Emergency Plumber in London

What we attend for

The list below is the honest version of what an emergency plumber in London gets called to, in roughly the order of how often it comes up. Most of it is water where water should not be, or the absence of hot water in a property where somebody has to wash tonight.

We cover both sides of the hot water system, which matters more than it sounds. A lot of firms do cylinders or do boilers, so a fault that sits between the two, a motorised valve that is not driving open, a coil that has stopped transferring heat, a cylinder thermostat calling for heat the boiler never receives, turns into two visits and two arguments about whose fault it is. Our engineers work on the whole system, so the diagnosis and the repair happen on the same visit wherever the part is available. Where the fault sits on the cylinder itself, the inlet group, the relief valves and the expansion arrangement are covered under unvented cylinder repair. Where it is the boiler refusing to fire or locking out on a code, boiler diagnosis explains how that gets narrowed down before anyone quotes for parts.

• Burst pipes and pipes that have split behind a wall, under a floor or in a loft after cold weather.
• Water coming through a ceiling from the flat or the bathroom above, including the trace to find where it is actually entering.
• Leaks with no visible source, found with acoustic and thermal equipment rather than by lifting floors on a guess.
• Hot water cylinders leaking, venting through the tundish, overheating or producing no hot water at all.
• No hot water where the heating still works, and no hot water from a combi where the radiators are fine.
• Boiler lockouts and fault codes, diagnosed and repaired where the part is available, replaced where it is beyond it.
• Immersion heaters that have stopped, tripped or are heating only a fraction of the tank.
• Relief valves and expansion vessels on unvented cylinders, which is specialist work and the core of what this company does.
• Overflowing cisterns, failed stopcocks and isolation valves, and taps that will not shut off.
• Blocked or backing up waste where it is flooding the property rather than merely draining slowly.

If water is live and near anything electrical, a ceiling light, a consumer unit, a socket, do not stand under it and do not switch anything on or off in that room. Turn the water off at the stopcock, keep people out of the room and tell us on the phone that there is water near electrics.

How a call goes, from the phone to the engineer leaving

When you get through, the first thing we do is work out whether you can reduce the damage in the next two minutes. That is usually the stopcock, sometimes an isolation valve on the appliance itself, occasionally dropping the immersion or the boiler out. It is a genuine question, not a script, and on a live leak it saves more than the visit does. With water escaping in the house the first two minutes are worth more than the next two hours, and the caller is the only person on site to use them.

Then we take what the engineer actually needs: the address and access, what the water is doing, how long it has been doing it, whether the property is a house or a flat, and the make and model of the cylinder or boiler if you can see it on the front of the unit. That last one is the difference between an engineer arriving with the right relief valve or the right immersion element and an engineer arriving to look at it and coming back tomorrow.

We give you a realistic arrival window rather than a number designed to win the call, and if that window slips because the job in front of yours turns out to be worse than it looked, you get told. The engineer who attends is one of ours, not a subcontractor found on a list, and they arrive with a van stocked for the work described rather than for plumbing in general. A burst pipe repair and a leak with no visible source are stocked for very differently, which is why we ask which of the two it is before the van leaves; the leak detection and repair page sets out what the tracing equipment can find without lifting a floor.

On site the order is diagnosis first, then a plain explanation of what has failed and what the options are, then the work. Where there are two ways to do it, a repair that will hold and a replacement that will hold longer, you hear both and choose. Where the honest answer is that the part is discontinued and the sensible move is replacement, you hear that too, with the reason rather than the sales version. A burst pipe repair runs the other way round, because the water has to be stopped and the run drained down before anything can be inspected properly.

The rate is fixed before we attend and does not rise for an awkward property or an evening visit, and the total depends on how long the job takes. Our pricing page sets out exactly what the call-out covers and what the hourly rate is, in writing, before you book.

What counts as an emergency and what can wait until morning

An honest emergency plumber will tell you when you do not need one, because a night visit for something that could have waited costs you money and takes an engineer away from a flooding property. The split is usually clear once you know what to look at.

