An emergency call to Mercer Plumbing & Drain starts the same way every time. Diane answers if it's during business hours; one of the senior techs answers after hours. They ask two questions: What's leaking, and where's it leaking from? Then they ask a third: Where's your main shut-off valve? If you don't know, they tell you how to find it (front yard near the meter, or in the basement against the foundation wall). Then they dispatch.
The senior tech on rotation gets the truck on the road within 12 minutes of the call. Inside the I-485 loop our average arrival time is 47 minutes — measured from the moment you hang up the phone to the moment the headlights pull into your driveway. We track it because Travis is a stickler about it. Every emergency call gets a timestamp, every truck gets a clock-in time, and Diane runs the numbers monthly.
The truck carries the parts inventory most emergency jobs need. Sweat fittings, PEX, shark-bite, common shut-off valves, flex supply lines, wax rings, supply hoses, P-traps, sump-pump checkvalves, the most common water-heater elements and thermostats. About 85% of our emergency calls get resolved on the first visit. The rest are the ones we have to come back for in the morning with a permit or a specific part.
What counts as a plumbing emergency?
A plumbing emergency is any failure that is currently causing water damage, sewage exposure, or loss of essential service. If it can wait until morning safely, we'll schedule it for tomorrow. If it can't, we dispatch tonight. Here is what counts.
- Burst supply lines
- Active water spraying or pooling from a copper, PEX, or galvanized supply line. Shut off the main first.
- Sewer backups
- Sewage coming up through a floor drain, tub, or lowest-fixture toilet. Stop using water immediately and call.
- Water heater leaks
- Active leak from the tank itself (not the relief valve dripping, which can wait). Shut off the heater's water and gas/power supply.
- No hot water · cold snap
- Loss of hot water during a winter freeze counts as an emergency because of the secondary risk to supply lines. Other times of year it can wait until morning.
- Active flooding · any fixture
- Toilet, sink, tub, dishwasher, washing machine — anywhere water is actively escaping the system. Shut off the local valve if you can.
- Gas-line leaks
- Call 911 first. Evacuate the structure. Call us second, from outside, and we will dispatch as soon as fire/gas company has cleared the home.
What we charge for emergency calls
We are not the cheapest emergency plumber in Charlotte, and we are not trying to be. We are the one where you know the price before we open the toolbox. Here is the after-hours pricing structure, complete, with nothing hidden.
| After-hours dispatch fee | $129 * |
| Diagnostic + inspection | $69 † |
| Emergency rate · 1-hour minimum | $185 / hr |
| Standard repair parts | retail · no markup |
* Waived if total repair exceeds $400 · † Applied to repair if you book
"You will know the price before we open the toolbox. We don't quote in 'hours-of-labor.' We quote in dollars." — Travis Mercer
Our 24/7 dispatch
The after-hours line is a real rotation. Andre Washington, Marcus Bell, and David Trujillo split the on-call duty week by week. The tech on call sleeps with the phone at the bedside. When you call, an AI receptionist (we use Twilio + Grok — no euphemisms) takes the first 15 seconds to capture your name and the address and the nature of the problem, and then it rings the on-call tech directly. If the tech doesn't answer in 60 seconds, it rings Travis. If Travis doesn't answer in 60 seconds, it rings Diane.
Three rings to a human. Always. The AI is not pretending to be a person. It tells you it's an AI. Then it gets you to a person.
Most calls reach a tech inside 30 seconds. The 38-second figure is our average. We measured it. We publish it because most emergency-plumber landing pages claim "we answer immediately!" and don't define what that means. Ours means: 38 seconds, measured from your call hitting our number to a human plumber saying hello.
What a $1,500 emergency call could have been
About half of the emergency calls we get are sewer-line backups that started weeks earlier as a slow drain. The customer noticed the kitchen sink draining slower than usual in March, then forgot about it. In April it backed up into the dishwasher. In May it overflowed into the basement at 11pm on a Sunday. That $1,500 emergency call could have been a $189 drain cleaning in March.
We are not in the business of upselling preventive maintenance plans. We don't sell those. But we will tell you what we'd tell our own families: a $189 drain cleaning every two years on Charlotte's older neighborhoods (Plaza Midwood, Dilworth, Elizabeth, Myers Park, Eastover) is cheaper than the emergency call you'll otherwise make in the rainy season. Read more on the drain cleaning page for what hydro-jetting actually does and whether you need it.