A little snippet

A helpful neighbor,
one call away

You know how it goes. Sooner or later you're hauling your third or fourth heavy 20-liter garrafón up a narrow spiral staircase in Condesa or Roma, sweating through your shirt, asking the question: “Why am I doing this to myself?”

I got tired of it years ago back in Los Angeles. Today I run a water filtration service here in Mexico City, built around helping newcomers and English speakers figure out the quirks of local hydration.

Here's how I work: I'm the guy who answers your WhatsApp. I'm the guy who gives you a straight quote, rides over on my bike, and installs the system myself. There's no dispatcher, no middleman, and no call center reading off a script. If something acts up six months from now, you're not starting over with someone who has never seen your setup.

How did the stars align? Honestly, it's a weird mix of my past lives.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon, where you just drink straight from the tap without thinking about it. Then I spent seven years working at Home Depot, most of that running the plumbing department. During the slow hours, old retired master plumbers who worked there took me under their wing and taught me the trade. By 2014 I was flipping houses and doing all the plumbing and filtration work with my own two hands.

After that I moved to LA for eleven years and worked as a television production manager on shows like Shark Tank, The Voice, and Miss Universe. It started with getting my foot in the door as a production assistant, which is also where I got sick and tired of lugging plastic water jugs around. Production life teaches you how to keep things running smoothly when everything is moving a million miles an hour, and that's a skill you can bring to any business.

In 2018 I put a proper filtration system in my house just so my roommates and I could stop buying bottled water. Pretty soon friends came over, saw it, and asked if I could set theirs up. Then their friends asked. Before I knew it, after twenty-eight installs, all strictly through word of mouth, I had accidentally become the water filter guy.

Eventually production jobs started bringing me down to Mexico for months at a time, and I fell head over heels for the country. That's how I met my wife, Jaqueline — a chilanga born and raised right here. We got married, I moved to Mexico City full time, and we live in Roma Norte. That's why my neighborhood is the center of my service area, not just a random territory on a map.

When you move here, you usually find yourself stuck between three bad options for water: expensive imported systems that treat clean water like a luxury item, massive local hardware stores that don't care what your specific, older apartment actually needs, or rental companies that nickel-and-dime you with endless monthly fees while never letting you actually own the system. Having spent seven years inside Home Depot, I know exactly how those big-box operations work. And what they miss.

I also know what it's like to try to handle complicated daily life in a language you're still learning. My Spanish is getting better every day, and thankfully I've got my wife and brother-in-law on speed dial to help me learn the local terms. If you don't have every technical word down cold, I want to make sure you have someone you can easily talk to.

Whether you just got into town or you've been here for years, I'm one call away.

Say hello on WhatsApp