Plumber Pelaw Main

Clay sewers a century old are the Pelaw Main plumber job that defines this village, with galvanised services splitting behind walls close behind. Pelaw Main sits to Kurri Kurri's south-west, and Kurri Kurri Plumbing Co covers it on the same coalfields run, with drains, hot water, gas and emergencies priced before any tools come out.

A village built around one pit. Pelaw Main opened with its mine in 1900, and the cottage grid south-west of town has barely changed since the pit closed in 1962. At the last census the village counted 424 dwellings, and the housing is nearly all detached weatherboard, fibro and brick-veneer stock from the pre-1940 through 1960s eras.

What that means for the plumbing. Nearly every cottage around Railway Street and Stanford Street sends its waste into glazed-clay pipes from the colliery years, and that network is coming to the end of its life one street at a time. Shrunken joints snag paper, and the privets and street trees planted over the decades follow the moisture into the shallow lines.

The water side is no younger. Galvanised risers put in the ground generations ago are still doing the job in cottages that have never been renovated, and rust inside them turns the water brown, weakens the showers and, eventually, splits the pipe inside wall cavities. The storage hot water units here tend to be kept decades longer than they were built to last, so failures cluster on frosty winter mornings.

Traffic reaches the expressway along the main road out of the village, and restored trains from the Richmond Vale Railway Museum still use the old colliery line to reach the village. The pipes under the streets are just as old as that line.