Call immediately for water you cannot stop, water that is spreading into another property, water anywhere near electrics, a gas smell, or a cylinder that is discharging hot water and steam. Those are all situations that get worse by the hour, and in a flat a leak that reaches the ceiling below stops being your problem alone.

It can usually wait for a normal appointment if the water is contained, if it is a slow drip into a bucket, if one tap runs cold but the rest of the property is fine, or if the heating works and only the hot water has gone in a house where nobody is at risk from the cold. Those are all real faults worth fixing properly, and they are cheaper to fix in daylight with the right parts on the van.

• Stop everything and call: burst pipe, water through a ceiling, water near a consumer unit or light fitting, a tundish discharging continuously, a cylinder that is hot to touch and making noise.
• Call the same day: no hot water at all, a boiler locked out in cold weather, a leak that is contained but getting faster, a stopcock that will not close.
• Book normally: a dripping tap, a slow waste, hot water that is taking longer than it used to, a weeping joint you have caught in a bowl.

What to do before we arrive

The stopcock is the whole game on a live leak. If you are asking where is my stopcock for the first time while standing in water, you are already behind, so it is worth locating it on a quiet evening and turning it once. In most London houses it is under the kitchen sink, and in flats it is often in the airing cupboard, under the bath panel or in a service riser cupboard on the landing. Turn it clockwise until it stops. If it is seized, which happens on stopcocks that have not been moved in twenty years, do not force it to the point of snapping the spindle, because a broken stopcock turns a contained leak into an uncontrolled one. Open the cold taps downstairs instead to drain the pipework down and take the pressure off the split.

Once the water is off, get what you can off the floor and out from under the leak, and put a bucket where the drip is landing. If a ceiling is bulging with trapped water, stay out from under it and tell us, because that is a controlled release job rather than something to prod with a broom handle. What to do if water is coming through the ceiling is its own short sequence, and getting it wrong brings the plaster down on whoever is standing there.

If the fault is hot water rather than a leak, there are two checks worth doing before anyone attends, because they solve a fair number of calls on their own. Look at whether the timer or programmer is actually calling for hot water, since a clock that has lost the time after a power cut will sit there doing nothing. And on a system with an immersion, check whether the switch or the fuse spur has tripped. Neither of those costs you anything to look at, and if one of them is the answer you have saved yourself a visit. Our no hot water checklist runs through both of those and the rest of the free checks in the order worth doing them.

• Find and close the stopcock, and if you do not know where it is, find it now rather than during the next leak.
• Open the cold taps to drain the pipes and drop the pressure on a split.
• Keep people and pets away from any water near electrics, and do not use light switches in that room.
• Photograph the damage before you mop it, which your insurer will want.
• Have the make and model of the boiler or cylinder ready, and any fault code showing on the display.

Flats, freeholders, landlords and managing agents

A large share of London emergency plumbing happens in flats, and flats have their own problem: the leak is rarely in the property that reports it. Water finds a route through a floor void and appears two rooms and one storey away from the split. That is why we lead with detection rather than with demolition. Acoustic and thermal equipment finds the entry point before anything is lifted, which keeps the making good to a patch rather than a floor.

For landlords, hot water is a repairing obligation rather than a favour, and a tenant without it is a situation with a clock on it. We can deal directly with the tenant for access and report back to you, and we will tell you plainly when a cylinder or boiler is at the end of its life rather than replacing the same part twice in a year at your expense. What that repairing obligation actually covers, and how quickly it bites once a tenant reports it, is set out on our page about landlord hot water responsibilities.

For managing agents and freeholders dealing with a leak between demises, the useful output is usually evidence: where the water is entering, what has failed and which side of the boundary it sits on. We provide that in writing so the conversation between the two leaseholders is about a finding rather than an opinion.

Older London stock adds its own quirks. Victorian conversions carry pipework that has been altered by five different trades over forty years, flats above shops have risers nobody has mapped, and hard water across most of the city scales immersion elements, relief valves and boiler heat exchangers faster than the manufacturer figures assume. Our engineers expect all of that, so the first visit is spent on the fault rather than on being surprised by the building.