Carl Wilson Dennis didn’t grow up dreaming of being a plumber. He was playing football, driving a van and trying to work out what came next. In his mid-thirties, with children looking up to him, he decided he wanted a different path.
That path involved a gas course, months spent learning on the job, a spell on building sites and, eventually, his own plumbing business. It also involved a borrowed hairdryer, but we’ll get to that.
In this episode of Off The Job: A Tradesman Podcast, hosts Keiran Yates and Pete Withers meet Carl, known online as CW Dizz, for a frank conversation about changing direction, going self-employed and making people laugh along the way. If this is your first time here, that’s the format: proper trade stories, honest conversations and the odd tangent that absolutely wasn’t on the running order.
Watch Carl Wilson Dennis on Off The Job, Season 1, Episode 2.
How did Carl Wilson Dennis get into plumbing?
Carl started with a plan to train in gas work. A friend made the earning potential sound appealing, but the training demanded more practical experience than Carl had expected. To build his portfolio, he found a company willing to take him on and spent around five months learning alongside its engineers before he began getting paid.
He was about 35, had a family and was starting with basics other people might have picked up years earlier. He talks about being sent for fittings he couldn’t yet identify and taking a photo to remember how to hold his grips properly. He also says he had to work hard on his reading and writing while learning the trade.
It was humbling. Carl stuck with it because he knew what he was working towards: a skill he could use to build something of his own. Plumbing wasn’t the original plan, but it became the route in.
From site work to working for himself
Carl worked in commercial plumbing before trying to find his feet with domestic jobs during the pandemic. Work wasn’t steady, so he returned to site work for a while. By then, he knew the fixed hours and routine weren’t for him.
He began taking private jobs after finishing on site, sometimes fitting one or two visits into an evening. That gave him a chance to build up customers before leaving. It didn’t remove the risk. As he tells Keiran and Pete, going self-employed meant giving up the certainty of a regular wage, and some months at the start were worryingly quiet.
Nor did he wait until everything looked perfect. When they recorded the episode, Carl was working out of a car rather than a van. His view was simple: if he’d waited for the van before starting his business, he would still have been on site and miserable. The van and the rest of the kit could come later.
That’s a useful reality check if you’ve ever told yourself you’ll make a move when you’ve got everything sorted. There’s a difference between preparing properly and waiting for a magical Tuesday when every problem disappears.
The hairdryer story (please don’t treat it as boiler advice)
Every tradesperson has a job that made them suddenly, aggressively aware of their own heartbeat. Carl’s involves a tricky boiler repair, water where he didn’t want it and a boiler that wouldn’t fire up afterwards.
His solution in the moment? Borrow a hairdryer from a nearby hairdresser, dry things out and try again. The boiler fired, and Carl could finally breathe. It’s one of those stories that’s much better to hear him tell than to live through yourself.
It’s a candid account of an early mistake and the panic that came with it, not a repair method or guidance for working on gas appliances. The point Carl and the hosts keep coming back to is how much there is to learn, even after you’ve decided to take the leap.
Why CW Dizz mixes plumbing with comedy
Long before Carl posted plumbing content, he was sharing family moments and having a laugh online. During the pandemic, his son’s TikTok pranks helped bring more people to his page. Carl then started mixing his work with the personality people already knew. His post-job “job’s a good’un” became a familiar sign-off.
He enjoys creating and editing content, and comedy is something he’d like to pursue further. But he is refreshingly honest about what an online audience does and doesn’t mean. People see a following or a stand-up clip and assume the money must be rolling in. Carl says he isn’t earning what people imagine from either.
That’s a conversation worth hearing, especially if social media has ever made you feel as though everyone else has a shiny van, a full diary and a life suspiciously free of invoices. Carl is building something, but he isn’t pretending every part of the journey is already sorted.
What does Carl say to someone thinking of changing careers?
Start somewhere, stick with it and notice the small wins. That’s the advice running through Carl’s story. He talks about celebrating a line read confidently while improving his literacy, a new skill learned on a job, or simply doing one thing better than the day before.
The trade gave him a way to change direction and support his family. Content and comedy have opened up other possibilities. He doesn’t claim to have a neat five-year plan, and that’s part of what makes this episode work. It’s a conversation with someone still figuring things out, willing to say so out loud.
There are plenty of laughs, too. Pete’s brief attempt to escape plumbing by buying a market stall and training as a driving instructor is a particularly spectacular detour. You can hear that whole story in the episode; it deserves Pete’s delivery.
Watch the full conversation: Carl Wilson Dennis joins Off The Job on YouTube. Expect honest trade talk, swearing, and a few stories that went sideways before they turned into good material.
If you’re a gas engineer building your own business, Gas Certificate App brings jobs, customer records, digital certificates, quotes and invoices into one place. It won’t borrow you a hairdryer, but it can help keep the business side organised while you’re out doing the work.
More from Off The Job
If you enjoy a story about finding your own route into the trades, read how Heat Geek’s Ollie Gilcreest got into gas engineering. For the creator side of Carl’s story, meet The Home Improvement Channel team and hear how they built an audience around life on the tools.
