Emergency guides

If something is happening right now

For a gas smell, call the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 from outside the property. For an oil spill reaching ground or a watercourse, contain what you can and report it.

The guide to read before you need any of them

Find your stopcock before you need it is the most useful thing on this site, and it takes ten minutes on a dry afternoon.

Because the problem is never finding it in principle. It is finding it at eleven at night, in the dark, under a cupboard full of cleaning products, with water coming through a ceiling – and then discovering it has seized because nobody has turned it for fifteen years.

What to do now, while nothing is wrong:

1. Find it. Usually under the kitchen sink, sometimes in a utility, a downstairs cloakroom, a garage, or under the stairs.
2. Turn it off and back on. Confirm it actually works and actually stops the water.
3. If it is stiff or weeping, get it replaced – see stopcocks and mains. A modern lever valve is a fraction of the cost of one flood.
4. Find the external stop tap too, usually under a small cover at the boundary, and check you have something that will reach it.
5. Tell everyone in the house where it is.
6. Label it. Genuinely – a luggage tag is enough.

Do the same for the heating: know where the boiler’s isolation switch and the gas or oil supply valve are – isolating heating and hot water safely.

Frozen pipes, where doing the wrong thing causes the burst

Norfolk gets hard frosts, and frozen pipes are a seasonal certainty in unheated spaces – lofts, garages, outbuildings, and any run against an outside wall.

The critical point is that a frozen pipe has usually not burst yet. The damage happens when it thaws, or when somebody thaws it badly. So what you do next genuinely determines the outcome.

• Never use a naked flame, a blowtorch, or a heat gun. Localised heat expands water violently in a confined space and splits the pipe.
• Warm it gently and gradually – warm cloths, a hairdryer on low kept moving, warm (not boiling) water.
• Start at the tap end and work backwards, so melt water has somewhere to go rather than being trapped between two ice plugs.
• Open the tap first, so there is a route out and pressure cannot build.
• Turn the stopcock off before you start, so if it has split you find out with minimal water behind it.
• Be ready with towels and a bucket.

Frozen pipes: what to do covers it properly, and frozen condensate pipes deals with the boiler-specific version that shuts heating down in every cold snap.

See also frozen pipes and pipe insulation, which is what stops it recurring.

Afterwards

Water damage and insurance covers what to photograph and when, which matters because the evidence people wish they had is almost always from the first hour.

Briefly: photograph everything before you move or clean anything, including the source; keep damaged items until the insurer has seen them or agreed otherwise; keep receipts for anything you buy to limit the damage; and notify promptly, because most policies require it.

And what counts as a plumbing emergency is worth reading calmly, because it saves both an unnecessary call-out charge and, occasionally, a much worse outcome from waiting.

See also emergency plumber, burst pipe repair and the emergency triage tool.