About PlumbingHub
Hi, I'm Nick Jolliffe. PlumbingHub is written by me. There is no team, no panel of experts and no anonymous review desk. One person, one opinion, and a background worth explaining before you decide whether to trust any of it.
Where the experience comes from
I spent 16 years running plumbers merchants across the south of the UK, then a couple more years with an independent merchant. That is the trade counter rather than the spanner, and it is a genuinely useful place to judge products from.
Behind a trade counter you see the part of a product's life that reviews never cover. You see which brands come back through the returns door and how quickly. You see which taps and valves the fitters ask for by name, which ones they will not touch at any price, and which ones only get bought because they are cheap and then get bought again six months later. You see what the actual trade price is, so you know when a retail listing is a deal and when it is theatre. You hear the same complaint about the same product from thirty different fitters until it stops being an anecdote and becomes a fact.
That is what I bring to this site. Not installation technique, product judgement.
What I am not
I am not a plumber and I am not going to pretend to be one. I have never held a Gas Safe registration.
Anything on this site that touches gas appliances, unvented cylinders, or notifiable work will tell you to get a registered engineer in, because that is the law and because it is the right answer. If a guide here explains how something works, that is so you can have a competent conversation with the person doing the job, not so you can do it yourself.
Where I do give a straight recommendation is on products: which one to buy, what it should cost, what the difference is between the cheap one and the expensive one, and when the expensive one is not worth it.
How I choose what to recommend
Every product on this site has to clear the same bar. It has to be available in the UK now, from a retailer that will still be there in a year. It has to be something I would have been happy selling over a trade counter. And where a cheaper option does the same job, the cheaper option gets the recommendation and the expensive one gets explained.
I do not accept payment for placement, and no manufacturer has any say over what appears here.
How the site makes money
Honestly: affiliate links. If you buy something through a link on this site, the retailer pays me a small commission and you pay exactly the same price. That is the whole model, and it is disclosed on every page that carries one.
It is worth knowing what that does and does not influence. It means I have a reason to link to retailers rather than say "have a look around". It does not mean the expensive option gets recommended, because commission on a £40 tap and commission on a £120 tap are both small enough not to be worth lying for. If I ever recommend something purely because it pays well, the site is worthless and so is my name on it, and I would rather keep both.
The day job
These days I run Sonick Marketing, where I do digital marketing for small businesses. A good number of those are plumbers, heating engineers and other trades, which is how I ended up back around this industry from a different angle.
If you run a trade business and you want to talk about getting found online, that is the place to do it. If you are here to work out which water softener to buy, ignore all of that and carry on.
Get in touch
Corrections are welcome and I would rather hear about them than not. If something here is out of date, wrong, or no longer available, tell me and I will fix it.