Appliance, plumbing, heating & gas services inMarkham.

A subdivision kitchen was cut to the exact machines on the builder’s list, and twenty years on the replacement rarely drops into the same hole. A slide-in range needs the counter cut. A freestanding one does not, but it leaves a raised back panel where a backsplash now sits.

Suites around Markham Centre were built to their own dimensions, and a replacement has to match them rather than the showroom. The dishwasher is often an 18-inch unit rather than the 24-inch everyone assumes, and the hood almost always recirculates through a charcoal filter because there is nowhere for a duct to go. We take the opening and check the filter type before a model is chosen.

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The outside taps are what catch these houses out. A frost-free sillcock splits inside the wall when a hose is left connected over winter, and it gives nothing away until spring, when the tap is turned on and water appears in the basement instead. Disconnect the hoses in October.

Toilets are the quiet one in the Markham subdivisions. Houses built through the late 1990s and 2000s took the first generation of six-litre fixtures, and plenty of them have never flushed well since. A running fill valve or a warped flapper wastes more water than anything else in the house and shows up as a bill rather than a leak. Where the bowl itself is the problem, we will say so.

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A subdivision mechanical room in Markham holds the furnace, the water heater and the ductwork in one small space, and most of those furnaces are now on their second decade. That room is where a service call earns its keep, because the filter, the condensate trap and the tank are all reachable from one spot.

The older houses, in Milliken Mills and around Markham Village, often have a B-vent fireplace: an open-fronted unit that draws its combustion air from the room and vents up a metal chimney. Those behave differently from the sealed direct-vent units in the newer subdivisions. They are sensitive to a house that has been tightened up with new windows and doors, so the draft is the first thing we check, before the burner.

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Island cooktops make a gas call awkward in Markham. Kitchens through Berczy and Angus Glen are built around a large island, and getting gas to one in a finished house means coming up through the floor at a point the cabinet base decides. We settle where it can rise before anything is ordered.

Townhouse blocks through Cornell and around Markham Centre carry their meters in a bank on one end wall, four or five units side by side. The first job there is working out which meter is yours, because the tags fade and the runs cross above the garages before they reach a house. We trace the line back from the appliance before anything is isolated, rather than shutting the gas off on a neighbour.

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