Red White Valve technical adviser Mark Stanhke examines why valves can fail in residential applications.
Mark Stahnke, a part-time technical consultant for Red White Valve Corp., has been working in the plumbing industry for nearly 30 years. After completing his apprenticeship through Local 78 in Compton, Calif., he worked for Frank Snavely Plumbing, a residential-commercial service and repair contractor in San Pedro, Calif. To advance his career, he accepted a position with Norris Plumbing Fixtures as a customer service manager. (Mansfield Plumbing Products LLC acquired Norris in the early 1990s.) There, Stahnke handled defective product issues and studied failure analysis on a large scale. In essence, he became the company's firefighter as it related to fixture installations in new home construction, which included accompanying attorneys to inspections to evaluate installation problems. Stahnke became proficient at gathering information that the attorneys were unable to find on their own, and he was called regularly to provide expert witness testimony. In 1990, he left Norris to start his own consulting firm. Since then, he has worked on product and system failure analysis for insurance companies and law firms.