A family firm that still answers its own phone

Dave Hartley started Reliable Flow Plumbing in 2013 with one van, a mobile number and a simple rule: turn up when you say you will. After fifteen years working for large heating contractors, he'd seen too many homeowners left waiting all day for an engineer who never arrived.

Today the business runs three vans across Chelmsford and the surrounding villages, with Dave's son Tom qualifying as a heating engineer in 2021. It's still small enough that the person who quotes your job is the person who does it — and the person you can ring afterwards if anything isn't right.

We don't do call centres, hourly-rate surprises or hard sells on new boilers. We quote a fixed price, we protect your floors, and we clean up before we leave. That approach has earned us 187 five-star reviews and, more importantly, customers who have used us for over a decade.