The five minutes between a pipe letting go and the water stopping decide how much of your house you lose. Know where the toby is now, not at 11pm in the rain.
Pipe Down does not run emergency callouts. Tony is one tradesman, and pretending otherwise at 2am helps nobody. But knowing how to stop the water yourself matters more than having someone to phone, because the damage happens in the first few minutes either way.
Read this once now, while nothing is leaking.
1. Stop the water
Inside the house: many homes have isolating valves under sinks and behind the toilet. If the leak is clearly at one fixture, that valve stops it without shutting off the whole house.
The toby: the main shutoff for the property. It is usually a small rectangular box set into the ground near the street boundary, often near the letterbox, sometimes under a plastic lid marked with a tap symbol. Lift the lid and there is a valve inside — a quarter turn clockwise on a lever, or a few turns clockwise on a tap-style handle.
Go and find yours now. Tobies disappear under lawn clippings, gravel and years of garden growth, and clearing one out is much harder in the dark with water running.
Keep a pair of gloves in the shed, plus a toby key if yours is a tap-style valve. A valve that has not been turned in fifteen years often needs more grip than bare hands in a muddy box can give it.
2. Kill the power to anything wet
If water is anywhere near switchboards, outlets, or appliances, switch off at the board before wading in.
3. Drain the pressure
Once the toby is off, open the lowest cold tap in the house — usually an outside tap or the laundry. That drains what is left in the pipes so the leak stops running rather than trickling for another ten minutes.
4. If it is the hot water cylinder
A cylinder leak needs two things off, not one:
- The water — there is usually an isolating valve on the cold feed into the top of the cylinder.
- The heat — switch off the cylinder's circuit at the switchboard for an electric system. For gas, close the gas isolation valve at the appliance.
Heating an empty or draining cylinder damages it, so the power matters as much as the water.
5. Get the water out
Photograph everything before you start cleaning: wet carpet, the damaged pipe, the affected rooms. Insurers ask for this and it is impossible to recreate later.
Then towels, mop, wet vacuum if you have one. Lift rugs, pull furniture off wet carpet, get air moving. How quickly a room dries out decides whether it needs replacing.
6. Then call
Once the water is off, the emergency part is over. What remains is a repair job that can be booked.
Tony works Monday to Friday, 6:30am to 5:30pm, Saturday by appointment. Outside those hours, leave a message and he will come back to you the next working morning. If water is still running and you cannot stop it, your water supplier's after-hours line can shut off at the street.
Most bursts give warning first
Few burst pipes are truly sudden. Usually something had been showing for months: a tap that started dripping, a patch of ground that stayed damp, pressure that dropped without explanation. Cold weather tends to finish off pipes that were already failing. See getting your plumbing through a Kapiti winter and what your house is telling you.
For repairs and replacements across the coast, get a quote or call 021 198 3113.