The New Year has bounced out of the blocks and Plumbing Connection is here to meet it head on with thought provoking technical articles and cutting edge industry news.

Our first quarter edition is currently in the mail and what a beauty it is.

You might ask what a French Foreign Legion hat is doing on the cover…..well, it leads to an interesting review of Legionnaires’ disease (you knew there had to be a link!).

This insidious disease keeps turning up in various plumbing situations and forms. It’s something we first wrote about back in 1987. While much attention over the years has focussed around preventing legionella in cooling towers, in more recent time the focus has been on water supply lines.

What is fairly clear is that the plumbing industry is not all that well placed to identify potential situations where outbreaks might occur.

And that raises one of our pet issues – why does a plumber get a licence for life and is not compelled to attend compulsory training on health issues such as legionnaires’?

We also have a range of other interesting stories including a review of new generation heat pump technology, some words of caution over multi-layered composite pipe, a WELS update, our regular technical columnists and lots more.

Will we see you at ISH, the world’s largest plumbing trade fair in March? If you’ve never been there before, give me a call (03 9542 9002) and I’ll be happy to give you an idea of what to expect.

If you need more copies of Plumbing Connection, simply ring Brigitta, our subscription manager on 1800 623 214 and she will attend to your needs.

Our team at Connection Magazines wishes all our readers a healthy and successful year.

Jeff Patchell – Publisher