Hear from Our Customers
When something goes wrong with your plumbing, you’re not thinking about the long-term history of your pipes. You’re thinking about the water on the floor, the smell coming from the drain, or the fact that you have no hot water and it’s January. What you need is someone who shows up, tells you exactly what’s wrong and what it costs, and fixes it that day. That’s the experience we’ve built Murray Plumbing around.
Newcastle’s housing stock tells the whole story. Many homes here — especially the older in-town properties along Old State Highway and Buena Vista Avenue — were built decades ago with plumbing systems that have never been comprehensively updated. The same aging infrastructure that pushed Placer County Water Agency and South Placer Municipal Utility District to launch a $2.4 million pipeline replacement project along those very streets in 2025 is a signal about what’s happening inside the walls of homes connected to those mains. When the public lines are that far gone, the private laterals connecting your Newcastle home to them are typically right there with them — and those are entirely your responsibility.
Add in Newcastle’s foothill winters, where temperatures have dropped to single digits, and you have a community where plumbing failures aren’t hypothetical. They’re a real, recurring part of owning a home here. The good news is that most of these problems — frozen pipes, aging laterals, slow drains, water heater failures — are fixable the same day you call, when you have the right contractor on the line.
We founded Murray Plumbing in 2009 with deep roots in the Sierra Nevada foothills — the same foothill geology, the same aging housing stock, the same freeze-thaw winters that Newcastle homeowners deal with every year. This isn’t a Sacramento franchise with a Newcastle page on its website. We’re a locally rooted plumbing repair company that has spent over 15 years working on the kind of homes that define this region.
We serve El Dorado, Sacramento, and Placer County — and Newcastle sits squarely in that territory. Our team holds a California C-36 Plumbing Contractor License, carries full insurance, and operates under the permit requirements of Placer County Building Services, which governs all plumbing work in unincorporated communities like Newcastle. You can verify our license directly on the CSLB website before anyone sets foot in your home.
Our 4.7-star Google rating across 93-plus reviews isn’t a number we put on a banner. It’s what happens when you show up on time, tell the truth about what something costs, and fix it right the first time.
When you call Murray Plumbing, you’re not leaving a message for a dispatch center. You’re getting a fast response from a team that knows Placer County and can get to Newcastle the same day for most repairs. The first conversation is simple: you describe what’s happening, and we ask the right questions to understand whether this is an urgent situation or something that can be scheduled at your convenience. Either way, we move quickly.
Once on-site, our technician assesses the problem before quoting anything. You get a flat-rate price — the exact number, before any work begins. No hourly clock running in the background, no verbal estimate that turns into a different written bill. If you’re dealing with a sewer issue, that assessment may include a camera inspection to see what’s actually happening inside the line, which is especially useful in older Newcastle homes where root intrusion from mature orchard trees is a common culprit. If it’s a water line concern — particularly relevant given the ongoing PCWA infrastructure work along Old State Highway — we can assess your private lateral and tell you exactly what condition it’s in.
Because Newcastle is an unincorporated community, permitted plumbing work goes through Placer County Building Services, not a city building department. We handle that process as part of the job, so you’re not left managing paperwork you’ve never dealt with before.
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Newcastle homes aren’t all the same, and neither are their plumbing problems. We handle the full range — from a backed-up drain on an acreage property off Rattlesnake Bar Road to a burst pipe in an older in-town home, to a water heater that gave out overnight in the middle of February. Our service list covers plumbing repair and emergency plumbing services, drain cleaning and hydro jetting, sewer repair and trenchless sewer repair, camera inspection, water heater repair and replacement, water line repair and waterline replacement, and leak detection — both trenchless and traditional.
For Newcastle specifically, a few services come up more than others. Pipe repair and water line repair are common in older homes with galvanized steel or cast iron lines that have reached the end of their service life. Sewer camera inspection and hydro jetting address the root intrusion issues that come with the mature trees throughout Newcastle — the same orchard legacy that made this community famous in the 19th century creates real problems for sewer laterals in dry summers. And for homeowners along Old State Highway and Buena Vista Avenue whose public mains are currently being replaced, it’s worth knowing the condition of your private lateral before the connection point changes.
We also offer water softening, filtration, and reverse osmosis systems — relevant here because PCWA’s treated water carries mineral content that builds up over time in pipes and water heaters, shortening their lifespan in ways that are easy to miss until something fails.
The $2.4 million project replacing aging water and sewer mains along Old State Highway and Buena Vista Avenue in Newcastle is replacing the public infrastructure — the mains that run under the street. What it doesn’t cover is the private service lateral connecting your home to that main. That section of pipe, from the main to your house, is entirely your responsibility as the homeowner.
