- 123 hours
- The week left after 8-to-5. A supply line has no preference between them.
- One call every 4.8 min
- Arithmetic on one plumber's arctic week: 600 calls across 48 hours
A burst pipe doesn't wait for Monday.
It calls whoever picks up.
Average water damage and freezing homeowners claim. Second most frequent claim in America after wind and hail.
Insurance Information Institute, from ISO / Verisk data, 2018–2022"It is important to dry water-damaged areas and items within 24-48 hours to prevent mold growth." The clock starts when the pipe goes.
U.S. EPA, A Brief Guide to Mold, Moisture and Your HomeJump in incoming calls at Texas shops during the peak week of Winter Storm Uri. Plumbing revenue went +11% in January to +48% in February to +72% in March.
ServiceTitan analysis of 100+ Texas shops, Winter Storm UriRoto-Rooter's own service calls the Friday after Thanksgiving versus an average Friday. +21% across the four-day weekend.
Roto-Rooter press release, November 20 2024This is the whole
product, out loud.
A call is a form being filled in out loud. Watch the intake sheet complete itself as the conversation runs.
2:14 a.m., the first hard freeze of the year. A supply line let go above a finished basement and the water is still running.
- Cloverly
Thanks for calling Fielder Plumbing. Para español, oprima dos. Is water running right now?
- Caller
Yes. It's coming through the basement ceiling and I don't know what to do.
- Cloverly
Okay. Before anything else — do you smell gas, or anything like rotten eggs?
Gas gets checked before water. A yes ends the call as an evacuation, not a booking.
- Caller
No. Nothing like that.
- Cloverly
Good. Then let's get the water off before we talk about scheduling. Your main is where the supply comes into the house — often near the water heater. Can you get to it and turn it clockwise until it stops? I'll wait.
Shut-off before scheduling. Twenty seconds, and it is the most valuable thing that happens on this call.
- Caller
There's a valve by the heater… okay, it's closed. It's slowing down.
- Cloverly
Good. Stay out of any standing water near outlets or the panel. Now — is this clean water off a supply line, or is anything coming back up out of a toilet or a floor drain?
Category 1 versus Category 3, asked in plain language. It changes the dispatch, the PPE, and whether restoration gets referred. A generic receptionist doesn't know the distinction exists.
- Caller
Clean — it's from the pipe overhead. But the whole finished side is soaked. Carpet and up the drywall.
- Cloverly
Clean water, supply side, into finished space. That doesn't wait for a morning window — I'm putting the on-call tech on with you now, and staying on the line while it rings. Leave the main closed, photograph everything before you clean up, and start pulling water and moving air.
The main is closed and the on-call tech is on the phone with the intake in front of him: clean water off a supply line, shut off inside the first two minutes of the call, finished basement, no gas. Nothing was quoted, nothing was diagnosed, and nobody was told it could wait until morning.
- Is water running right now
- Gas or rotten-egg smell
- Is the main shut off, and can they get to it
- Standing water near outlets, the panel, or appliances
- Clean water or sewage
- Source and spread
- Whole house or one fixture, and whether there's any water at all
- Property type, and owner or tenant
- Full service address, validated against your area
- A callback number, read back
The judgment is yours.
It just applies it every time.
The first question, before the name. Uncontained water is a different call from a contained drip, and everything downstream branches off the answer.
Asked early and asked on every call. A yes stops the intake and becomes an evacuation — leave the building, no switches, no phones inside, call the gas utility and 911 from outside.
The one thing the caller can do that changes the size of the loss. If they don't know where it is, the agent walks them to it: where the supply enters, near the water heater, the crawlspace, the garage, or the meter at the curb.
Determines whether the caller should be walking in it at all, and whether the tech is stepping into an electrical hazard.
Category 1 off a supply line and Category 3 backing up out of a floor drain are not the same job. It changes who gets dispatched, what they bring, and whether restoration should be referred.
Fixture, ceiling, wall, slab, water heater, main line, or outside — and how many rooms, whether it's reached finished space, and whether it's coming through to a floor below.
Whole-house points at the main line or main supply. No water at all is its own urgency, and it isn't the same as too much water.
Single family, condo, HOA, rental, or commercial. The real question underneath it is whether the person on the phone can authorize the work.
Checked before anything is committed. An out-of-area call gets handed to you, not put on the schedule.
On an escalation the tech is calling this number in the next four minutes. A wrong digit undoes the whole call.
InsteadReads back the call-out or dispatch fee you set, labelled as the fee to come out. Not a repair range, not a "usually around." Plumbing is priced off your book after a tech sees it, and any number said on the phone becomes an anchor you have to argue out of.
Instead"Sounds like a slab leak" is a licensed judgment with liability attached. It takes symptoms — where, how much, clean or dirty, how long — and leaves the call to the tech.
InsteadHolds a window your schedule actually supports, or says the on-call tech will confirm timing directly. Never "someone will be there within the hour."
