Emergency Plumbing

If a pipe bursts or you've got water flooding in, the single best thing you can do is find the main shutoff for the whole house and turn it off. Then go outside and open your hose bibs. That drains the system down, takes the existing pressure off the lines, and lets the water empty outside instead of into your house.

If your toilets are backing up and overflowing, shut the water off to the house and then do not use any fixture until a plumber gets there. This is the big one people miss: do not run a load of laundry. Folks figure that because the toilet isn't working, the washer is fine. It isn't. Your laundry line ties into the same main sewer, so when that washer drains, all of it has to go somewhere.

We had a customer who thought they had one clogged toilet when they actually had a full main line backup. Not knowing the difference, they ran a full load of laundry and used the kitchen sink like normal. The second that laundry drained, it came right back up through the toilet and flooded dirty water across the entire first floor. One load of laundry turned a service call into a cleanup.

We'll be straight with you, because not everything that's annoying at midnight is worth an after-hours visit. Calls after 5 PM are after hours and have a $150 call-out fee. If you've got a dripping toilet, a leaky shower, or a faucet that won't quit, you can usually shut off the valve right at that fixture and wait for normal hours. Those are the little valves under the sink, called angle stops, and they double as emergency shut offs. Close that one valve, get some sleep, and we'll schedule you the next day without the emergency charge. If the toilet keeps running, our guide to telling a bad flapper from a bad fill valve shows the quick test we use.

A broken pipe is a different story. That's a real emergency. We'll guide you to shut the water off at the main, then give you the choice: we come out and make the repair that night, or if it's stable we get you first thing the next morning. Your call, with no pressure either way.

We carry what we need to actually fix the emergency the same night, not just diagnose it and leave.

The biggest one is our ProPress. For copper, we can cut out the bad section and press in a new repair piece in minutes, and the key is we don't have to wait for the whole system to drain down the way you would to solder. That's the difference between getting your water back on tonight and waiting around for hours.

We also keep a snake and a hydro jetter on the van. If you've got a clogged drain or a sewer backup, we can snake it or jet it and get you operational that night, then show you whether there are roots or a break in the line and lay out your options for a real fix.

A real person picks up 24/7, including after hours. We talk you through stopping the water before we arrive, and we usually get there in 30 minutes to an hour. We'll also tell you the truth about whether you've got a real emergency or something that can wait till morning. Calls after 5 PM are after hours and have a $150 call-out fee, so waiting can save you that fee. And we show up ready to fix it on the spot, with a ProPress, plus the snake and hydro jetter we keep on the van. Our owner has 20+ years in the trade.