AI plumbing takeoffs: go from 1–2 bids a week to 8–9 without hiring another estimator
Harner Plumbing
What they did with AI
Harner Plumbing, a full-service residential and commercial plumbing company in Mantua, Ohio (founded 1977), was doing its takeoffs by hand with tools like FastPIPE. One bid could take up to a week, so the team could only get out one or two bids a week. Since December 2024 it has used Beam AI, which reads PDF plan sheets and pulls out pipe lengths, fittings, fixtures and equipment, with the vendor's QA team reviewing each takeoff before it's delivered. Beam AI reports that Harner saves about seven days per takeoff and increased bid volume 4.5x; Assistant Project Manager Danell Zarrelli is quoted on Beam AI's site saying the team went "from 2 bids a week to 8–9, with no extra hires." Figures are vendor-published and not independently audited.
Results above are as reported by the vendor or company in the source and haven't been independently audited by this site. Listing a tool is not an endorsement, and nobody paid for this entry.
Related use cases
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Automate a plumbing shop's back office with AI agents, but keep humans on big quotes
Jon O'Neill (@HouseHackerJon)
A plumbing company owner who also builds software for the trades listed the AI workflows running in his shop: email triage, job booking by text and email (he still doesn't trust voice agents), truck and warehouse restocking, fleet maintenance reminders, reviewing sold-job notes for missed opportunities, drafting quotes from tech notes and photos, job routing, review requests and missed-call texting. In replies he says job booking saves the most time, and that quotes over $5K, price negotiation and truck restock orders over $1K still go to a human.