When public mains are replaced after decades of use, the private laterals connected to them are typically the same age and in the same condition. In some cases, the connection point itself may need to be updated to match the new main. If you live along the project corridor in Newcastle and haven’t had your lateral inspected, now is a practical time to do it — not because anything is necessarily wrong, but because knowing the condition of that pipe before a failure forces the issue is always less expensive than dealing with it as an emergency. We can run a camera inspection and give you a straight answer about what’s there.
Yes — Newcastle’s elevation of 1,311 feet puts it well above the Sacramento Valley floor, and the foothill winters here are real. The all-time recorded low for Newcastle is 5°F, and temperatures regularly drop toward freezing during cold snaps. Placer County Water Agency explicitly warns foothill customers, including those in Newcastle, that frozen pipes on private property are the homeowner’s responsibility to repair.
If your pipes freeze, the first thing to do is shut off the water at the main shutoff valve to limit damage if a pipe has already cracked. Don’t try to thaw a pipe with an open flame — that’s a fire risk and can damage the pipe further. A heat gun or warm towels on exposed sections can help if you know exactly where the freeze is, but if you’re dealing with pipes inside walls or in a crawl space, call us. A burst pipe in a Newcastle foothill home at elevation in January is not a situation where waiting to see what happens is a good strategy. We respond to emergency calls the same day, including for freeze-related failures.
If your home was built before the 1980s and the sewer lateral has never been inspected or replaced, that’s reason enough on its own. But there are also specific warning signs to watch for: drains that are slow across multiple fixtures at once, gurgling sounds from your toilet when you run the sink, sewage odor in the yard, or wet patches in the lawn that don’t correspond to irrigation or recent rain. Any of these can point to a compromised sewer line.
In Newcastle, root intrusion is a particularly common cause. The community’s mature trees — many of them descendants of the orchard plantings that defined Newcastle’s agricultural history — have deep, aggressive root systems that seek moisture in dry summers. Sewer laterals are a primary target. A camera inspection puts eyes on exactly what’s inside the pipe without any digging. If roots are present, hydro jetting can clear them. If the pipe itself is damaged or collapsed, trenchless sewer repair is often the most cost-effective fix — it avoids excavating through landscaping or hardscape, which in older Newcastle foothill properties can be a significant additional cost.
Newcastle is an unincorporated community, which means it falls under Placer County jurisdiction rather than a city government. Plumbing permits here are issued through Placer County Building Services, not a city building department. Whether a permit is required depends on the scope of the work — routine repairs like clearing a clogged drain or replacing a faucet typically don’t require one, but larger work like water line replacement, sewer lateral repair, or water heater installation generally does.
Any permitted plumbing work in Placer County must be performed by a California C-36 Licensed Plumbing Contractor or under the direct supervision of one. This matters for homeowners because work done without the required permits can create complications when you sell the property, and in some cases can affect your homeowner’s insurance coverage if an unlicensed repair causes subsequent damage. We hold the required C-36 license and handle the Placer County permit process as part of the job — you don’t have to figure out the paperwork on your own.
Traditional sewer repair means digging. A trench is opened along the path of the damaged pipe, the old pipe is removed or repaired, and then the trench is backfilled and the surface above it — whether that’s a lawn, driveway, or landscaping — has to be restored. In older Newcastle properties with established landscaping, mature trees, or long pipe runs across acreage, that excavation and restoration cost can be substantial.
Trenchless sewer repair addresses the same problem through a much smaller access point. Depending on the method, the damaged pipe is either lined with a resin that cures in place to form a new pipe inside the old one, or a new pipe is pulled through while the old one is broken apart. The result is a repaired or replaced sewer line without the excavation. For most homeowners, trenchless repair costs less overall once you account for what you’re not spending on digging, restoration, and landscaping repair. We offer both trenchless and traditional sewer repair, and can tell you which approach makes sense for your specific situation after a camera inspection.
Low water pressure across your whole house and low pressure at a single fixture are two different problems with different causes. If it’s just one faucet or showerhead, the issue is usually a clogged aerator or a partially closed valve — something simple. If pressure is low throughout the house, that points to something further upstream: a failing pressure regulator, a partially closed main shutoff, a significant leak somewhere in the line, or — in older Newcastle homes — mineral scale buildup inside aging pipes that has gradually reduced the interior diameter over years of hard water use.
PCWA’s treated water in the foothill region carries mineral content from the American River system, and that scale accumulates over time inside pipes and water heaters. In a Newcastle home with original galvanized pipes that are 40 or 50 years old, the inside of those pipes may be significantly narrowed by buildup. That’s not something you can fix with a filter — it typically means pipe replacement. A licensed plumber can assess the pressure at different points in your system to isolate where the drop is occurring, which tells you a lot about what the actual fix needs to be. We carry out that diagnostic as part of any water line repair assessment.
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