How We Get Our Numbers

Every price on this site is a typical installed range — the new equipment, labour, code-required parts, disposal, and permit. Not a teaser price that doubles once someone's in your basement.

Our ranges come from open-source sampling of published prices, not private quotes we solicit. For each service we read the installed prices BC plumbing and heating companies publish on their own websites, cross-check them against Canadian supplier retail pricing for the equipment itself, and pull the permit figures straight from municipal fee schedules and Technical Safety BC's gas fee schedule. City figures adjust the BC baseline for local labour rates and carry that city's real permit fee where we could confirm it. Every page shows when its numbers were last reviewed — if a page says "Updated July 2026", that's when a human last looked at the data behind it.

Sources

Three kinds of published source sit behind every range, all dated and recorded in our internal registry:

• Contractor rates — installed prices published by BC plumbing and heating companies, including Milani, ROMA Heating & Cooling, HYDROPRO, Ashton, Ace Tech, Budget Heating, and others (nine for tanks, seven for tankless).
• Supplier pricing — Canadian retail equipment prices from Home Depot Canada and specialist HVAC suppliers, used to sanity-check the equipment share of a job and to frame the DIY option honestly.
• Permit fees — municipal bylaw fee schedules city by city, plus the Technical Safety BC gas fee schedule for the cities that route gas permits through it, and the CleanBC Better Homes and BC Hydro program pages for current heat-pump rebate figures.

Readers will be part of this too. As homeowners send in real invoices, we'll check each one against these ranges and correct a figure where the evidence has moved. If you've just paid for a job, the five minutes it takes to share it makes these pages better for the next person.

Treat every range as a budgeting guide: your home, your timing, and the contractor you pick decide the final price. When a quote lands far outside our range, that's worth a second opinion — in either direction.

We're not a plumbing company. The site earns money when homeowners request quotes through us and from clearly-labelled contractor advertising — never by marking up the numbers.