat among the 1,000 souls pressed into Ebenezer.

“The atmosphere was black,” Baldwin wrote, “with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack.”

As the service began, Baldwin tried to keep himself together. “I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile.” His death was too terrible, the void too deep. “I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop.”

Finally, the pallbearers carried King’s casket toward the door. When Baldwin emerged in the sunlight, he noticed the enormity of it all, which he had failed to appreciate on his way in. He saw that masses of people not only lined both sides of the road, but that they occupied every imaginable space. They stood on every rooftop, baking in the Georgia heat. “Every inch of ground, as far as the eye could see, was black with people, and they stood in silence.” They offered a mute testament to King. “It was the silence that undid me,” Baldwin explained. “I started to cry, and I stumbled.”

King’s coffin was loaded into a wagon drawn by mules. As Bernard Lafayette put it, the wagon “symbolized what he lived for and what he died for.”

The mule-drawn wagon brought King down from the plane of Nobel laureates and the rarefied air of angels. It placed him squarely alongside ordinary black laborers. It highlighted his ties with those whose hands had picked cotton, those who still worked with mules across the rural South, those who cleaned the bathrooms or carried the trash. They were King’s people.

As a Newsweek reporter wrote, the funeral procession featured “the powerful and mighty marching along with a gnarled sharecropper wearing his only oversized Sunday suit.” Princes and paupers alike donned their Sunday best.

01/12/2024

The temperature is forecast to plunge into the negatives over the weekend and stay there for four days. Those are ripe conditions for pipes freezing.

If you happen to experience frozen or burst pipes, we will have plumbers working all weekend, including 24-hour on-call technicians who can thaw or repair them on the spot.

Just call 888-MAC-CLOG and one of our friendly staff will dispatch the nearest plumber ASAP.

Stay warm out there and remember: a little extra hose with your kilt never hurt anyone!

11/11/2023

07/07/2023

Yikes!

“Urban areas and areas near potential PFAS sources, like industry or waste sites, are more likely to have higher levels of PFAS, the study found.

Drinking water exposures may be more common in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Eastern Seaboard and Central and Southern California, according to the study.”

The U.S. Geological Survey tested tap water from 716 locations nationwide over five years.