Plumber Merrylands, NSW 2160
Merrylands is one of the biggest suburbs in the Cumberland area and one of the busiest, with Stockland Merrylands, the station and a town centre that has filled with apartment buildings over the last decade. Away from the centre it is still a suburb of 1950s and 60s cottages on flat clay blocks, now steadily giving way to duplexes and granny flats. The Cumberland Highway, Woodville Road and Merrylands Road connect it to Parramatta and Guildford.
What usually goes wrong in Merrylands
- Earthenware sewers under 1950s fibro homes broken by clay movement and full of liquidambar and eucalypt roots
- Granny flats and duplexes tied into old sewer lines that were never sized for two households
- High mains pressure on the flat ground toward Guildford splitting old pipes and blowing relief valves
- Flexible hose floods and blocked shared drains in the apartment buildings around Stockland Merrylands
- Hot water units outside on sun-facing walls failing after long, hot summers
Local notes from the plumbers
Merrylands is flat, it is clay, and most of it was built in the fifteen years after the war, which is a recipe for sewer trouble. The earthenware lines under the fibro and brick cottages were laid in short lengths with cement joints, and seventy years of the Cumberland Plain clay swelling and shrinking has opened nearly every one of them. Liquidambars and eucalypts planted in the 1960s now have roots the length of the block. What makes Merrylands different from its neighbours is how much of that old housing has been rebuilt as duplexes and granny flats, often tied into the original sewer line without anyone checking whether it could carry a second household, so blockages and gully overflows are common on the redeveloped blocks. Mains pressure runs high on the flat ground toward Guildford, and old pipes and relief valves on hot water tanks feel it. Around Stockland Merrylands and the station, the apartment buildings bring flexible hose floods and blocked shared drains. In a summer storm the suburb drains slowly and the low streets on the eastern side hold water.
Housing in Merrylands
1950s and 60s fibro and brick cottages on flat blocks across most of the suburb, 1960s and 70s red-brick unit blocks near the station and Merrylands Road, and 2010s and 2020s apartment buildings around Stockland Merrylands and the town centre, with duplexes and granny flats replacing older homes on the back streets.
