For Robert Gonzalez, MegaPress products have proved to be something that keeps his small company competitive in today’s market. And while he initially saw some potential benefits to using MegaPress and ProPress, once he put Viega to work he started to realize how much more efficient his crew could be. Now it’s a solution he relies on.
“We do a lot of things 2½ inches and up, so when I saw that MegaPress had come out in the larger sizes, I wanted to try it,” Gonzales said. “We’d start a project on a Monday, and the welder would show up and take two or three days to prep and prefab everything, and I’d have to put two guys on it to help. We had to schedule around the welder. Then on the fourth day, we’d get our plumbers back and they’d run copper. In all, it was taking us five days total to do these laundromats we’ve been fitting.”
That changed with a laundromat in San Antonio, where RG Plumbing Houston used Viega ProPress and MegaPress.
“It blew everybody away,” Gonzalez said. “We started on a Monday, and by Wednesday the whole job was done! The gas was done in one day, where it’d been taking the welder three days.”
Gonzalez comes from a family of Master Plumbers, so he said he’s seen how the industry has changed through the years. Today he knows the older and younger generations of plumbers think about and approach jobs differently, noting that he doesn’t believe that many of the older workers are interested in “making the industry better.”
“It’s hard to change the mentality. They’re stuck in their ways,” Gonzalez said. “It’s hard to embrace the new technology. But I want to connect that bridge between the generations. I strongly believe that Viega has taken the steps forward to do that.”
At the laundromat that RG Plumbing Houston worked on in San Antonio, all the plumbing is done with ProPress, and the gas lines are run with MegaPressG fittings. The building has 44 washing machines and 16 dryers; a 4” gas main services the dryers with a loop system, so there’s no pressure loss. The location also has three tankless water heaters fueled with MegaPressG. The 2” copper main line feeds all the washing machines via ProPress fittings and valves.
Gonzalez said the ProPress check valves were a huge hit on the project. “We learned that Viega’s check valves are amazing. You can squeeze them into a tight spot and that’s really great,” he said.
Since finding success at the location in San Antonio, Gonzalez said he has moved completely to MegaPress. And while he admits he was hesitant about press, once he crunched the numbers and tried it out, he realized Viega’s technology was a game changer for his company.
