Fort Myers Shores and Buckingham Plumber

Plumbing Services in Fort Myers Shores

Where we work east of Fort Myers

This page covers the stretch of unincorporated Lee County along State Road 80 and the south bank of the Caloosahatchee River, east of the Fort Myers city line. Fort Myers Shores is bounded by SR 80 on the south and SR 31 on the west, with the river along its north side. Olga sits right next to it to the east, then Alva beyond that. Buckingham lies south of SR 80, between Fort Myers and Lehigh Acres.

None of these are incorporated cities, so permits and code questions go through Lee County, not a city building department. That matters when a job needs a permit, like a water heater swap, a repipe or a sewer connection.

If you’re closer to the river crossing at Alva, see our Alva plumber page. If you’re south and east into Lehigh, our Lehigh Acres plumber page covers that grid. For the bigger county picture, start at Lee County plumbing.

Three areas, three different setups

We get a lot of calls where the first ten minutes are just figuring out what the house is connected to. Out here it’s worth asking before anyone shows up, because it decides what we bring. This table is a rough starting point, not a rule. Plenty of properties are exceptions.

If you don’t know whether you’re on a well or county water, look at your bills. No water bill from Lee County Utilities usually means a private well. A sewer charge on that bill means you’re connected to county sewer. No sewer charge usually means septic.

Fort Myers Shores river and canal homes

The Shores has a lot of water inside its boundary. Close to a fifth of the census area is water, mostly the river and the canals that cut back into the neighborhoods. Those canal lots are what people come here for, and they bring their own plumbing quirks.

Houses on canal lots tend to sit low. Fort Myers Shores is only a few feet above sea level, which means a high water table, soft soil near the seawall and drain lines that don’t have much fall to work with. When a main line runs flat, it collects grease and paper faster, and a slow drain becomes a backup sooner than it would on higher ground.

Outdoor plumbing gets more use on the water too. Dock spigots, boat wash-down lines and fish cleaning stations all tie into the house supply. We see a lot of corroded hose bibs and buried lines that were run cheap, with no shutoff between the house and the dock. If a dock line leaks under the yard, the only signal may be a higher water bill or a soggy spot that never dries.

• Put a separate shutoff valve on any line feeding a dock or seawall area, so a break out there doesn’t shut down the house.
• Add a vacuum breaker or backflow device on hoses used for chemicals or wash-down. Florida’s plumbing code requires backflow protection on hose connections.
• Keep the cleanout near the house accessible. Covered cleanouts make every drain call slower.

Older homes: 1960s to 1980s pipe problems

Much of the housing in Fort Myers Shores and older parts of Olga went up between the 1960s and 1980s. The materials from that era are the reason a lot of these houses are on their second or third round of repairs.

Supply lines

Homes from the 1960s often started with galvanized steel supply lines. Galvanized rusts from the inside, so the opening shrinks over time. You get weak flow at one fixture, then another, plus rust-colored water after the line sits. Patching galvanized rarely holds. By the time it’s this far along, a whole-house repipe is usually the real fix.

Homes built in the late 1970s and 1980s may have gray polybutylene supply pipe. It was used widely until the mid 1990s and is known for failing at the fittings and from the inside out. Many Florida insurers flag it on a 4-point inspection. If you’re buying or insuring a house of that age, check for it early.

Drain lines

The drains in these houses are usually cast iron under the slab. After 40 to 60 years in damp Florida ground, cast iron scales on the inside and cracks or rots along the bottom of the pipe. Common symptoms are drains that back up into the tub when the washer runs, sewer smell in one bathroom and the same clog coming back a few weeks after it’s cleared. We run a camera before we recommend a repair, so you’re paying for what’s actually broken. More on that on our sewer camera inspection page.

Buckingham acreage: wells and pressure tanks

Buckingham is a big area, about 18 square miles, and most of it is still rural. Lee County’s community plan for Buckingham is written to preserve its rural and agricultural land use pattern, which is why you still see horse properties, nurseries and homes on large lots instead of tract subdivisions. In the 2020 census, most Buckingham residents lived in areas classified as rural.

On that kind of land, a private well is the norm. A typical system has a submersible or jet pump, a pressure tank, a pressure switch and usually some kind of treatment. When the water stops, the cause is usually one of a few things:

• Pressure switch contacts burned or pitted, so the pump won’t kick on
• Waterlogged pressure tank, which makes the pump short-cycle on and off every few seconds
• Failed pump motor or capacitor, sometimes after a lightning strike or power surge
• A leak in the buried line between the well and the house, so the pump runs and never reaches cut-off pressure

Short-cycling is the one to catch early. A pump that clicks on and off constantly wears itself out much faster than it should. If your pressure gauge swings fast or you hear the pump every time someone runs a faucet, call us before it fails. Our well pump and pressure tank page has more detail.

Acreage also means long runs. Supply lines out to barns, stalls, irrigation and guest houses are often buried shallow and repaired many times over. When a leak is somewhere in 300 feet of pipe, we isolate sections with valves before anyone starts digging.

