Nassau County does not license plumbers — it is municipal or it is nothing. We hold the Town of Hempstead licence, which covers Levittown, East Meadow, Merrick, Wantagh and the rest of the unincorporated Town.
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631-587-0085WE ANSWER EVERY CALLFirst, the thing that confuses everybody: the Town of Hempstead and the Village of Hempstead are two different governments. The Town holds close to 800,000 people and is the largest township in New York State. The Village is one of the 22 incorporated villages sitting inside it, with its own building department. NJM holds a master plumber licence from the Town, issued by the Town’s own five-member Plumbers’ Examining Board — which matters because Nassau County does not license plumbers at all. There is no county licence to fall back on here. It is municipal or it is nothing.
What the Town licence covers directly is the unincorporated half of Hempstead, and that half is enormous: Levittown, East Meadow, Elmont, Baldwin, Oceanside, Uniondale, Franklin Square, Merrick, West Hempstead, Wantagh, Roosevelt, Bellmore, Seaford, North Merrick. Roughly 350,000 people whose plumbing, gas and mechanical permits go straight through the Town Building Department on Washington Street, with no village licence in between.
It is also some of the most consistent housing stock anywhere in the country, because most of it went up in the same handful of years after the war. Every ZIP we looked at across the Town peaks in the 1940s. And one piece of it — Levittown — was built to a single design at a scale nobody has attempted since, which means the same problem is now arriving in seventeen thousand houses at roughly the same time.
Master PlumberLicensed to pull permits
TASK 86/87Certified for gas work
Navien NSSFactory-trained on tankless22+ years on Long Island · Plumbing, heating, cooling, gas and contracting under one roof
We don’t charge to quote a job. We do charge to find a problem nobody has identified yet. Which one you need — and what it costs — gets agreed on the phone, so nothing about the cost is a surprise on the doorstep.
You get the number on the phone, before anyone is dispatched, and it is what you are charged when the technician arrives. One rate across all four trades — plumbing, heating, cooling and gas.
A licensed, insured technician carrying the certifications the work needs, and the time to find what has actually failed — not a quick look and a guess.
A call-out advertised at almost nothing gets recovered once someone is standing in your basement. Get the number before anyone travels — from us, or from anyone else you call — and hold them to it when they arrive.
A boiler that fails in January is not a purchase anyone planned. Financing is available on the big-ticket work, so a system replacement does not have to come out of savings in one go.
Boiler, furnace and water heater replacement, a full air conditioning system, a whole-house repipe, sewer and water main work, and larger contracting jobs — kitchens, bathrooms, dormers and extensions.
At the estimate, before anything is scheduled. It is worth asking even if you think you will not need it, because knowing it is there changes what you are willing to consider fixing properly.
The price of the job. The quote is the quote whether you finance it or not — and on a straightforward repair it is usually not worth the paperwork. We will tell you which one you are looking at.
Some of these will save you a job rather than sell you one. They are on the page because the ones that save you money are what make the rest of it worth believing.
If your system is losing water into the ground, a new boiler will lose water into the ground too — faster, because it is more efficient at pushing it. Boiler replacements get sold into this problem constantly. The pressure loss has to be diagnosed before anyone quotes equipment, and if it is the floor, the answer is a conversion, not a boiler.
Uneven cooling in a slab ranch is nearly always airflow — a system added years after the house was built, ducted wherever there was room. Oversizing makes it worse: the unit short-cycles, cools the air without pulling the humidity out, and leaves the house cold and clammy. We do the load calculation before we quote a box.
Nassau County’s own hazard assessment puts Levittown at 0.0% of improved property in the 100-year flood zone, and East Meadow at 0.1%. If someone is selling you flood-related mechanical work inland, ask them which map they are reading. The exposure in this Town is real but it is on the south shore and the barrier islands.
Hempstead is stricter than its neighbours here. Under § 352B(3) new AND replacement heating, air conditioning and plumbing service equipment must sit at least two feet above base flood elevation — where Islip, North Hempstead and Babylon put equipment at BFE and only the lowest floor at BFE plus two. Do not let anyone apply the wrong number to your job in Island Park, Oceanside, Seaford, Wantagh, Bellmore or Merrick.
