Hydraulic installations in Olhão, Fuseta and Moncarapacho. Replumbing the cubist houses of the town centre, new-build houses and hot water systems for holiday lets.
iStarTec is a hydraulic installations company founded in 2000 that works in Olhão, about 50 km from its office in Albufeira. It installs plumbing (hot and cold water, wastewater and rainwater drainage), Uponor hydraulic underfloor heating, Bosch solar thermal hot water and bathrooms, in new builds and renovations: replumbing the cubist houses of the town centre, new-build houses and hot water for holiday lets. It does not do gas, drain unblocking or emergency repairs.
Olhão is the Algarve municipality where urban regeneration has picked up most over the last decade. The cubist houses of the town centre — narrow, deep houses with a flat roof terrace (açoteia) and often no back yard — are being converted into homes and holiday lets at a steady pace. From a plumbing point of view it is one of the most difficult building types in the Algarve: shared party walls, no service shafts, and internal pipework installed at different times with no record of where it runs. Outside the centre, Moncarapacho and Quelfes have estates of detached houses built in the conventional way.
Most of our work in Olhão is split between complete replacement of the pipework in rehabilitation projects and full installations in new houses. In both cases we hand over as-built drawings showing the routes actually installed — in a historic-centre building, knowing exactly where the pipes run saves a great deal of money on the next intervention.
Complete hot and cold water and drainage networks. In rehabilitation work in the centre of Olhão, we solve the routing without a service shaft by using vertical service ducts and runs through suspended ceilings, leaving the party walls intact.
Bosch solar thermal for hot water, with the primary circuit in copper. The typical Olhão açoteia is an excellent surface to install on: flat, unobstructed and well oriented, which makes fixing and maintaining the collectors simpler.
Uponor PEX underfloor heating in new builds and in rehabilitation work with a new floor slab. In historic-centre houses, we first assess the available floor height and the load capacity of the floor before proposing the system.
Supply and fitting of sanitaryware for homes and for holiday-let units, where durability and ease of maintenance matter more than a high-end finish.
15 to 80 apartments
3 to 6 bedrooms · pool
Replacing old pipework
Solar + heat pump · NZEB
Heating + cooling
Premium sanitaryware
We also work directly for homeowners in Olhão, Fuseta, Moncarapacho, Quelfes and Pechão — including in homes that are lived in during the works. This is installation and system replacement, not repair work. A technical visit and quote are free, and we reply within 24 working hours.
Uponor hydraulic underfloor heating in new and existing homes, paired with a heat pump.
Bosch solar thermal systems, including replacing old collectors and gas water heaters.
Replacing old galvanised or lead pipework with multilayer or PEX.
Embedded fittings, plant room, saltwater treatment, lighting and pool heat pump (AstralPool).
Yes, it is an important part of our work in the municipality. The cubist houses have no service shaft, so the pipe routing has to be designed from scratch — usually with a vertical service duct and distribution through a suspended ceiling on each floor. We survey the building before quoting, because two houses that look the same from outside can be very different inside.
We do the complete hydraulic installation: water supply, drainage, hot water and sanitaryware. For holiday lets we always recommend hot water storage with spare capacity, because the usage pattern concentrates several showers into the same short window. We do not provide service call-outs or maintenance contracts after the job is finished.
In a two-storey house in the historic centre, the complete network typically takes two to four weeks of plumbing work, depending on the condition of the walls and on whether there is a new floor slab. That time does not include reinstating the finishes, which is the responsibility of the general contractor.
Yes, the whole municipality. Fuseta and Moncarapacho are less than fifteen minutes from Olhão and are served by the same team, with no difference in response time.
No. iStarTec installs and replaces complete systems; it does not do one-off repairs, emergency call-outs, maintenance contracts or drain unblocking. For a single leak or breakdown, a local repair plumber is the right call.
Olhão lies between Faro and Tavira, which lets us group jobs in the Sotavento into the same travel period. We cover Fuseta, Moncarapacho, Quelfes and Pechão with the same team that serves the town.
Whole municipality covered
~9 km west · District capital and new builds
~25 km east · Restoration of old houses
~20 km north-west · Detached houses and quintas
~12 km east · Houses and holiday lets
~9 km north-east · Quintas and detached houses
~3 km north · Residential estates
On request, we put you in touch with clients of ours in Olhão, Fuseta and Moncarapacho. You can check technical standards and deadlines directly with owners and builders who have been through the job.
Builders, developers and homeowners in Olhão, Fuseta or Moncarapacho — we reply to quote requests within 24 working hours, in English or Portuguese.