InsteadDeciding an active leak is non-urgent is a diagnosis with a claim-sized downside. Ambiguity escalates. A false alarm costs you a phone call.
InsteadTells the caller to leave the building now, not to touch switches or use a phone inside, and to call the gas company and 911 from outside. Then it stops. That call is not a job.
InsteadValidates the address before the calendar. Out of area gets a straight answer or a hand-off to you, not a slot.
InsteadShut-off, stay out of the water, start drying, take pictures. No drain chemicals, no relighting a pilot, no "try tightening the."
A generic receptionist
doesn’t know your year.
You write these once. Every call after that follows them the same way, at 2am as at 2pm.
- Gas or a rotten-egg smell, at any point in the call
- Hard stop. Leave the building, no switches or phones inside, call the gas utility and 911 from a safe distance. No truck, no booking, no exceptions.
- Active water that can't be shut off
- Warm transfer to the on-call phone, after the shut-off attempt. The damage clock runs whether or not anyone is awake.
- Sewage backing up into living space
- Warm transfer. Category 3 water means people and pets out of it, nothing more going down the drain, and a different dispatch than a clean-water leak.
- Water near the electrical panel, or an injury on scene
- Warm transfer, after telling the caller to stay clear. 911 first if anyone is hurt.
- No water at all to the property
- Warm transfer. A house with no water is not a next-day appointment.
- Water reaching a second unit, a neighbor, or a commercial tenant
- Warm transfer. The loss is now somebody else's property and somebody else's insurer.
- A service-agreement customer, or a call the agent can't classify
- Warm transfer. Priority is the whole thing a plan holder bought, and ambiguity escalates by default rather than guessing.
- No hot water, a slow drain, a running toilet, a contained drip with the water off, estimates and repipe questions
- Booked on the schedule. Nobody gets woken up for a dripping angle stop.
The two stretches a plumbing shop makes its year on — a hard freeze and Thanksgiving weekend — are precisely the two moments nobody is available to answer the phone. During Winter Storm Uri, ServiceTitan measured calls at Texas shops up 7× in the peak week, and plumbing revenue running +11% in January, +48% in February, +72% in March as the backlog cleared.
Burst pipes, frozen hose bibs, no hot water. Overnight and weekend heavy, and the worst on-call weeks of the year.
The historic shock month. Uri hit Feb 10–18. Backlog builds faster than trucks clear it, and techs burn out on rotation.
Backlog clearance. The thaw surfaces slab leaks and damage nobody saw in February.
Sewer and root work peaks, main line backups, slab leaks where dry soil shifts. Vacation coverage thins the bench.
Roto-Rooter's own numbers: calls up 50% the day after Thanksgiving versus an average Friday, +21% across the four-day weekend. Kitchen drains, disposals, grease, houses full of guests — and a holiday nobody wants to be on call for.
Holiday guests stacked on the first freezes. Drain and no-hot-water calls at holiday premium, and the year's most resented on-call assignments.
A caller can tell within one sentence whether the person on the line has done this before. The script is written in plumbing language.
Where the supply enters the house. Also the street valve or curb stop at the meter. The first thing worth finding at 2am.
Clean supply water versus grossly unsanitary — sewage, floodwater. Different dispatch, different PPE, different call about restoration.
Everything backing up at once rather than one fixture. Points at the lateral, not the P-trap.
The capped access to the line. Cutting one in is its own job.
A supply line failing under the slab. Detection, then repair or reroute — and it can turn into foundation work.
Corrosion through copper. One is a repair; three in a year is a repipe conversation.
Replacing the supply piping through the house. PEX or copper. The largest ticket in residential, and usually discovered on an emergency call.
Polybutylene. Still in the ground in some markets, and a live repipe driver.
Clearing the line with high-pressure water instead of a cable. Roots and grease.
Camera down the line. Sells itself on real estate transactions.
Temperature and pressure relief on a water heater. Discharging is not a nuisance drip.
The sacrificial rod in a tank heater. Gone means the tank is next, which is a replacement conversation.
The outside spigot. The first thing to split in a freeze.
Going back out on your own dime because the first visit didn't hold. Margin poison, same as every trade.
Everything above,
with its receipts.
It tells them to shut off the main before it books anything
The EPA writes it plainly: "It is important to dry water-damaged areas and items within 24-48 hours to prevent mold growth." That window opens the moment the pipe lets go, not the moment your truck arrives. Cloverly walks the caller to their main shut-off, tells them to stay out of standing water near outlets, and tells them to photograph everything before they clean up. Then it deals with scheduling. The house is smaller by the time you get there, and your shop is not the one that told them to sit tight.
Google's own docs say missed calls cost you rank
Google Local Services Ads lists responsiveness among the inputs to ad rank, and states it directly: "Missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness." That is about ranking, not billing — Google does not charge you for a call you never answered, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But the ads you already pay for get placed partly on whether the phone gets picked up. The 11pm ring you let go is placement you hand to the shop down the road.