The same flood section requires sanitary sewage systems in flood-hazard areas to include automatic backflow valves. If you are on the south shore and have had sewage come back up during a storm, that is a code requirement you may be missing rather than an accessory somebody invented.
Nassau County lists a named sewer authority for effectively every Hempstead community, with Point Lookout and Atlantic Beach the notable exceptions. If you are being quoted septic or cesspool work in Levittown, Merrick or East Meadow, it is worth establishing what you are actually connected to first.
Radiant heat in a slab is a lovely way to heat a house. Warm floors, no radiators taking up wall space, no blowing air. When it works there is nothing better. The problem in Levittown is not the idea, it is how fast it had to be done and what was left out to do it that fast. The trade literature on these systems — Dan Holohan’s work is the standard reference — records crews installing up to five systems a day, with no insulation under or at the edges of the slab and no vapour barrier beneath it.
What that means in practice is that the failures are silent. When the buried copper finally goes, the water does not come up through your floor and announce itself. It soaks away into the ground underneath. What you notice instead is a boiler that keeps needing water added, a heating bill that has quietly climbed, one part of the house that never gets warm, or a system that will not hold pressure. People chase those symptoms round the boiler for a couple of seasons before anyone suggests the floor.
And roughly twenty years is what the trade literature records these systems giving. That is not a defect so much as arithmetic — thin copper, in constant contact with concrete and damp soil, with no barrier between them. Most Levittown houses are on their second or third heating arrangement by now, and a good many abandoned the slab decades ago. If yours is still running on the original coils, it has substantially outlived what anyone expected of it.
The honest answer is that you do not repair it. There is no economic way to find and fix a leak in copper buried in a slab under a finished house, and replacing the tubing means taking up the floor. What is actually done — and what the trade literature describes as the standard remedy — is to disconnect the buried loop, leave it in the ground, and put the heat back in above the floor with baseboard convectors. Modern installs use PEX rather than copper, but in an occupied Levittown ranch, baseboard is usually the sane answer.
Which is where doing four trades under one roof stops being a slogan. That conversion is three jobs at once. It is a heating job — new distribution, re-piping the boiler, zoning a house that never had zones. It is a plumbing job. And it is a carpentry job, because baseboard has to go round the whole perimeter of a house whose walls, flooring and trim were never designed to have anything run along them. A heating company on its own gets you two thirds of the way and then hands you a phone number. We do the lot with one schedule and one company answering for it.
Abandoning a failed slab loop and putting the heat back above the floor — boiler re-piping, zoning, baseboard, and the carpentry to make it look like it was always there.
Installation, service and straight repair-or-replace advice. In a post-war Hempstead house the heating plant is usually on its second life already.
Every ZIP across the Town peaks in the 1940s. Original supply piping at that age tends to fail in threes. We find the leak properly before anything is opened up.
A slab house with no basement and no duct chases is exactly where ductless earns its keep — several indoor heads, individual thermostats, no ductwork to invent.
TASK 86/87 certified. The Town requires its own gas piping permit before any pipe is run from the meter to an appliance, filed separately from the plumbing permit.
Gas, oil and propane, including high-efficiency tankless. Navien NSS certified.
The plumbing, gas and mechanical handled by the same licensed team as the building work, rather than three trades waiting on each other.
Every day of the year, across the Town. Southern State and Sunrise run straight west from our shop in North Babylon.
What it says on the coupon is what comes off the bill. Mention it when you call.
A few tells. There are no radiators and no baseboard on the walls, or there is baseboard that looks newer than the house. The boiler has a feed line that gets used more than it should. There is no basement and the floor is warm in some rooms and not others. And the strongest tell of all: somebody has to keep adding water to the system. If you are adding water regularly, water is going somewhere, and in a slab house it is usually going into the ground. Call us and describe what the boiler is doing — a lot of this can be narrowed down before anyone comes out.
