Emergency Plumbing & Heating

These are the ones where waiting makes the damage worse by the hour rather than by the day. If you are looking at one of them, stop reading and call.

Find your main shut-off and turn it off. It is usually where the supply enters the house — a basement wall, a crawl space, or a box near the street. Turning it off stops the clock on the damage, and it is the single most useful thing a homeowner can do in the ten minutes before a plumber gets there.

If you do not know where yours is, that is worth finding out on a Sunday afternoon rather than at midnight. Take a photo of it while you are down there. Half the emergency calls we take start with somebody looking for a valve in the dark.

For no heat, check the thermostat batteries and the boiler or furnace switch before you call — it is a wasted call-out often enough to be worth thirty seconds, and we would rather tell you that on the phone than charge you for it.

A dripping tap, a slow drain, a toilet that runs, one cold radiator in an otherwise warm house, low pressure upstairs — none of these gets meaningfully worse overnight, and none of them is worth what a night call-out costs you.

If you describe the problem and it is one of these, we will tell you it can wait and book you in properly. That is not us turning work away; it is the difference between a plumber you call once and a plumber you keep the number of.

Text a picture of what you are looking at. A great deal can be worked out from a photograph of a valve, a puddle or an error code, and sometimes the answer is something you can do yourself in two minutes.

That is not a theory about how it could work. One of the reviews on this site describes exactly that happening late at night, over text, from photos — the customer got heat back in her unit without anybody driving anywhere.