24-Hour Emergency Plumbing
In a building where one apartment's problem becomes four apartments' problem, the first twenty minutes decide how expensive the night gets.
Stop the water first
Before anything else, shut the water off. In a converted loft or a pre-war walk-up, the valve you want is usually one of three things: a quarter-turn ball valve under the fixture, a gate valve on the branch where it leaves the riser closet, or the building's main in the cellar. If the fixture valve turns and the water keeps coming, the fixture valve has failed and you need the next one upstream.
Call while you are looking. We will talk you through finding it. A great deal of the damage that gets done in these buildings happens in the stretch between noticing the leak and finding the valve, and that stretch is the one part of the night anyone can shorten.
Leave it alone and stay out of standing water. Get the power off at the panel if the panel is dry and you can reach it safely, and if you cannot, leave the space and call from outside.
What we get called for at 3 a.m.
| Ceiling leak | Water showing in the apartment below. The source is rarely directly above the stain. It travels along a joist and drops where it can |
|---|---|
| Burst supply line | Usually an old galvanized branch or a failed flexible connector behind a washing machine or under a sink |
| Sewer backup | Waste coming up at the lowest fixture in the building. In a cellar-level unit or a storefront, that is you, regardless of whose blockage it is |
| No water at all | Often the roof tank or the booster pump rather than anything inside your apartment |
| Stuck main valve | An old gate valve that has not been turned in thirty years and will not close when it finally matters |
Why a leak here spreads sideways
Loft conversions have big open floor plates and long horizontal runs. A pipe that fails in the middle of a floor does not simply drip into the unit below it. It runs along the underside of the deck until it finds a penetration, and it comes through somewhere that can be thirty feet away and two rooms over. That is the single most useful thing to know when you are trying to describe the problem over the phone: where you can see the water is not where the water is coming from.
It also explains why the neighbor whose apartment is filling up may be the last person to know. The leak is in someone else's wall.
What happens when we arrive
- Isolate. Get the affected branch off without shutting the whole line down if there is any way to avoid it, because shutting the riser affects every unit on it.
- Find the actual source. Not the stain. This is where leak detection equipment earns its place, and where opening the wrong ceiling costs you twice.
- Make it safe and dry tonight. A permanent repair sometimes needs a part nobody has at 3 a.m. Getting you through until morning without further damage is a legitimate outcome.
- Tell you what the real repair is, what it costs, and whether it can wait.
What to have ready when you call
- The address, and which floor and which line you are on
- Whether the water is clean supply water or waste
- Whether you have managed to shut anything off
- Whether there is a super or a managing agent who needs to be in the loop
Need this doing?
Call and describe the problem. You will get the price before anyone starts.