What to Do Before the Plumber Arrives

What should I do before the plumber arrives?

Stop the water, isolate the fault if you can, make the work reachable, photograph what has been damaged, and write down what changed just before it started. In that order. If water is actively escaping, the stopcock comes before everything, including the photographs.

None of it needs a tool and none of it involves opening an appliance, so it is as reasonable for a tenant as for an owner. The aim is not to fix anything. The aim is that when an engineer walks in, the water is off, the cupboard is empty and the fault is visible. Call early rather than late, too. With twenty engineers we can usually get someone moving while you are still working through the list, and whoever answers can talk you to the stopcock.

• Water off at the stopcock if anything is leaking.
• Isolate the single tap, toilet or appliance if the valve is reachable.
• Switch off the electrics that matter, leave the lights on.
• Empty the cupboard and clear the floor around the work.
• Photograph the damage, the data plate and any fault display.

Find the stopcock now, not when the water is running

The internal stopcock shuts off the whole cold supply into the property and it closes clockwise. In most London homes it is under the kitchen sink, in a downstairs cloakroom, or under the stairs. If you have never found yours, go and find it today rather than at the point where a joint has let go and water is crossing the hallway.

London housing makes this awkward. In Victorian conversions the original stopcock is often boxed in, buried under a fitted unit, or sitting in the flat below, because the pipework was run when the building was one house. In purpose built blocks each flat usually has its own isolating valve in a riser cupboard on the landing or by the front door, and that is the one that matters to you rather than anything in the basement.

Old stopcocks seize. If yours will not turn by hand, do not lever it with a wrench and a length of pipe. Use the outside stop tap in the pavement box if you can reach it, isolate closer to the leak instead, and say it is seized when you call, because that may become part of the job. Once the water is off, run the kitchen cold tap until it dies to drain the rising main and drop the pressure at the leak. Hot taps keep flowing for a while on a stored system because the cylinder and any loft tank are still full, so do not read that as the stopcock having failed.

If you cannot find or turn the stopcock while water is escaping, stop searching. Contain what you can and get someone out. Locating a hidden stopcock is part of the job.

Can I isolate just the leaking tap or toilet?

Usually yes, and it beats killing the water to the whole property. Most taps, toilets and appliances fitted in the last couple of decades have a small isolation valve on the supply pipe within reach. It is a compact brass body with a slot across the middle that a flat screwdriver or a coin will turn. Slot along the pipe is open, slot across the pipe is closed.

Look under the basin for the two valves feeding a mixer, on the pipe into the toilet cistern, and behind the machine for a washing machine or dishwasher. Turn it a quarter turn, then run the tap or flush to confirm the water has stopped rather than slowed, because tired valves pass slightly when closed. It also tells the engineer something real: if closing that valve stops the leak, the fault is downstream of it rather than in pipework buried in a wall.

Braided flexible tap connectors deserve a mention, because they are the most common thing we find weeping under a London basin. If the braid is frayed, rusted or bulging, the hose is failing. Photograph it in place, close the valve, and expect both sides to be changed rather than only the one that went.

Which electrics should be off, and which should stay on

Switch off the circuit for anything the water can reach and anything heating water it no longer has. In practice that means the immersion heater if a cylinder is draining, the boiler spur if the leak is at the appliance, and any socket circuit water is running into. Leave the lighting on. An engineer working in an unlit cupboard by torchlight is a slower engineer.

The immersion is the one people miss and the one that costs money. An element left on while the cylinder empties burns itself out in minutes, because it is designed to sit surrounded by water and nothing else. Its switch is the large one with a neon near the airing cupboard, and there are often two. Know where your consumer unit is as well, and be able to point at it.

Do not throw the main switch as a precaution. It sounds prudent and it is not. It kills the boiler, the controls, the lighting and often the door entry, and it means nothing can be tested after the repair. Circuit level isolation, not the main switch. If water has got into a socket or a light fitting, switch that circuit off and leave it off rather than testing whether it still works.

Water running near a consumer unit, crackling, or a burning smell from an accessory is an electrical emergency, not a plumbing one. Do not go near it and get an electrician involved.

Clear the access properly, because we will not move your things

Empty the cupboard completely and clear a metre of floor in front of the work. Not tidied, emptied. Airing cupboards in London flats are storage first and plant rooms second, and the towels, suitcases and paint tins stacked around a cylinder all have to come out before anyone gets a spanner on a valve. If we do it, it is charged time, and we are also the ones blamed when something gets wet.

Same under the kitchen sink: take the bin, the bottles and the cleaning products out and give us the whole cupboard. If the boiler is in a high level cupboard, clear the shelf below it so the front panel has somewhere to go. Access to the fault itself is the other half. In a Victorian conversion a lot of pipework is buried in walls or under boarded floors, and a leak showing on a ceiling below usually means lifting a board, so move the furniture and roll the rug back before we arrive. In new builds with liquid screed over underfloor heating nothing gets lifted casually, which makes the manifold cupboard and any access hatch the things to clear.

Access matters most on cylinder work. An unvented cylinder repair needs room to reach the inlet control set and the expansion vessel, and an airing cupboard packed to the door turns a short visit into a long one before anybody has touched a valve.

• Empty the airing cupboard rather than tidying it.
• Clear a metre of floor and somewhere to set panels down.
• Move furniture and rugs off any floor that may need lifting.
• Pets behind a closed door, and say if it is the only bathroom in the property.

Photograph the damage before you clean it up

Take photographs before you mop, before you move anything and before work starts. Wide shots showing how far the water reached, close shots of the actual damage, then the leak itself if it is visible. Your phone dates them for you.

