[Closed] Thinking about becoming a plumber

The plumber I use used to be a prison officer, like wot I am, but he got as pi$$ed off as I am about the job, left & re-trained as a plumber & Gas Safe heating engineer. Dunno exactly how old he was but probly about 35 ish.
I'm screwed (pardon pun) cos I'm 54 so It's probably too late for me.
I reckon 50K is quite easily achievable.

That 50K figure was really based on London plumbers I reckon. We use a few plumbing outfits and they do ok but their lads dont get anywhere near 50K. I guess it all depends on the contacts you have and if you go light commercial/domestic or large commercial scale really. I am surprised that there is little work out there for a mechanical building services engineer though as we are really struggling to find people in this role as all the plumbers/ventilation installers we approach wont touch designs or drawing work and want us to provide these for them. Design seems to be a really big deal now especially with the tightening of Part L regs.

Organic355. Get your name down at the job centre for "interest in a plumbing appreticship" as the rule will be changing shortly with a top age of 25 I think. If you put your name down you will have beaten the deadline.
PS You'll need to be a good talker to get a job with a reputable plumbing company as a plumber used to serve 7 year appreticeships.
Good luck.

Organic, would love to earn those figures, think they are more London based and probably more heating engineers doing breakdown and call out work. Which if you are in it for the money is ok, but I would find it dull. Much prefer to do a mixture of plumbing.

Where abouts are you based?

You'll get sick of people moaning about how expensive a new boiler is. 🙄

You can buy a new combi for a £500, it's the fitting which bumps it up to exorbitant figures - just DIY as it's really not that hard...

or you could work for the right sort of clients who appreciate your work and pay for quality......

There are plenty of 'career change' training centres telling you to become a spark or a plumber and earn thousands. The only people earning good money from this are the training centres. Do some research. How many plumbers are there in your yellow pages? All this talk of shortages in the trades sector is rubbish - there's nothing of the sort. By all means go for it but don't expect to get rich. I jacked everything in and retrained as a spark two years ago and struggled for nearly a year self employed. However, as a direct result of this, I am now a solar PV system designer and installer, which is nice.

Not sure how apprenticeships work these days, but my wife is now in the final months of her plumbing apprenticeship with a local council and she's 38.

+1 what Dudie said. All that news coverage a fews years back about the money plumbers could earn because of a shortage then all of a sudden everbodys training to be a plumber. Plus everybody thinks of boilers, what about the s**t end of the job, toilets! Sorry couldn't resist that one.

The whole idea and concept of an aprenticeship is that youre constantly supervised, learn from a few people attend a college on day release and get paid.

Thats what i did, but not as a plumber.

or you pay a training company thousands who train you the basics and then youre on youre on your own, with nobody to tell your youre making a balls up, otr that want work, then wonder why the customer doesnt pay.

Oh and its almost compulsory to have VW transporter, and add a zero onto every esstimate.

PS dont forget all the tools you have to buy as well.