Plumbers & electricians in Erith

The town sits on the Thames with the pier running out into it, and behind the riverfront the housing goes from Victorian terraces to post-war estates to recent blocks of flats within a few streets. Northumberland Heath is largely interwar. Slade Green sits out on the flat ground to the east, close enough to Dartford that the boundary feels arbitrary on the ground.

Working across that range means the same reported fault has three different causes depending on the address. A leak in a terrace is a leak in your house. A leak in a block is potentially a leak in somebody else’s.

Leaks in flats, and who needs to know

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In a block, the pipework divides into what belongs to your flat and what belongs to the building. Broadly, everything from the isolation valve inside your front door inwards is yours, and the risers, the stacks and the mains feeding the block are the freeholder’s or the managing agent’s. Where the boundary sits varies by building and it is written into the lease.

That matters on the night, because the two problems need different phone calls. If water is coming from your own pipework, shut off at your isolator, which in most flats is in the airing cupboard, under the sink or in a service cupboard on the landing. If it is coming from a riser or a communal stack, your isolator will not stop it and the managing agent’s emergency line needs ringing as well as us.

Either way, tell the flat below. Water travels down through a concrete floor slab far more slowly than people expect and far further sideways than they expect, and half an hour’s warning is the difference between a stained ceiling and a ruined one.

Erith also holds a good deal of housing that was terraced, then converted, then converted again, and every round of that left pipework behind it. If your flat has a waste run that disappears into a wall and reappears somewhere improbable, that is why. None of it is dangerous. It does mean the first half hour of a job is spent finding out what is actually there.