Business & Tech

Meet Jeff and Tiffany Nunes, Owners of Nunes Quality Plumbing and Heating

Through 22 years of marriage and business partnership, Jeff and Tiffany Nunes have seen it all.

Windsor residents Jeff and Tiffany Nunes have been married for 22 years, and they've been in business together just as long. With Jeff out in the field using his 30-plus years of plumbing and heating experience to ease the woes of customers in distress, and Tiffany making sure the business side of is running up to snuff, the Windsor couple has come to establish a well-known business in town that takes pride in being on a first-name basis with its loyal customers and providing honest, top-notch work.

With a list of services that's about as lengthy and diverse as the entertaining plumbing stories they have to tell, Jeff and Tiffany Nunes have seen it all. Windsor Patch recently sat down with the couple to discuss their successful business, bizarre plumbing stories and more.

Windsor Patch: You've been married and in business together for 22 years now. How did you go about getting married and immediately going into business together?

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Jeff Nunes: Here's the ironic part: I worked for another company out of Bloomfield for years, and the end of the 80's was like it is now. That was our last recession ... We were building (our) house, getting married in the same year, and the company I used to work for — I worked for them for five years or so — I got laid off. The economy was hurting; nobody was building houses; people were getting burned left and right; people weren't paying their bills.

I said, "I can't afford to be laid off right now." I didn't want to collect... So, a couple family members, some friends said, "Hey, I've got something I could have you do..." Next thing you know, I had a couple days worth of work, and I found I was making as much in a couple days as I was busting my butt for a week for the other guys. That pushed me out on my own.

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It's funny how things come full circle.

WP: What's contributed to your success over the years?

Tiffany Nunes: Yin and Yang. He's good at what he does. I'm good at what I do.

JN: Also, I'll be honest with you, I don't sell anybody something that they don't need. I went to a job yesterday, and she said she needed a new garbage disposal. I went in there with my tools and a new garbage disposal ... I hit the reset button, I un-jammed it, and the thing runs like a champ ... She was happy. I said, "I could have sold you a new one, but it's not the right thing to do."

WP: What do you enjoy about the plumbing and heating business?

TN: I'll tell you what it is. It's when I talk to our customers, they tell me my husband's a hero. They say, "He saved the day."

JN: For me, it's trying to figure something out. I love troubleshooting. You have no heat? I want to figure out why. That's my thing. I enjoy piping things and standing back, looking at it, and thinking, "That looks pretty good. I did that." I enjoy that.

WP: What are the most common calls for service that you receive?

TN: The most common calls, I would say, are leaks and clogged drains, which could be the kitchen, could be the bathroom toilet... [Customers] see water; they see stains on their ceiling; they see a puddle. We have to figure out the source of the leak and properly diagnose, because water travels. You could have a leak on the left side of the house, and yet the puddle is on the right side of the house. And sometimes we have to tear down walls... Sometimes we rip up tile. It can ge pretty ugly.

WP: Are there any calls that stick out in your mind as being the most bizarre?

TN: In light of the Shad Derby coming up, one year we had a call from ... the restaurant that is now Dom's — it was another restaurant before ... We got a call for a toilet that needed to be snaked, or unclogged. We call it snaked. So Jeff's got the machinery, and it has kind of a spear on the end of it. And he can feel when he hits something (in the toilet). Sometimes you can push it through; a lot of times you do, thankfully, because you don't always want to see what's on the other end of that. Well that particular time, he pulled up a Shad. He pulled up a fish out of the toilet.

Our theory is somebody won it — remember they had the fishing contest over on the Green? So we figure somebody won a fish out of the fishing derby, didn't want it, and decided to flush it down the toilet. Except it didn't go down.

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WP: When it comes to plumbing, people always try to fix things themselves. Are there certain things that people tend to mess up the most?

TN: Well, when they take things apart it's sometimes a bad thing. When we get there it's all in a million pieces.

JN: That's all happened since the home centers have come about, and I don't begrudge anybody for trying to fix their own stuff. Listen, I do my own electrical; I do a lot of my own stuff too, it's just that they don't know how far to push the envelope.

WP: Are there certain things that people commonly try to fix, but mess up time and time again?

JN: It's toilets and faucets. Those are the biggest things.

TN: You would be surprised at how many parts and how many pieces are in a faucet. They buy a faucet at a home store, and then they get it home and there's a bag full of 50 parts.

WP: Being in the business for over two decades, have you seen it change at all?

JN: Drastically. Materials that we use — gas piping, years ago, was all black steel pipe... A lot of the piping now is flexible and it comes in a big roll. It's all about saving time and money; get it done faster. All the water piping, years ago, was copper. Now it's all plastic. Everybody's going to plastic because copper's very expensive, people are stealing copper out of houses left and right.

TN: From a business perspective... What I see is the cost of everything has just sky-rocketed. The cost of materials... the cost of doing business in the state of Connecticut for your insurance and your liability insurance... is just crazy.

WP: In this economy, business has gone down for a lot of people, but people always need a good plumber. How have you seen business change during these times?

TN: I think [the plumbing business] is recession-proof. Granted we get more heating calls in the winter... But we've been pretty consistently busy.

JN: Like you said, everybody's got plumbing... but, the economy, everybody feels it. People ask, "Can you do a little better?" when I'm bidding a job. It used to be they just give you a call and say "Come get it done" and I give [them] a bill. Now I'm getting three or four prices. So it's made a difference and it has impacted us that way.

WP: What separates your business from other plumbing businesses?

TN: The phone rings and somebody will say, "Hi Tiffany." We know everybody on a first-name basis. A lot of the time we know their circumstances... We know if she lost her husband or she lost her job. We know a lot about our customers, and I think there's a better level of intimacy when you really care.


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