There are plumbers, and there are plumbers. Stemmle, the company with the funny name and the cool, little trucks, has kept Richmond flowing, warm and cool, for more than 25 years.

What makes Stemmle so endearing is their commitment to new techniques, like the no-dig technology that allows them to approach problems from the inside out, instead of the traditional dig-and-pray method.

Why is this important? Because pipes are often buried below irreplaceable wood floors and behind plaster walls. Sometimes it's impossible to even know where the pipes are, where they go or why. Traditionally, the only way to figure it all out was by a destructive method - exposing the pipes from the outside. Instead, Stemmle will put a liner inside an old pipe. "We can give it a 50-year life expectancy which is the same as new pipes," says owner John Stemmle, plus "you could never tell we were there."

(As ran in the September '07 issue of RHome magazine)