Emergency plumbers and electricians

What counts as an emergency

Water where water should not be, and electricity that has stopped behaving. That is the honest short version. A slow drip under a sink can usually wait until morning; water coming through a ceiling cannot, and neither can a burning smell at a socket.

The calls that come in most often are a burst or split pipe, a leak nobody can find the source of, no hot water at all, a toilet that will not stop filling, a fuse board that trips the moment it is reset, and a full or partial power loss with no obvious cause. All of those are one number.

What to do before we get there

For water, find your stopcock and turn it clockwise until it stops. In most houses around here it is under the kitchen sink; in older terraces it can be in a hallway cupboard or under the floor by the front door, and in flats it is often in the airing cupboard or a service riser on the landing. Turning it off stops the vast majority of leaks getting worse while you wait.

For electrics, go to the consumer unit and switch off the circuit that has tripped, then leave it off. Do not keep resetting it. A breaker that trips repeatedly is telling you something is wrong on that circuit, and forcing it back on is how a fault becomes a fire. If you can smell burning, switch off at the main switch and open a window.

One firm, both trades

Plenty of plumbing firms stop where the pipework stops. That matters at two in the morning, because a boiler that has gone dead is as likely to be an electrical fault as a plumbing one, and a leak near a ceiling rose is both. Carrying both trades means the diagnosis and the fix happen on the same visit instead of turning into a second call out to a second company.