Well water quality in rural east Lee County

Groundwater in Southwest Florida commonly carries hardness, iron and hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is the rotten-egg smell. Iron leaves orange stains in toilets and on anything the irrigation hits. Hardness builds scale in water heaters and wears out fixture cartridges early.

The right treatment depends on what’s actually in your water, so we start with a test. A softener handles hardness. Iron and sulfur usually need a filter made for them, sometimes with air injection or another oxidation step ahead of it. Put a softener alone on high-sulfur water and you’ll still have the smell. Treatment options are on our water softeners and filtration page.

If the smell only shows up in hot water, the problem may be the anode rod in the water heater reacting with sulfur in the water, not the well itself. Swapping the anode to a different type often fixes it. It’s a cheap first check before changing the whole treatment setup.

Septic systems and the move to sewer

A lot of properties in this part of the county still use septic tanks, especially in Buckingham and on older lots near the river. On low ground with a high water table, drain fields can saturate during the rainy season. When that happens, every drain in the house gets slow at once and the toilets gurgle. That’s different from a clog in one fixture, and it points to the tank or drain field, not the house plumbing.

Here’s how we split the problem:

• One fixture slow: likely a local clog in that branch line
• Several fixtures slow, but the cleanout outside is dry: blockage in the main line between the house and the tank
• Water standing in the cleanout, or the yard wet over the drain field: the septic system isn’t accepting water, and the tank may need pumping or the field may be failing

When county sewer reaches a street, owners on septic may be required or offered the chance to connect. The plumbing side of a hookup means running a new line from the house to the county connection, then abandoning the old tank to code. Our septic to sewer conversion page walks through that process.

Lee County Utilities water and the Olga plant

Lee County Utilities provides water and sewer service across much of unincorporated Lee County, including parts of Fort Myers Shores and Olga. LCU runs several water treatment plants on one connected distribution system, so the water at your tap can come from more than one plant.

One of those plants is in Olga. It’s unusual for this area because it treats surface water from the Caloosahatchee River instead of groundwater. The county’s process there includes color removal, filtration, chlorination and fluoridation. LCU’s other plants draw from aquifers, and some use reverse osmosis or nanofiltration.

In practice, river water can taste or smell different from season to season. Lee County has reported earthy or musty tastes in the past during algae blooms in the river, even when testing showed the water was safe. If taste is your main complaint, a carbon filter at the kitchen sink or a whole-house carbon unit is usually the simplest fix. If you’re seeing scale, stains or pressure problems, that’s a different issue, and we’d look at the plumbing first.

County water also uses chlorine-based disinfection, sometimes chloramines. Chloramines are harder on some older rubber parts, like toilet flappers and fill valve seals. If you’re replacing flappers more often than you think you should, that may be why.

Hurricane Ian flooding and what it left behind

Ian hit Fort Myers Shores hard in September 2022, even though it’s about 20 miles up the river from the Gulf. Surge pushed up the Caloosahatchee and reached close to eight feet in this area. Some homes took more than three feet of water inside.

Most of the obvious work got done in the first year, like water heaters, drywall and electrical. We still find things that got missed. If your house flooded, these are worth checking:

• Water heaters that sat in floodwater and were dried out instead of replaced. The controls, burner or elements and the insulation all take damage.
• Shower valves and tub spouts with silt in the cartridges, which shows up as weak or uneven flow
• Floor drains, cleanouts and the main sewer line packed with sediment that settled out of the floodwater
• Well pump controls and pressure switches that were submerged, and septic tanks that filled with silt or shifted
• Washing machine and ice maker supply lines that were never replaced after the flood

A camera inspection of the main drain is a good idea for any house that had water inside. Silt and debris can sit in a low spot under the slab for a long time before it causes a backup. For future storms, our hurricane plumbing checklist covers prep and shutoffs.

Buying or selling an older home out here

Riverfront and acreage properties east of Fort Myers come with more plumbing unknowns than a newer subdivision house. Before closing, these are the questions we’d want answered:

• Is the house on county water or a well? If a well, how old is the pump and tank, and has the water been tested?
• Is it on sewer or septic? When was the tank last pumped, and where is the drain field?
• What’s the supply pipe material? Galvanized and polybutylene can both cause insurance problems.
• Did the house flood during Ian? If it did, what was replaced and what was only dried out?
• Has anyone run a camera through the cast iron drains?

We can go through a property before you commit and tell you what we see. For a longer list, read our guide to buying an older home.

How to reach us and what to have ready

Our office is at 3903 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd in Fort Myers, a short drive west of Fort Myers Shores. Office hours are Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm. Outside those hours, we take urgent calls by phone when we can.

When you call (239) 518-4198, tell us whether you’re on a well or county water and on septic or sewer, along with roughly when the house was built. That helps us show up with the right parts. You can also email help@homeflowfl.com or use our request form. If you’re in the city limits, our Fort Myers plumber page covers that area.

For owners who’d rather catch problems before they turn into calls, we offer a yearly plumbing maintenance plan. It’s a once-a-year look over the whole system. Call for details.