5 Step Plan For Dealing With A Burst Pipe

A burst pipe is one of the worst things that can happen to your home. It’ll flood the place and can cause a lot of expensive damage if you don’t deal with it quickly and stop the water from spreading around the house. In a situation like that, it’s easy to panic and end up making things worse. To prepare yourself and make sure you limit the damage, take these steps in the event of a burst pipe.

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Regular Maintenance

This is actually a step you should be taking beforehand but it’ll help you to avoid getting into this situation in the first place. Water pipes don’t just burst out of nowhere, they’ll be getting weaker and small cracks will form which then lead to a bigger burst, often when the weather is particularly cold. If you can get on top of minor damage and repair it right away, you can hopefully avoid a burst pipe in future. That’s why it’s important that you get a plumber to do a regular service on your pipes to check that everything is working as it should and you aren’t at risk of a pipe bursting.

Stop The Water

The most important thing is limiting the amount of water that spills out and floods your house so the very first thing you should do is cut off the water to the house and limit the damage. The stopcock for the water main is usually under the kitchen sink or on the outside of the house where the water main runs inside. Make sure that you know where yours is now, and let everybody else in the house know so if a pipe does burst you don’t waste time running around trying to find it while water pours into the house. This will prevent the need to call a Mold and Water Damage Restoration service. Taking immediate action is best in this situation.

Drain The Pipes

Even though you’ve stopped more water coming in, there’s more left in the pipes that can spill out into the house. You need to drain all of that water out as quickly as possible so it doesn’t leak out of the burst pipe. Turn the hot water heater off immediately, put all of the taps on and flush all of the toilets and you should clear the remaining water out.

Call A Plumber

Once you’ve stopped the immediate flow of water, you need to call an emergency plumber to come down and fix the pipe for you. You can’t afford to wait for the pipe to be fixed so calling a normal plumber won’t do. Get an emergency plumber who can come out quickly and get everything up and running again.

Damage Limitation

While you wait for the plumber to arrive, you need to start taking steps to limit the damage from the water that has leaked out of the pipe. That means putting down towels to start mopping it up and moving everything out of the way before the water can soak into it. If you get everything out of the way as soon as possible, you’ll minimize the amount of remodeling you need to do.  

A burst pipe is always going to cause some damage to the house but if you take these steps, you can minimize it.

This is a contributed post.

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