Honestly, no — and anyone who tells you otherwise should explain how. The tubing is buried in poured concrete under a finished floor, the leak drains away underground so it does not announce its location, and even if it were located precisely, getting to it means breaking up the slab and the floor above it. You would then be repairing seventy-year-old copper that is failing everywhere else at the same rate. The standard remedy in the trade is to abandon the loop in place and put the heat back above the floor. It sounds drastic and it is actually the cheaper answer.
Ask us with the address, because the answer genuinely varies and we would rather check than guess. The Town of Hempstead has 22 incorporated villages inside it and they do not all work the same way. Some accept the Town licence directly. Some issue their own on the strength of it. At least nine run their own examining boards where a Town licence is not automatically enough. NJM holds the Town licence and, separately, a Village of Rockville Centre licence — we went and got that one because Rockville Centre does not accept anybody else’s. Where we are not the right people to pull a village plumbing permit we will tell you before you book, and the heating, cooling, gas and contracting work is a separate question with a separate answer.
No, and this surprises people. Nassau County licenses home improvement contractors, home services, locksmiths and a long list of other trades — but not plumbers. The County’s own home improvement application says all subcontractors "except plumbers and electricians" must be licensed with that department. So in Nassau, plumbing licensing is entirely municipal: town and village. If a contractor tells you they hold a Nassau County plumber’s licence, that is worth a follow-up question, because the County does not issue one.
This is the common Levittown and Island Trees problem and it has two good answers. Ductless is often the better one rather than the fallback — one outdoor unit running several indoor heads, each on its own thermostat, no ductwork required and no attic or crawl space to fight over. It heats as well as cools, which in a house with heating trouble is worth something on its own. The alternative is a ducted system run through the attic, which works well in some of these houses and badly in others depending on what has been done up there. We install both, so we have no reason to push you toward either.
Yes. The Town runs a separate gas piping permit under § 86-10C(2), required before any pipe is installed to carry gas from the meter to an appliance — it is not covered by the plumbing permit. The Town also appoints its own Plumbing Inspectors, who have to hold ten years in the trade plus five years as a licensed master plumber, and plumbing work gets its own certificate of approval separate from the building one. We file both and handle the scheduling; you do not need to deal with the Buildings Department on Washington Street yourself.
For this Town, yes — and it is worth understanding rather than panicking about. The stock went up in a compressed burst after the war, so the supply piping, the drain lines, the heating distribution and the electrical service all reach the end of their design lives within a few years of each other. That is why the third leak turns up two months after the first. When it starts happening in threes it is usually cheaper to plan a sequence than to keep paying for emergencies, and we will tell you which order we would do it in — including which parts can safely wait.
Across the Town, and it is a genuine service area rather than a map we drew — the licence is real and we hold it. Levittown, East Meadow, Elmont, Baldwin, Oceanside, Uniondale, Franklin Square, Merrick, West Hempstead, Wantagh, Roosevelt, Bellmore, Seaford and North Merrick are all unincorporated and permitted through the Town. Call 631-587-0085 with the address and we will be straight about scheduling instead of optimistic.
Based in North Babylon, working across both counties — close enough to get there fast, local enough to know the housing stock and the permit offices.
Proudly serving all of Nassau and Suffolk County, with deep local roots near our North Babylon home base.
Get A Free Estimate5 out of 5 stars
The experience I had with with NJM Mechanical & Contracting was a pleasant one. I had the pleasure of doing business with Neil. The work I had done was a basement entrance to my yard and it came out wonderful. The work performed as well as the communication is 10/10.
5 out of 5 stars
Neil has handled all my A/C needs over the years. He's very communicative and open about service charges. He never steers you wrong
5 out of 5 stars
As always, Neil is a pleasure to have as my plumber. He is so professional and knowledgeable. I wouldn't use anyone else! I highly, highly recommend him.
Free estimates with no obligation, 24/7 emergency response, and 22+ years serving homes and businesses across Nassau and Suffolk County.
