Plumber Yagoona, NSW 2199
Yagoona sits on the Hume Highway between Bankstown and Bass Hill, a post-war suburb of fibro and brick cottages on large blocks that is changing fast as duplexes and granny flats replace the originals street by street. The station is on the Bankstown line, the highway brings light industry and shops, and the ground is flat clay draining toward Salt Pan Creek. Most of the plumbing underground is still the original 1950s pipework.
What usually goes wrong in Yagoona
- Earthenware sewers under post-war fibro cracked on clay and blocked with roots from camphor laurels and figs
- Galvanised water lines in the oldest cottages corroded through, with brown water and falling pressure
- New duplexes and granny flats tied into seventy-year-old sewer lines that block within months
- Stormwater pooling on flat yards and gullies surcharging in the low streets that drain to Salt Pan Creek
- Electric storage hot water tanks outside 1950s laundries failing after decades of Bankstown summers
Local notes from the plumbers
Yagoona is a suburb where the houses are being replaced faster than the pipes under them. The fibro and brick cottages from the late 1940s and 50s were built with galvanised water lines and earthenware sewers on Cumberland Plain clay, and both are now seventy years old. The galvanised has corroded to the point of brown water and a weak shower; the earthenware has cracked at the joints as the clay swelled and shrank, and the camphor laurels, figs and jacarandas along the older streets have grown into it. The new duplexes and granny flats going in across the suburb are connected to that original sewer line, so a new house can block within months of the family moving in because the last twenty metres of drain is 1950s clay pipe full of roots. Blocks here are flat and slow to drain, and in a summer thunderstorm the low streets toward Salt Pan Creek see gullies surcharge and water sit on the lawn. The walk-up units near the station bring flexi hose floods and blocked shared stacks, and the Hume Highway frontage adds shop and workshop drains.
Housing in Yagoona
Fibro and brick cottages from the late 1940s, 50s and 60s on wide blocks either side of the Hume Highway, a steady spread of duplexes, granny flats and two-storey rebuilds replacing them, a few 1960s-70s walk-up unit blocks near Yagoona station, and light industry along the highway.
