A pipe that lets go in the middle of the night is the single most expensive thing that happens in an ordinary house. Not because the repair is expensive, it usually is not, but because of how much water moves before anyone does anything. A half-inch supply line pushes somewhere around six gallons a minute. Twenty minutes of that is roughly a full bathtub emptied into your floor.
The repair is our job. The first five minutes are yours. Here is the order.
Shut off the water before anything else
Not the breaker, not the towels, not the photographs. The water.
Most Springfield homes have the main shutoff where the supply line enters the house, typically on the street-facing wall of the basement or crawlspace. It is a valve on a pipe coming through the foundation. Older homes here often have a gate valve, the kind with a round handle you turn counterclockwise several full rotations. Newer ones have a ball valve with a lever that goes a quarter turn.
If the leak is clearly under one fixture, a sink or a toilet, there is usually a smaller stop valve right there. Use it. It is faster and it leaves the rest of the house with water.
Find this valve today, not tonight. Go look right now, while nothing is wrong. Turn it once so you know it moves. A valve that has not been touched in fifteen years can seize, and discovering that while standing in water is a bad night. If yours will not budge, that is a twenty-minute job to replace and worth every penny.
Kill power to the affected area
If water is anywhere near outlets, the panel, or a ceiling fixture below the leak, shut off that circuit. If you cannot get to the panel without walking through the water, do not walk through the water. Call us and call the utility.
A ceiling that is holding water and has a light fixture in it is the specific case to take seriously. That fixture is a hole, and the water will find it.
Open the taps and drain the system
Once the main is closed, the pipes are still full. Open the lowest faucets in the house, basement or first floor, and let gravity pull the remaining water out somewhere useful instead of through the break. Open a few upper taps too, which breaks the vacuum and lets it drain faster.
If it is freezing out, this matters twice. Standing water in a line that already froze once will freeze again in the same spot.
Photograph before you clean
Insurance adjusters want to see the state of things before anyone touched it. Take more pictures than feels reasonable: the break itself, the water at its high point, anything soaked, and the ceiling below if the leak was upstairs. Get a video walking through. It costs ninety seconds and it is the difference between a claim that moves and a claim that gets argued.
Write down the time you noticed it. Adjusters ask.
Then start moving water out
Now the towels. Now the wet vac. Pull rugs up off hardwood, they will hold moisture against the floor and cup it. Get air moving with fans, and open windows if it is warmer outside than in.
What you are racing at this point is not the water, it is mold, and the clock on that is about twenty-four to forty-eight hours in a warm house.
What not to bother with
Do not try to patch it yourself with tape or epoxy while the water is on. It will not hold at household pressure, and time spent on it is time the water is still running.
Do not turn the main back on to check whether it is still leaking. It is.
Do not run the furnace to dry the place out if the leak was anywhere near the ductwork or the unit itself.
Why pipes let go here
Springfield has enough of a freeze-thaw swing that most of what we cut out in winter is split copper on an exterior wall or in an unheated crawlspace. Water expands about nine percent when it freezes, the ice plug pushes pressure down the line, and the pipe splits at whatever point was weakest. Interestingly the split is often not at the ice, it is downstream of it.
The other common one is nothing to do with cold: pinhole leaks in copper that has been slowly corroding for thirty years. Those start as a stain on a joist and become a burst later.
If your house is on original plumbing and you have seen a green or white crust on the pipes, that is the tell. It is worth a look before it picks its own timing.
After the water stops
Call us. We will find the break, cut out the damaged section, and get you back to running water, usually the same day for a single break.
If you are standing in it right now, the number is at the top of this page and someone answers it.
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