Emergency Plumber Adelaide: What to Do Right Now

What counts as a plumbing emergency, and what does not

Call immediately, at any hour, for any of the following. These get worse by the minute and the cost of waiting is always higher than the cost of the callout.

• Water you cannot stop: a burst pipe, a split flexi hose under a vanity, a hot water tank that has let go, or a meter still running with every tap closed.
• Sewage backing up into the house, or surging out of the overflow relief gully in the yard.
• Any smell of gas, a hissing gas appliance, or a carbon monoxide alarm sounding.
• No water at all to the property, which matters most where there are medical needs or young children.
• Water near electrical work: a ceiling bulging and holding water, a light fitting dripping, or water at a switchboard.
• A hot water unit venting steam or knocking loudly, which points at a failed thermostat and a pressure problem.

Now the part most emergency plumbing pages leave out, because it costs them a booking. Plenty of what people ring about at 9pm is not an emergency, and an after-hours premium for it is money thrown away.

• No hot water, with no leak. Uncomfortable, not dangerous. Book it first thing and pay the ordinary rate.
• A dripping tap or a running cistern. It wastes water and it will annoy you all night, but it waits. Close the isolating tap under the fixture if there is one.
• A single slow-draining basin, shower or sink while every other fixture runs normally. That is a local blockage in that branch, not a sewer problem.
• A toilet that flushes weakly but still clears. Stop using it, use another, and book a normal appointment.
• A stormwater downpipe overflowing in heavy rain, once the rain has stopped and nothing is entering the building.

The first 5 minutes, before anyone arrives

What you do in the first few minutes decides how much of the house has to be repaired later. Work through this in order.

1. Turn the water off at the meter. In Adelaide the meter sits in a box near the front boundary, within a metre or so of the footpath. The tap on the house side is yours. Turn it clockwise until it stops.
2. If the water is coming from the hot water unit, close the isolating valve on its cold inlet as well, and switch off its power at the switchboard or its gas at the appliance isolation valve.
3. Cut power to any circuit near the water. If water is at floor level in a room with power points, or a ceiling is holding water, switch that circuit off at the switchboard. Never stand in water to reach anything electrical.
4. Open the lowest tap in the house, usually the laundry or a garden tap, to drain the pressure and the standing water out of the pipework instead of into the ceiling.
5. If it is sewage, stop every fixture in the house, including the washing machine and the dishwasher, which will happily pump another 40 litres into a blocked drain while you are mopping.
6. Photograph the damage before you clean up, then move what you can lift and put towels down. Insurers ask for the photos, and 30 seconds now saves an argument later.
7. Call, describe exactly what you can see, and ask what it will cost before anyone starts work.

The emergencies Adelaide housing produces

After-hours calls in this city are not random. The housing stock, the soil and the climate produce the same short list of failures, and which one you are likely to get depends largely on when your house was built.

Adelaide's reactive clay is the thread running through most of it. The soil swells through a wet winter and shrinks hard through a dry summer, working everything buried in it back and forth: drain joints, slab penetrations, and the supply line under the front lawn. That is why burst pipes and blocked sewers cluster in the same few weeks of a hot dry February, and why a house can be trouble-free for a decade and then produce 2 faults in a month.

What happens when you call Allmat

Marc answers, or rings back. He is a licensed plumber and gas fitter with 20 years of hands-on experience and he attends the job himself, so the person you describe the problem to is the person who turns up. Allmat is family-run and works from Westbourne Park, which puts most of the inner south inside a short drive.

1. You describe what you can see. If there is something to do before we get there, like closing a specific valve, you are told on the call.
2. You get a text with an arrival time before Marc sets off. His customers mention this more often in reviews than they mention price, and it exists so you are not stuck waiting through a 4 hour window.
3. The fault is diagnosed on site and you are shown what is wrong rather than told about it. The truck carries a Jetwave jetter and a RIDGID SeeSnake CCTV camera, so a drain problem is looked at rather than guessed at.
4. The price is agreed before work starts. No surprises added at the end.
5. The job is made safe and, wherever possible, finished in the same visit.
6. If the honest answer is that the repair is better done in daylight at the ordinary rate, you are told that too.

Allmat covers roughly 10km around Goodwood plus the Adelaide Hills. The Hills are a genuine drive from Westbourne Park, and Nairne is not around the corner from anywhere. What you get instead of a fictional response time is a real arrival time by text before we leave, which is the more useful promise at 11pm.

Questions we get asked