What counts as a real emergency

If water is actively running where it shouldn’t be, that’s an emergency. A burst pipe. A supply line that let go behind a wall. A fitting spraying under the sink. Every minute it runs it’s soaking your subfloor, your drywall, the ceiling below. That’s the call you make at any hour.

Sewage backing up into the house is another one. If a toilet or a floor drain is pushing dirty water up into the tub or the basement, stop running water and call. That’s a health problem, not just a mess to mop up.

No water at all, anywhere in the house, gets a same-night look too. Could be a well pump that quit. Could be a main line break. Out here in the valley cold it could be a line that froze and cracked. Whatever it is, you can’t live without water, so we treat it like the emergency it is.

The gas smell and the water heater

If you’ve got a gas water heater and you smell rotten eggs near it, take that seriously right now. Get people out of the house, don’t flip any switches, and call your gas utility from outside. Once it’s safe we’ll handle the plumbing side. A gas leak is one thing we never tell anybody to sleep on.

A water heater leaking heavily is also a call we want tonight. A little condensation on a cold day is normal. A puddle spreading across the floor, or water running out the bottom of the tank, means the tank is failing and it only gets worse from there. Shut the water off to it and ring us.

We’re certified on most of the major water heater brands, so whatever’s sitting in your basement or closet, odds are we know it well and can get to it fast.

What can usually wait till morning

A single slow drain is annoying, but it isn’t an emergency. If one sink or tub is draining slow and the rest of the house is fine, that’s a morning job. Same goes for a dripping faucet. It’ll cost you a few cents in water overnight and that’s about it.

A running toilet that won’t stop cycling is in the same boat. Reach behind it and turn the little shutoff valve by the wall, and you’ve stopped the water until we can get a new flapper or fill valve in there.

Here’s the way I think about it. If you can shut off the one fixture and the rest of the house keeps right on working, it can wait. If shutting it off means the whole house loses water, or water’s getting into places it can ruin, don’t wait.

Know where your main shutoff is before you need it

This is the single most important thing in this whole post. The one move that saves people thousands of dollars is knowing where the main water shutoff is and how to turn it. Go find it today, while nothing’s wrong. Not while you’re standing in two inches of water.

In a lot of valley homes the shutoff sits where the line enters the house, usually in the basement or a crawlspace near the front wall, or over by the well pressure tank if you’re on a well. It’s a round handle you turn clockwise, or a lever you flip a quarter turn. If you’re on Front Royal municipal water there’s also a curb stop out by the meter, but the valve inside is your fast one.

Go put your hand on it and make sure it actually turns. Old valves seize up, and the worst time to find that out is during a flood. If yours is stuck or won’t fully close, get that handled on a calm day. We’re glad to come swap it out for you.

When in doubt, just call

You don’t have to diagnose it perfectly. If you’re not sure whether what you’re looking at can wait, pick up the phone at 540-671-5417 and tell us what you see. We’ll talk you through it. Plenty of times we can tell you it’s fine till morning and save you a night call.

We run 24/7 emergency service across Front Royal and out through the valley, Winchester, Strasburg, Woodstock, Luray, Berryville and on toward Loudoun and Fauquier. Between my father and me there’s 45 years of this work. He ran the plumbing department at America’s largest plumbing company, so there’s not much we haven’t already seen come up at a bad hour.

Quotes are free. And in winter we knock 10% off frozen water-line repairs, because the valley gets cold and pipes don’t care what time it is.

Questions about your own system? Learn more about our Drain Clearing, see recent work, or request a free quote. Or call us straight at 540-671-5417. We pick up, we show up, and we tell you straight what is wrong.