Six hundred calls in forty-eight hours
During an arctic snap in Massachusetts, plumbing owner Carl Jonasson told CBS Boston: "I've probably fielded 600 calls and there's only so much we can do in a day." One condo complex had nineteen residents with burst pipes at once and was quoted next Tuesday. He is not a Cloverly customer — we have none, and this is his account of his own week, not a result we produced. It is here because it is the honest shape of a freeze: no human answers 600 calls in two days, and the twelfth caller in the queue dials the next shop.
Partly true, and we're not going to argue it away. On a real emergency the job isn't to replace your tech — it's to answer in one ring, get the water shut off, capture the address and callback, and put your on-call cell on the line. Today the alternative isn't a human either. It's voicemail, or a per-minute service that takes a message and calls you anyway. The human still gets the call. He just doesn't have to screen the other eleven.
It's free and it works, right up until you're under a house, asleep, or already on the other line. Forwarding is single-threaded. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Roto-Rooter's own calls were up 50% over an average Friday. In a freeze, ServiceTitan clocked 7×. And a forwarded call you miss is still a missed call as far as Google's ad ranking is concerned.
That's the weakest spot for any AI and we'll say so. Known numbers can route straight through to you. What Cloverly covers is the calls nobody is answering right now — the 2am one, and the seventh simultaneous one during a freeze. It's not standing in for the relationship. It's covering the gap where there's currently a mailbox.
Fair worry. The script is yours and the greeting is your shop's name. The thing the caller repeats to their spouse the next day is "they told me where my shut-off was at two in the morning," not "I talked to a robot." If you don't believe that, listen to it take a burst-pipe call and decide from there.
Probably right, and the trade press agrees the word has lost meaning — Plumbing & Mechanical argues urgency is a spectrum and the "emergency" label has stopped being a usable dispatch signal. That's an argument for triage, not for a mailbox. The price shopper at 11pm and the supply line at 2am dial the same number, and something has to tell them apart before your phone rings.
Straight answers.
No. Not a number, not a range, not a "usually around." It can read back your call-out or dispatch fee exactly as you wrote it, because that's a number you set and it describes showing up, not the repair. Everything else is priced off your book after a tech sees the job. Anything Cloverly said about price would become a promise you'd have to argue your way out of at the house.
It asks, in plain language: is this coming off a supply line or a clean fixture, or is it coming back up out of a toilet or a floor drain? That's Category 1 versus Category 3, and it changes the dispatch, what the tech brings, whether the caller should be standing in it, and whether restoration gets referred. It's the question a generic receptionist doesn't know exists.
Yes, and in that order. If they don't know where the main is, it walks them to it — where the supply enters the house, near the water heater, the crawlspace, the garage, the meter at the curb. For a leaking water heater it also points at the cold inlet on top of the unit. Scheduling happens after the water is off.
It stops trying to book. Leave the building now, don't touch switches, don't use a phone inside, call the gas utility and 911 from outside or a neighbor's. Then the call is handed to you as an escalation. It does not send a truck into a suspected gas leak and it does not keep collecting intake fields while somebody is standing in a house that smells like gas.
It isn't trying to decide what's real. Active water, sewage, gas, no water at all, or anything it can't classify escalates to your on-call phone by default. The bias toward over-escalation is deliberate and it's a setting you control. A false alarm costs you a phone call. Water damage and freezing averages $13,954 a claim, per Triple-I's ISO data for 2018 to 2022. Those are not symmetric mistakes and it isn't tuned as though they are.
All six get answered at the same time, because it isn't single-threaded. ServiceTitan measured incoming calls at 100-plus Texas shops jumping sevenfold during the peak week of Winter Storm Uri. A person answers one call at a time; caller seven hangs up and dials the next shop. Cloverly triages all of them, escalates the real ones, holds windows for the rest, and the price doesn't move with the volume.
An answering service takes a message and calls you anyway, so your phone still rings at 2am — and you're paying by the minute for it. PATLive publishes $460 a month for 200 minutes, then $2.20 a minute. Two hundred minutes is nothing on a freeze night, and per-minute billing pays for brevity on exactly the call where thoroughness matters. Cloverly is flat, so a freeze doesn't produce a surprise invoice. It also checks the address is in your area and gives the caller something useful before you ever pick up.
It will. We're pre-revenue with no customers, so we're not going to hand you an accuracy percentage — we haven't measured one and neither has anyone quoting you a number. What we can say is what's under your control: the escalation rules are yours, they're written down, and you change them. And the phone line degrades to forwarding your cell if anything on our side fails. Your phone never goes dead because of us.
Call it
yourself.
Leave your cell and it calls you — so the first thing you hear is the product taking a plumbing call. Or book 30 minutes with the team and we'll write your script on the call.
Call the AI that would answer your phone.
Pick your trade, leave your cell. The AI calls you back and takes the call the way it would take one for your shop.
We’re taking our first
plumbing shops now.
You’d be early, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Month to month, setup waived, and thirty days to decide — if it hasn’t booked you a job in that window, we refund the month in full.