The first reason is insurance. Escape of water is one of the most common domestic claims there is, and an insurer assesses what you can show rather than what you describe. Once the ceiling is dry, the carpet is in a skip and the pipe is repaired, there is nothing left to photograph and the loss becomes an argument. The second reason is that it protects both sides. Plenty of what we open up has been wet for months before anyone noticed, and a photograph taken before the engineer arrived settles any question about what was already damaged, in your favour if it was.

Photograph the technical things while you are there. The data plate on the cylinder or the model badge on the boiler tells us which parts to load before the van leaves, which is the single most common reason a job finishes in one visit instead of two. Any fault code goes in a photograph before anyone resets anything, because a reset wipes it.

That matters even more where the visit is likely to become leak detection and repair, because the state of things before anybody touched them is part of the evidence.

• Wide shots of the room, then close shots of the damage.
• The leak itself, before it is disturbed.
• The boiler or cylinder data plate and model number.
• Any fault code on a display, before any reset.
• Anything already damaged that the water did not cause.

If you may be claiming, do not dispose of damaged carpet, flooring or furniture before the insurer has seen photographs. Move it, dry it, keep it.

Contain the water, and note what changed

Get a container under the drip, towels around it, and the water away from anything electrical. A bowl inside a roasting tin catches more than a bucket alone because the tin takes the splash. If it is coming through a ceiling, put the container under the lowest point of the bulge rather than the wettest patch. A sagging ceiling is holding water and will let go eventually, so clear the room beneath it and keep people out.

While you wait, write the history down, because half a diagnosis is history. When it started, what was happening at the time, and what changed in the days before. Faults that appear after a cold night, after the water was off in the street, after a bathroom refit or after a power cut all point in different directions. Be specific rather than summarising: every tap or one tap, constant or only when the shower runs, does the heating still work while the hot water does not.

Two details people leave out. If a previous engineer has been to the same fault, say what was done, because changing the same part twice is the most expensive kind of wasted time. And across the London supply the water is hard, so say whether the kettle furs fast, the shower head blocks or the immersion has been replaced before. That pattern explains a lot about why an element or a heat exchanger failed.

• When it started and what was happening at the time.
• Every outlet or a single outlet.
• Constant, or only when something specific runs.
• Whether the heating still works.
• What was done on any previous visit to the same fault.

Tell us how to get in and where to park

Access and parking add more time to a London job than most of the plumbing does. Say which door, which buzzer, whether the intercom works, and whether a concierge needs to expect someone. A flat above a shop with its own street door is rarely obvious from the pavement. On parking, say whether the street is a controlled zone and whether there is a permit, a bay, or nothing, because an engineer parked five streets away is carrying tools five streets and a van with a cylinder in it cannot circle the block.

In managed blocks, check beforehand whether the work needs booking with the caretaker and whether the water can be isolated at the flat rather than at the riser, because finding that out at the door wastes an hour. Lastly, be there, or make sure whoever is there can make decisions. An engineer who finds a second fault behind a panel needs an answer, and a neighbour holding a key cannot give one.

What not to do before we arrive

Do not try the fix. The dearest jobs we attend are not the ones where something broke, they are the ones where something broke and was then worked on with the wrong tools. An adjustable spanner rounds a compression nut, a chrome trap tightened by hand and then a bit more cracks at the thread, and prising a stuck cartridge out of a mixer usually ends with a tap body that can no longer be repaired.

Do not pour chemical drain cleaner down a blockage in the hour before someone arrives. It rarely shifts anything a rod would not shift faster, and it leaves a trap full of caustic liquid that has to be dealt with before the pipe can safely be opened. If you already have, say so at the door. That is a safety matter, not an embarrassment.

Do not reset a boiler repeatedly, because you are wiping the code that would have explained the lockout. Do not top up or refill a system that is losing water, because the loss is the job and adding water hides the evidence. And do not clean so thoroughly that there is nothing left to see. A wiped down, dried out cupboard is genuinely harder to diagnose than a wet one.

Do not assume a no call out fee plumber will quietly absorb a wasted visit either, because a trip to a property nobody can get into still costs somebody the hour.

• No DIY attempt on the fitting itself.
• No chemical drain cleaner immediately before a visit.
• No repeated boiler resets.
• No topping up a system that is losing water.
• No deep clean of the evidence.

Why ten minutes of preparation is worth real money

Because plumbing is sold by time on site. Whatever the pricing structure, the clock starts when an engineer walks in, and the first half hour is almost entirely within your control. An empty cupboard, a known stopcock and a model number to hand can be the difference between a job that finishes today and one that needs a second appointment for a part that could have been on the van.

Preparation also changes the diagnosis, not just the speed of it. An engineer who arrives to a contained, isolated, photographed fault sees the problem as it actually presented. One who arrives to a tidied cupboard, the water back on and a boiler reset four times has to recreate the fault before working on it, on your time. The photographs also put you in a stronger position on an insurance claim. Our rate is published on the pricing page and fixed before anyone attends, and what a job totals still depends on how long it takes and what is found.

A plumber call out fee buys attendance and a block of time, so the minutes spent clearing a cupboard before we knock are minutes spent on the fault instead of on your storage.

That holds whether the job is on an hourly rate or fixed price, because a fixed price was calculated from an expected duration before anybody quoted it.

If you are not sure what is a call out fee paying for in the first place, the short answer is attendance and the first stretch of diagnostic time, which is precisely the part your preparation shortens.

Nothing here asks you to open a panel or work on gas or an unvented cylinder. If a step starts turning into a repair, stop. That is the line.