Start with what Pimlico is good at

Pimlico Plumbers covers fourteen trades from one London base: plumbing, heating, electrics, appliances, drains, carpentry, roofing, air conditioning, building, bathrooms, kitchens, handyman work, pest control and commercial. It publishes a full rate card, it says it completes more than 100,000 jobs a year, and in September 2026 the Advertising Standards Authority examined a competitor's challenge to its 24/7 claims and did not uphold it, concluding that those claims had been substantiated.

That is a strong position, and for a lot of jobs it is the right one. If you need a tap replaced, a bathroom refitted, a consumer unit looked at and a roof tile put back, one firm with fourteen trades and a published rate for each of them is a genuinely good answer. We do none of those things.

The case for calling us instead is narrower than that, and it is worth stating plainly before anything else. It applies when you have a leak and nobody has found it yet.

What Pimlico publishes about leak detection

Pimlico runs a dedicated leak-detection page. On the snapshot we checked, it named four methods: inspection cameras, ultraviolet trace dye, thermal imaging and trace gas. Its rate card carries a separate footnote on the leak-detection line reading "Includes thermal, acoustic or gassing detection", which adds acoustic to the list. The service page states that workmanship is guaranteed for 12 months.

That is more detail than most London firms publish, and considerably more than the other national name people compare us with. Naming your methods is the honest thing to do, because the method determines what can actually be found. A camera finds a defect in a drain. Thermal imaging follows a warm pipe run under a floor. Tracer gas finds a pinhole on a drained circuit that nothing else will pick up.

On price, Pimlico publishes an hourly rate of £165 excluding VAT for leak detection, listed for the 7am to 6pm band only. Its leak-detection service page separately advertises "Prices from £45.25+VAT". Neither page explains how the two relate, and we are not going to guess at it on their behalf. Both figures are as at a 7 June 2026 archive snapshot of a rate card marked "effective as of 15-01-2026", so check the current page before you rely on either.

What we publish, and where it differs

We charge £150 per hour, fixed before we attend. We name five methods: acoustic, thermal imaging, moisture mapping, pressure testing and non-invasive gas tracer. We operate no find, no fee, which means that if we do not locate the leak you do not pay for the time we spent looking. No no-find-no-fee terms appear on either of the Pimlico pages we checked.

The bigger difference is what happens after the leak is found. We repair the pipework, in copper, MDPE, push-fit or lead, and then our own handymen and builders put the floor, screed, plaster, ceiling, tiles and decoration back. That is the point of the business. Most leak firms in London locate the leak, hand you a report and leave you to find a plumber, and then a plasterer, and then someone to re-lay the floor.

Pimlico can do all three, because Building and Plastering is one of its fourteen trades. The structural difference is that each of those trades is a separate line on the rate card billed at its own hourly rates, so a detection visit, a plumbing repair and a plastering visit are three chargeable attendances at three different rates. Whether that suits you depends on the job. On a single small repair it may make very little difference. On a floor that has to come up, be dried, be repaired and be re-laid, the coordination is the job, and it is the part we do not hand back to you.

The pricing structures, compared honestly

Both firms charge by the hour with no call-out fee. Pimlico applies a one-hour minimum and then bills in 15-minute units, which is a fair structure and arguably fairer than ours on a very short job. Its published position is that there is no weekend uplift, though its own rate card does publish higher hourly figures for the evening and overnight bands: plumbing, for example, runs at hourly rates of £130 (7am to 6pm), £170 (6pm to midnight) and £210 (midnight to 7am), all excluding VAT.

Our rate does not change with the hour of the day, and it is fixed before we attend. What it does not do is tell you the total in advance, and nobody should pretend otherwise. A fixed hourly rate is not a fixed price. The rate cannot rise; the number of hours is what it is, and on a detection job that number is not knowable until someone has looked. What we will tell you before we start is the rate, the method we intend to use and what we expect the job to involve. Our pricing page sets out the whole of it.

Ratings: two platforms, two different pictures

This one needs both numbers or neither. On 19 September 2026, Trustpilot rated Pimlico 4.4 out of 5 from 12,318 reviews, with 82% at five stars, on a claimed and verified profile. On the same day, Reviews.io rated it 2.7 out of 5 from 188 reviews, with 43% of reviewers recommending.

Those are very different pictures on very different sample sizes, and we are not going to tell you which one is real, because we do not know. Twelve thousand reviews is a large sample; a 2.7 from 188 is not nothing either. Read both, read the recent ones on each, and form your own view. We publish no rating of our own, because the business is new and we would rather say that than manufacture one.

Structure, and why it is worth knowing

Pimlico Plumbers Limited has been on the register since 1986. Since 20 September 2021 the ultimate UK person with significant control has been Neighbourly Brands Limited, and the registered office is now in Brackley, Northamptonshire, though the trading address remains Pimlico House on Sail Street in SE11. Pimlico's own site puts this simply: in 2021 it joined the Neighbourly family of brands.

None of that is a criticism. Large operations do things small ones cannot, including staffing a contact centre around the clock and fielding fourteen trades. The practical consequence for you is only this: in an operation of 200-plus workers across fourteen trades, the person who takes your call and the person who arrives are different people, and the engineer who detects the leak may not be the one who returns to repair it. With us, the person who finds it is the person who fixes it, and that continuity is most of what you are buying.

When Pimlico is the better call

  • You need several trades on one property and want one account handling all of them.
  • The job is not a leak: a boiler service, a gas safety certificate, an electrical fault, a roof, a bathroom.
  • You want a named hourly rate for a specific trade published in advance and are comparing that rate directly.
  • You are outside London but inside the M25, where their published coverage extends and ours does not.
  • You want a twelve-month written workmanship guarantee on the detection work specifically.

When to call us instead

  • Water is appearing and nobody has established where it comes from. That is the entire job we do.
  • Your boiler pressure keeps dropping and no visible leak explains it.
  • A floor, screed or ceiling has to be opened, and you want one firm to open it, repair the pipe and put it back.
  • You are making a trace and access claim and need a report written to be accepted by an insurer.
  • You want the risk of a fruitless search on us rather than on you.

And to be equally plain about when not to call anyone: if your pressure gauge drops once a year, that is normal. If a radiator valve is weeping and you can see it, most plumbers will sort it in under an hour and you do not need leak detection at all. Detection is for water you cannot trace, and paying for it when the source is visible is money you should keep.