Plumber Baulkham Hills, NSW 2153
Baulkham Hills is one of the oldest of the Hills suburbs, settled along Windsor Road and Old Northern Road and built out for families through the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The blocks are wide and the houses are brick, and the suburb sits on the sandstone ridge between Castle Hill and Winston Hills, dropping away toward Toongabbie Creek on the western side. Stockland Baulkham Hills and the M2 bus interchange keep it busy without a Metro station of its own.
What usually goes wrong in Baulkham Hills
- Earthenware sewer joints under 1960s and 70s homes cracked and packed with roots from sixty-year-old street trees
- Copper pipes from the original build springing pinhole leaks inside walls and under slabs
- Original galvanised water lines in the oldest streets near the village corroding and choking pressure to a trickle
- Stormwater from the ridge overwhelming grates and running under houses on the blocks that fall toward Toongabbie Creek
- Electric storage hot water tanks in laundries and outside on side walls failing after fifteen years of Hills summers
Local notes from the plumbers
Baulkham Hills is older than most of the Hills, and it shows in the ground. The streets near the village and along Windsor Road went in during the 1960s, with galvanised water lines and earthenware sewers that have been in the ground for sixty years. Galvanised pipe corrodes from the inside, so the first sign is pressure fading to a trickle at the kitchen tap; earthenware cracks at the joints, and the camphor laurels, liquidambars and gums planted when the streets were new have had six decades to move in. The 1970s and 80s brick veneer homes further from the village have copper rather than galvanised, and that copper is now at the age where pinhole leaks appear in a wall or under the slab. The suburb sits on the sandstone ridge and falls away toward Toongabbie Creek on the west, so heavy storms send water sheeting off driveways and the blocks at the bottom of the slope cop it. Knock-down rebuilds and duplexes are common now, and a new house tied into an original sewer line is a regular source of surprises.
Housing in Baulkham Hills
Brick veneer and full brick homes from the 1960s through to the 1980s on generous blocks between Windsor Road and Old Northern Road, with some 1950s cottages near the village, 1990s townhouse complexes, and a growing number of knock-down rebuilds and duplexes on the older streets.
