When Daniel Rodriguez started out, he did not own a pickup. He had a Honda CR-V. He loaded his materials into it and drove all over Texas, plumbing Circle K remodels by himself.
“Now we actually have trucks,” he says.
Green Ridge Services is based in San Antonio and has been in business since about 2019. Rodriguez runs it with two partners, David and Thomas. The company takes residential service calls and does commercial plumbing, and the partners prefer the commercial side because that is where they spent most of their careers. The name ends in “Services,” plural, because they eventually want to bring HVAC and electrical work under it. Today’s crews often work at night, on jobs that start after a restaurant closes and have to be done before it opens.
Those jobs are water heater change-outs. A crew arrives after hours, removes the old 100-gallon tank heaters and installs a bank of Noritz tankless units, which Rodriguez considers the best tankless system out there. “We do this overnight because it’s a restaurant, and they have to be open for their customers the next day,” he says. Pulling the old tanks, setting the new system and having it running by morning takes coordination he calls “insane, but we’re able to do that.” His crews work weekends when the schedule calls for it, and he says they like the overtime.
The work has sent Green Ridge to Plano, Laredo, San Juan and Amarillo. Amarillo is eight hours from San Antonio, and Rodriguez did not just send a crew. He went himself, with three other men, for an overnight job.
The job he brings up first is a school. Green Ridge did the plumbing for the athletics center remodel at Smithson Valley High School. By his account, work of that size usually takes about a year and a half, and the school district needed it done in four months. When he heard the deadline, he says, his answer was “Yeah, we’ll get it knocked out.” The crew finished in four months without a single issue, he says, and the job opened doors to more commercial work. He and his partners came to it with a long list of school plumbing behind them: high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, IDEA campuses.
Rodriguez learned the trade through the PHCC plumbing program in Texas, a four-year course at a junior college with two three-hour classes a week. Each year in the program counts toward the hours needed for the license below master, and it shortens the road to a master’s license, which a person needs to own a plumbing company, from eight years to six. Green Ridge lists a Texas master plumbing license.
By his second year, he says, he felt he knew more than most of the more experienced plumbers he worked beside. They had learned by word of mouth from whoever trained them, and he found that a lot of what they had been taught was wrong. So he started carrying the textbook to work. “I’d bring my book to the job site and be like, ‘Look, man. This is what it says,’” he says. “This is the way we’ve got to do it.”
The habit of doing things by the book started well before trade school. His father retired from the Air Force after 22 years, and his mother and stepmother both worked in civil service. By age 6, he says, he was folding his own laundry the military way. When he joined the Air Force himself, he was made dorm chief as soon as he stepped into basic training. As he tells it, he was put in charge of everyone else because he already knew how everything worked.
That upbringing did not cover everything. When the four of them set out for Amarillo, it was 85 or 90 degrees in San Antonio, as he remembers it. “You get up to Amarillo and it was freezing,” he says. “We were not prepared for that.”